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Comment by beepbooptheory | Hacker News Reader

As someone whose life was very much thrown into turmoil and difficulty for getting caught with a relatively small amount of mushrooms in Texas, to the point that it will soon be a decade and I have not really completely recovered financially or emotionally, and also still blocked from a lot of jobs, news like this is so good but hard to hear on a personal level.

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I think about this a lot when I see cannabis dispensaries popping up all over the place in my hometown while I've also seen an acquaintance's life completely ruined (hard prison time and property seizure) due to growing a small number of plants on his property. There's a pretty extreme impedance mismatch regarding how these issues are handled, and it's anything but just.

I hope one day we will have a Nuremberg-style trial for all those friendly chaps who orchestrated (and profited from) this pointless life-destruction machine called war on drugs

How does that address those who voted for many of those men and women, knowing their policies and completely agreeing with them?

I am acquainted with people who firmly believe the Devil's Plant is terrible and shouldn't be legal anywhere — what then?

I suppose we can extend the German analogy here as well, e.g. not trying to put half a country on trial might be the most reasonable option

Did we have one post-Prohibition?

If we don't either in this case, there's always a second option of doing the same thing Israel did to those who decided not to face a trial and ran away..

We just had one for Purdue Pharma. Spoiler alert: absolutely nothing happened to these friendly chaps.

I know of a police chief who just retired with a $250k/year pension whose primary contribution to the community was arresting high school kids for smoking joints.

Nixon, Reagan including Nancy Bush Sr. the original instigators of the federal on drugs are all dead.

Don't worry, the system is so screwed up that they will continue to ruin people's lives over other infractions instead of producing true justice.

The problem is peoples’ notions of justice are capricious and savage. The draconian laws over psychedelics represents yesteryear’s popular conception of “true justice.”

The legal system will always trail behind the reality on the societal ground out there - that's almost by definition, and you actually kinda want them to be quite cautious and thorough before they make decisions.

But you also need to watch for outliers - laws that are WAY past their prime, and should have been put to pasture long ago.

Basically, the legal system needs a garbage collection mechanism.

"The Breitbart Doctrine is the idea that "politics is downstream from culture" and that to change politics one must first change culture.} [cited from Wikipedia]

Andrew was a man ahead of his time.

And now his name shall forever remain linked with one of the most vile spouts of toxic sludge in the contemporary media.

Legacies are complicated.

I mean, I don't like Huffington post but dang...

Neither do I!

(and, BTW, I agree with the general meaning of your quote from AB)

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I agree that many penalties in the system are overly harsh. Even very minor offenses can ruin people's lives. I also agree that laws tend to lag behind society's views.

I lived in a state that legalized marijuana, and police unions lost their minds over it. They lobbied for "reform" bills that would allow cops to arrest people, and specifically kids, for marijuana offenses.

Before legalization, one of the biggest reasons for arrests was marijuana offenses. Not only were police the biggest expenses on many towns' budgets, but many municipalities relied on revenue from those marijuana arrests to balance their own budgets. Now cops are scrambling to manufacture other victimless crimes in order to justify their budgets and compensation, as well as keeping their employers afloat.

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