The Difficulty of Untraining Drug Dogs How to Smell Marijuana

I believe it is morally wrong to keep people imprisoned for actions that are now legal, especially given the viciousness of our penal system. This is a great injustice of our time.

> people who are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment

But consider that their actions are the reason why marijuana is becoming legal. The public sentiment against the War on Drugs is partly or mostly due to outrage the public felt at long sentences for possessing or dealing in marijuana. The people who did the most to get the laws overturned (even though they did it unwittingly) do not benefit from the changes. Everyone should benefit from the relaxed laws going forward except for the people who suffered to make it possible?

Marijuana was explicitly prosecuted [edit: criminalized] more aggressively to target certain groups of people. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich... The laws were never just and that's why the "criminals" should be exonerated.

> are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment.

"Sorry, we weren't enlightened 20 years ago, so you're going to stay in jail" is an embarrassing cop-out. This is a systematic flaw in the legal system, and is unjustified. If it took decades to figure out that marijuana was wrongfully illegal, then those persecuted under such a law should be removed from incarceration at once. How can it be any other way? This is common sense.

Keeping people in prison for actions now known to be harmless is a terrible and embarrassing flaw in moral structure.

Given that:

Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman told a journalist that the main purpose of the War on Drugs was to attack Nixon's "enemies" and that they knew the WOD was based on lies about drugs: > "You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on...

I think those people should not only be exonerated, but also treated as victims of Nixon corrupt politics and given hefty compensation.

Advocating for the War on drugs should be a criminal offence.

Ex post facto applies both ways - you can do something legal today and be punished in the future if it becomes illegal (UK tax law has some good examples of this).

It would be inconsistent to say past crimes should be revoked if the law changes, but present legal acts cannot be retrospectively classed as illegal if the law changes in the future. That's a contradiction I'm sure many people operate under however (myself included).

I am also not a lawyer :)

Would you hold the same position if instead of being imprisoned for drugs, they were imprisoned for homosexuality or marrying someone of a different race?

Depends on what you view the law for. Personally I think the law is a tool that acts as a proxy for group morality, and is useful as much as it serves that aim. The law itself is not sacrosanct and can be wrong, which is why we revise it. Under this view, those who broke a law we then get rid of should be released, as we have agreed that the law was wrong, we also have agreed that they were right. If the law itself is not put on a pedestal, then if the law was wrong then those people who broke it should also no longer be regarded as criminals as we are simultaneously admitting that it was also wrong to have labelled them as such in the first place.

The obvious answer to this is: change the law.

Do whatever is necessary to enable the bureaucracy to remove all drug related charges from a persons record.

I'd argue the correct thing to do is wipe all criminal records clean of drug related convictions, and do all the good things in your comment.

Prior drug conviction is one thing, but Oakland has a pretty unbalanced system where you get an advantage by living in a high-drug-arrest area. That means the smartest people from the high-arrest area who are already advantaged by doing whatever they were doing to not get arrested are given a double advantage of priority access to a cannabis license. The real intention is racial discrimination but they probably can't do that so they found other ways to judge someone's race - income and neighborhood. It should be strictly limited to drug convicts/arrestees of all races, incomes, and suburbs, not just people who fit the same group as them.

https://melmagazine.com/the-state-of-drugs-bb51d1b675e0

Some simple numbers courtesy of the ACLU[1]

"Marijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana."

So that's 7.2 million arrests simply for possession.

In 2010 police arrested someone for weed-related things every 37 seconds.

However it is important to note that an arrest is not a conviction. Most are fined or are placed into community supervision. About 40,000 inmates of state and federal prison have a current conviction involving marijuana.

That's a lot, and there are likely a lot more that ended up in prison due to problems with having an arrest record (that should also be wiped imo) so that is a lower limit but the point is that overall - even without a ton of active prisoners there is still a massive effect of all those arrests.

Also it's worth noting that black people are nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for these things even though usage rates are the same across races.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers

I know that this is not a good sample by any means, but from my own life thus far here in the UK as someone with a middle class accent and pale skin tone, who smokes a bit of pot and these days stay out of trouble, however used to get exceedingly drunk and got into numerous stupid drunk incidents in public, I have been held in police station cells 6 times and officially cautioned twice.

2 of the times in the station were alcohol related, everything else is weed from stop and search. One thing to note, as soon as I opened my mouth in each incident, there was no further threat from the police of taking it to court, despite me having no decent legal representation. Sounding posh goes very far with the police here.

I always want to know how many are really in for marijuana, as opposed to this being a plea deal for something else.

Since something like 95% of convictions are plea deals, it seems to me that the official charges probably aren't a great guide to this, at all.

My example is this: the police want to crack down on a gang, and have some informants. They round up all the foot soldiers, who are standing duty on street corners etc. To put them away on conspiracy charges will be hard work, and will expose informants. But they don't have to -- once the gangsters are scared of having last week's murder pinned on them, they'll sign anything with a few years sentence. And so they get locked up for possession.

Anyone have any idea how to get a handle on how big this effect is? While the rest of the thread seems to believe 100% of soft drug convictions are for drugs, it seems equally plausible to me that this could be close to 0%. How would we tell?

Here's one link, which has 14% of all US prisoners as being drug offenders. Not just marijuana, so that's an upper bound:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/releasing-drug-offender...

One interesting thing to look up is the places you can still get a major felony for small amounts less than the amount you're legally allowed to carry in some state.

I am not sure no one will make money if legalized, tobacco companies have a history of profitability.

Growing weed may be easy, but it isn't that easy. Marijuana is a lot pickier about grow conditions than most people think (if you want a quality product at least. Crap weed is much easier to grow). It also takes several months from seed to being smoke/edible-making ready. Just the harvesting and curing process alone is a massive PITA.

There will always be a market for quality grown weed, just as much as you buy produce at the grocery store.

You are conflating legalized with deragulated.

>When it’s actually legalized, nobody will be making money, as it’s an agricultural commodity that is pretty easy to grow.

When compared to other cash crops, remarkably easy to meet market demand on a per acre scale, which is a contributing factor to why it's still illegal, and when legalized, why the who, where and how much are so heavily regulated.

Your way of viewing things is so foreign to me (and I'm a foreigner so makes sense I guess). I think prisons should be all about rehabilitation. If you crime is selling drugs, and selling drugs is no longer something we train people out of... What's the point of staying in prison?

Race does come into play as well, because your argument seems to be that it's "fair" that these people are still imprisoned. But by and large, they were set up by a society that left them few other choices, which is far from fair. Refusing to release them is tantamount to denying the error of our past ways. It was always a trap, ever since the lies that enabled marijuana prohibition in the first place.

>I also fail to see where race comes into play.

This is what the advocates of racist policy always say.

Enforcement is where race comes into play, you don’t see it because you don’t care. Otherwise it’s very hard to miss.

That is to say, drug dogs are extremely effective, it’s just that their job is different from what their name might make you think.

As long as it doesn’t result in evidence being thrown out, a drug dog that alerts when drugs aren’t present is a feature, not a bug, for the police.

To put an even finer point on it, drug dogs don't need to establish probable cause, and they don't, they just provide a back door around the 4th Amendment.

Drug dogs are excellent at barking at the person their handler wants to search.

>Also a lot of convicts financially supported Mexican cartels and bear some responsibility for their crimes.

Lawmakers created the Mexican cartels, and therefore bear most of the responsibility for their crimes?

>letting the winners to keep the money but let losers go would not be exactly fair.

Frankly it feels that you care much less about fairness than you care about enforcing terrible laws.

As long as smoke-time includes a fun ball or toy for the dog, he'd be in heaven. They love the smell of weed cause it means a reward.

and I don't see how drug dogs trained this way would help detect cocaine in, say, a suitcase, vs a person who had used cocaine but was carrying none with them.

That's how i read it at first, but it could also be that cocaine goes through fermentation during it's extraction, and that if that's done near human settlements, air pollution contaminates the final product, making it detectable.

-

I'd love to see a dog detect the odor of an undoped polycrystalline silicon wafer.

Cocaine hydrochloride's vapor pressure is negligible, AFAIK. I always thought that the "smell of cocaine" is actually the smell of solvent traces or other impurities left from typical production routes.