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Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

The number of people incarcerated on marijuana possession charges alone is a rounding error.

This page suggests 0.1%: http://www.therecoverycenter.org/resources/weed-through-the-...

I'm not sure to what extent that's a political advocacy organization, so let's just call 0.1% a lower bound. The absolute upper bound is ~5%: https://twitter.com/JohnFPfaff/status/985996204986241026 But that assumes that everyone arrested for marijuana possession (even if it was only one of the charges) was incarcerated. But that's absolutely not the case. Rather, marijuana arrests are almost always pretextual and used to intimidate; basically, catch & release.

There sure are a ridiculous number of arrests, though, and these days having any kind of arrest on your record can be a significant handicap.

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First, those sources are terrible. The first is a single treatment center, with an obvious bias, that provides zero methodology. The second at least seems like a decent authority, but provides no reason to believe his statement.

Second, the actual number of people in for marijuana far outnumbers those charged with possession. Both sources ignore those arrested for "drug trafficking" violations which would still be misdemeanors at best under the new laws, neither considers what various three strike laws have done, and god knows how many people took a plea for something not labeled possession.

I am the last person to ask for a citation, but you are responding to a comment which provided one, so your lack thereof does hurt your credibility.

I would be very interested to know what the numbers are for each of the instances you claim, as well as how many of those people were only charged with marajuana offences. It is very common for people to be charged with drug and violent crimes, but 'plead out' of the violent crimes; these people would likely have been jailed/imprisoned for the latter crimes alone (though perhaps for less time).

>I am the last person to ask for a citation, but you are responding to a comment which provided one, so your lack thereof does hurt your credibility.

I don't think I need a citation to show that those sources are terrible. I never claimed to know how many people are actually locked up.

If it's not terribly easy to refute the claims with a reliable source, then yeah, you probably need a citation.

I would need a citation if I was saying the figures they claim are wrong. I'm saying they provide no detail on how they got those figures, have clear monetary interest, and are only presenting a portion of the people in jail for marijuana charges. My "source" is reading the sources the poster provided.

AFAICT, the 600k figure comes the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. And the author of that tweet is a criminal law and criminal justice scholar, currently a professor at Fordham University. I don't remember reading any of his works specifically, but I have read plenty of scholarship on the issue. This summary, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/10/how-we-misunde..., of his latest book seems consonant with everything I've read.

Criminal justice reform advocates created, or at least found themselves with, a particular narrative around the drug wars that heavily emphasized and even exaggerated aspects such as incarceration. That narrative helped to generate support for reform, but it wasn't very accurate. The truth is more complex, but no less in need of addressing. But if you don't have an accurate understanding of the underlying dynamics (e.g. not just that the system is racist, but why and how--those are vary important details) you're not going to be able to remediate it very well.

>And the author of that tweet is a criminal law and criminal justice scholar, currently a professor at Fordham University

Yes, an excellent authority, but it is still just an appeal to authority. The first one was the truly objectionable one.

I'm not saying that legalizing marijuana will solve all the legal systems problems, but it would remove a significant weight from an overburdened system. ~5% of prisoners alone is a lot of people, plus think of how many public defender hours are spent on these matters.

I think you misunderstand the impetus for freeing the people arrested for breaking marijuana laws. It isn't just to reduce crowding in jails -- it's to free people who were arrested and imprisoned under an unjust and insane law.

Sure, even if it's a merely a fraction of the prison population, the sheer human cost of those remaining in prison is incalculable. Still, from a public policy point of view at some point it sort of becomes indistinguishable from the background population of those unjustly incarcerated for myriad other reasons, and trotting out rare examples of long-term marijuana possession prisoners confuses the debate.

We're like 15 years into marijuana decriminalization--actual decriminalization at the state and even Federal level, not simple advocacy. It became a mostly bipartisan endeavor, at least on the national level since at least 2015 when Paul Ryan became Speaker. Though for various reasons most of the GOP remain non-committal, and will only tacitly support passive decriminalization.

Nonetheless, that's at least 15 years of slowly emptying our prisons of not only marijuana offenders, but drug offenders generally. The state of affairs today is nothing like the numbers that advocates were throwing around 15 years ago (and what most people still believe is the case), and even then they were exaggerated. There's still a ton more that needs to be done, and some reforms even need to be walked back or reverted because it turns out decriminalization alone exposes some serious problems and deficiencies elsewhere in the system. But if everybody's empathy is focused on the de minimis incarceration problem it's difficult to regroup and shift efforts.

Even take it at face value .1% of 2.3 million people incarcerated is 2000 people. Then you have to consider the number of people who get criminal charges on the record and face employment issues in the future because of it

Even if we pretend it's such a low number (which it's obviously not), the even bigger problem with marijuana criminalization laws is the terror they cause. They terrorize the population, literally. It's government tyranny flat out. It's unjust, it's evil, it's cruel to torture your citizens that way, that they should have to live in fear when they're not harming other people.

The politicians that produced and executed the war on drugs across decades are all vile bastards, on both sides of the political spectrum. Anyone involved should never be allowed to hold elected office, and that includes the current President.

Why not just smoke something else?

The burden should be on the government to have moral reasoning for incarcerating people. As long as they aren’t harming others, people should not have to change their behavior to avoid incarceration

Government has moral reasoning - it's for public good. Narcotics are harming other people. Marijuana was first banned in XIII century.

What about all the people who are harassed and/or killed in situations where cops would otherwise have no reason to? What about the extreme race disparity in who is charged with marijuana+other crimes?

Your dubious metric, if true, does not capture the essence of the problem.

When talking about the prison population in America, keep in mind that America has the largest prison population in the world both in absolute numbers and per capita.

So when you talk about the percentage of people locked up for X is small, this is skewed by the vast amount of people we lock up in general. If X is small compared to the prison population as a whole, it may still be an awful lot of people.

If we free people for marijuana possession and sale why not free people for cocaine possession and sale? And so on.

Why not indeed? But realistically we need to go one step at a time and keep pushing the Overton window.

Who would build our furniture and make our clothes then?

Yes, it is essential that we legalize cocaine and many other recreational drugs.

Exactly, now you're getting it. Certainly all people jailed for personal possession of any kind of drug and all small scale dealers should be pardoned and dealt with by social workers instead, or simply allowed to live their lives unharassed.

Another thought comes to mind (which I mention just for novelty's sake): even if a full rational analysis says that taking, say, heroin is a bad idea (for pretty much anyone who plans to live for more than a year, or whatever), it seems legalization should open the door to people tweaking the formula to come up with something with similar positive effects and fewer drawbacks. It seems to me that a great way to get people to stop taking dangerous drugs is to make something that's just better and is also less dangerous.

I've read a few things over the years saying that medical and psychiatric researchers (all but the bravest) have absolutely avoided doing anything remotely connected to the illegal drugs because of fear; given marijuana's use in pain management, and more recent results about psychedelics being possibly useful to treat depression and PTSD, this has probably set back research by years, possibly decades.

There are countries with prescription heroin, safe injecting rooms and addiction support not just looking at mental health, but also housing, work and relationships.

There are indications that this strategy works in decreasing harm, decreasing economic impact, and decreasing supply by drying up demand in illegal supply chains.

As always with public health and challenges to existing socio-cultural norms, there’s a lot of room to further discuss.

https://transformdrugs.org/heroin-assisted-treatment-in-swit...

Diamorphine is already very safe, has few side effects, and is commonly used as a stronger version of morphine in cancer treatment.

What is diamorphine? Well, it's the scientific name for heroin. However, it differs from the drug in being far purer, being used in a clinical setting, and with carefully controlled dosages. Other than that, it's identical to heroin.

This means we can conclude that the negative aspects of heroin come from impurities, addiction, mental health issues of the users, unsafe injection practices, and unknown strengths resulting in overdose.

You can, with access to medical grade heroin, use it occasionally with no negative side effects. We know this because it is used daily in hospitals around the world.

This is hilariously almost-selfaware.

Reminds me of these interactions on twitter:

> arrest the cops killing Breonna Taylor

> yeah, let's arrest every cop killing an african american...

> yes, that's the point

> the covid vaccine should be free

> yeah, let's just make chemotherapy free as well..

> yeah, let's

Yes, why not?

It is time to accept we need to manage these things differently.

I support this statement. No citizen should be held as a criminal for ingesting, smoking or injecting something into their own person.

If we are not allowed to treat our own bodies in any manner which we see fit, then these bodies are not our own.

Please read up on the crack epidemic in America in the 1980s and 1990s. You probably didn't live through it so see what widespread drug use does to society and especially cities.

Could you explain it for us then? I'm genuinely curious in what you observed.

Yes we should.

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