And plea cases come up on appeal all the time (and in fact are probably the typical criminal appeal). A plea bargain agreement generally precludes appeal of the conviction, but does not preclude appeal of the sentence (because the judge, not the prosecutor, decides the sentence).
I have lots of friends who are public defenders. Almost everyone they work with is guilty (much of the work is hammering out plea deals that ensure that they're convicted of the correct things). Same thing for people who work with Innocence Projects, where filtering out all the requests for aid from guilty people is a big part of the work. If the issue were just not sending large numbers of innocent people to prison we would have fixed it. What makes criminal justice so challenging is the constant fight to protect the rights of the innocent within a system where the overwhelming majority of the accused are not just guilty, but obviously so.
Really it should just be called "possession of a lot of drugs."
The reason the laws were changed was that it was tough to convict someone if you had to actually show they intended to sell.
the us criminal system is a machine run for profit, not for justice, simply because SOME of the convicts are murderers is simply correlation
The felon caught with a gun in his car, or the drug dealer who tried to sell drugs to an undercover cop, or the guy who was arrested after beating his wife bloody. That's the bread and butter of the justice system. You can argue that two of those three things shouldn't be crimes (and I agree--but at least half the country doesn't) but the idea that people are routinely convicted without evidence is a myth.