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Comment by a8da6b0c91d | Hacker News Reader

That simply doesn't happen in America. Cannabis is de facto legal throughout the USA. I repeat: marijuana is in practice legal in America, and all these people talking about drug charges ruining lives don't know what they're talking about.

The only way you get serious charges or any jail time at all for marijuana in America is when you've been arrested for serious crimes, but a District Attorney goes with "possession" for the plea deal. It's just easier that way.

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You are either incredibly misinformed or you are an out-and-out liar.

For instance, a drug charge of any kind, even just a misdemeanor for paraphernalia precludes any Federal Student loans from being offered. My younger brother was arrested with a pipe containing some cannabis residue and was unable after that point to receive any Federally subsidized student loans.

Some 20,000 inmates in US prisons are currently incarcerated for cannabis possession and trafficking.

There was a young man of 19 years of age down here in Texas that was arrested after he was ratted out by some teenage customers who were themselves arrested and flipped on their dealer to save themselves. He was arrested with cannabis and cannabis oil along with a pan of brownies he had made with the oil. The Williamson County prosecutor sought to treat the entire volume of brownies as drugs and the defendant was facing LIFE in prison over some cannabis brownies.

So yeah, you either need to inform yourself better or you need to stop lying.

You are misinformed, there were over 700,000 arrests made for marijuana last year. Even without jail time, a possession charge can have serious consequences for young people. Being ineligible for federal financial aid, losing your job, and losing public benefits just to name a few.

Imagine what better things our police officers could be doing if they didn't have to churn a kid through the system every 51 seconds.

You don't get it. Those people get hit with narcotics charges because the cops and D.A. know exactly who they are and the long list of other crimes they've committed.

People who simply use or sell some marijuana and that's the extent of their "illegal" activity, they don't wind up in prison. Doesn't happen.

Nothing can be called "de facto legal" when hundreds of thousands of people are arrested for partaking in it each year. Prison time or not, possession charges can have serious consequences for many.

Not true at all. Out side of progressive areas like major coastal cities posession of marijuana can in some cases be a felony offense. Contrary to what you have stated, people ARE arrested regularly for simple possession of the drug, almost always meaning very limited life prospects in the future.

This is pure disinformation. I was arrested for possession of marijuana in college. There was no other charge, there was no other crime. I was a white middle class male stopped in a middle class suburb of a smallish college town in the midwest.

You got a small fine. At no point were you at any risk of facing incarceration. You were also probably doing something stupid and very annoying like stinking up the floor in a dormitory. This illustrates how the drug laws in practice work.

>> This illustrates how the drug laws in practice work.

When you're a middle-class white male

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