Posted on 07/11/2014 7:03:24 AM PDT by PoloSec
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama laughed off an offer of a joint. A legal one, mind you, since this was Colorado.
We’ve come a long way, baby, since five years ago when the exact same president was making cheap stoner jokes in response to serious questions about changing drug policy.
These last few years have seen — and continue to see — an amazing pushback against the excesses of the drug war. Like the Berlin Wall, the war on drugs seemed like it would stand forever.
The arguable “tear down this wall” moment for drug policy came in November, 2012, when two states legalized marijuana. Now, twenty-three states (and DC!) allow medical marijuana, and Colorado and Washington allow its recreational use.
Even mainstream politicians have begun to grudgingly admit that weed is not a schedule one-worthy drug, and does indeed have medical usage for some seriously suffering individuals.
Most astonishing of all — thanks in part to Sen. Rand Paul — sentencing reform has become a bipartisan issue in a Washington, DC which can generally only agree on the fact that nothing in government is nonessential enough to chop.
But while Colorado may be a shining beacon of legalization without Armageddon and while at least mainstream politicians have vaguely noticed the horrifying state of the prison system, there are still so many rotten things in US justice — particularly in the state of Louisiana.
As NPR reported on Wednesday, Colorado ain’t the U.S. In the face of potential reforms, local Louisiana prosecutors are objecting vociferously to reductions in mandatory minimum sentencing.
Mandatory minimums come into play for all manner of crimes, but their most horrifying stories come from the drug war. After a second or third narcotics offenses, people have been sent to prison for decades — sometimes for life.
In tribute to the current national panic over the drug, and flying in the face of gentler way suggestions, Louisiana recently raised the maximum penalty for heroin sales to 99 years in prison.
The truly sad thing about this anti-anti-drug war is that the prison state pushback hasn’t even yet found a toe-hold in Louisiana. In the country with the biggest prison population, Louisiana is the place with the highest per capita number of people incarcerated in the world. There are 39,000 of them.
As a seminal 2012 Times-Picayune series on Louisiana prisons reported, “Among black me from New Orleans, one in 14 is behind bars; one in seven is either in prison, on parole or on probation.”
One out of every 86 Louisiana adults is behind bars in the state for a reason. Real crime is high, sure, but the weed laws are harsh, and the prisons are mostly for profit.
First time weed possession gets you six months in prison. Second time possession is an automatic felony. Strike three and you could get up to twenty years.
This life-ruining absurdity has lead to talk of changing the law. Yet in April the state senate rejected a bill to change possession of less than an ounce of weed to a misdemeanor.
This would have saved the state more than $20 million a year. Part of the problem was that the bill would not have capped the number of times possession would count as a misdemeanor. The prospect of someone being arrested ten times for a tiny bit of weed without the hammer coming down on him was too much for the politicians.
Louisiana suffers from the most severe form of this incarceration addiction that many other states are trying to kick. There are myriad perverse public incentives that perpetuate bad justice policies. Note the evils done by the California Prison Guards’ Union, or civil asset forfeiture’s status as a drug war honeypot.
Louisiana’s for-profit jails are a $143 million industry. Such a large economy has lead to ballooning employment of deputy sheriffs and corrections officers. Reportedly two thirds of the people in Louisiana jails are there for nonviolent reasons. Get rid of those prisoners, and most likely there would be a whole bunch of law enforcement and corrections officials out of a job.
No politician wants to come out in favor of cutting jobs, and especially not law enforcement ones. This is good news for the prison industrial complex.
Louisiana’s justice system problems aren’t unique, they are just on the extreme end of the issue. Prosecutors in the state dislike the prospect of mandatory minimum reductions because it gives them less power, but that is also true as a general rule nationwide.
Prosecutors like their tools to be hammers. Twenty years in prison hanging over someone’s head is a great incentive for them to rat on someone else for a drug ring, and then plead guilty to something that will get them five years with good behavior.
That Louisiana’s harsh sentences, overcrowded prisons, and foot dragging on reform already feel as if they are from another time is a good thing. Perhaps Attorney General Eric Holder’s tentative clemency program for certain drug offenders, plus Colorado and Washington state, and the benign federal neglect of legalization proves our tolerance for law and order lunacy is diminishing.
This shouldn’t make any of us complacent and overly eager to celebrate the end of the war on drugs. A lot of lives are being ruined and wasted in Louisiana right this minute — and, odds are, in your state as well.
LEOs still love the WOD because it allows them to set up SWAT raids complete with ninja masks, machine guns, and armored vehicles. It’s a far cry from Sheriff Andy Taylor’s Mayberry.
He might have been yukkin’ on the outside but you know he was jonsin’ on the inside. Must have taken a lot of control to not actually reach for it.
Fookin stoopit.
At this point in the war on drugs, it can be observed that is an abject failure and too many people are being incarcerated for behavior that injures no one.
Law enforcement targets users who do nothing to anyone.
It needs to end.
Furthermore - at this point it can be considered a government social program that enhances the size of government and keeps more government workers feeding at the taxpayer trough.
Case in point - Louisiana.
Hey, they made Planet of the Apes there...
Thatz gotta be worth....nothing...
I’ve said it so many times, I rarely say it anymore, because speaking out is an apparent waste of time.
The failed Drug Prohibition needs to end. The lost “War On Drugs” itself is a worse problem than the drug use it’s intended to stop. We need to look no further than around 100 years ago at the failed alcohol prohibition to learn the valuable lessons from it, but we refuse. The history is RIGHT there, and no one learns from it, so we’ll instead reap the consequences - in spades....
That’s the funny thing with all things big government. Especially when entire livelihoods grow around a government program. There’s NO such thing as ‘course correction’; when something doesn’t work, rather than make changes(that could cost government jobs), we double down, spend more, and deliver MORE of what has failed us!
I believe the domestic arm of the so called “War On Terror” is gonna take us to the same place, but worse. I don’t think our free republic will survive both the War on Drugs and the domestic arm of the War on Terror combined.
What’s discouraging is even here on FR, there are a vast, if not a majority of well meaning/good Americans that fail to see this. Our only hope will be if enough small government/constitutional conservatives along with idiot liberals that happen to be ‘right’, but for the ‘wrong’ reasons can align on these issues to set the country on the right course. I’m not terribly hopeful this will come to pass...
(NO... I don’t use drugs of any kind, or support those that build belt/truck bombs....)
Not a waste of time, although it may not seem like it in certain posts, but I've seen a lot of minds changed recently...you know a lie can travel the earth as fast as lightning, but like thunder, the truth takes time.
I see your frustration in many, this issue has come along way but it has taken near 60 years to get this far, my guess, it will soon, not be a big issue.
“I’ve said it so many times, I rarely say it anymore, because speaking out is an apparent waste of time.”
No, it’s not a waste of time at all. Keep in mind that most people don’t adopt “radical” ideas, and up until recently, the idea of ending drug prohibition was radical. How do you move an idea from radical to not so radicall?
By repeating it again and again and again.
We’ll see the end of the drug war within 10 years. Legalization in CO has not caused mass chaos or the end of civilization as we know it. It’s just like lotteries and gambling were 25 years ago.
The lack of response to this thread, when there is a very obvious Big Government Corporatism/Cronyism network benefiting from the extended incarceration of non-violent offenders is what’s depressing.
For many, it’s an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ thing, they don’t care until this insane level of statism directly affects them or someone in their family.
Only then are the necessary eyebrows raised. The same progression of ignorance to enlightenment that many here often (and rightly) accuse liberals of, once they are impacted by statist laws.
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