Massachusetts Police Balk at Ticketing Marijuana Offenders

“yeah. You can’t arrest them, you can only ticket them. So why bother?”

I was talking to an officer a while back who does highway drug interdiction. Pretty much all he does is sit out on the highway and run his dog around vehicles they stop and search for drugs. Several thousand pounds of pot are removed from the highway in my county every year and they make a ton in asset forfeitures. Anyway, he was complaining about all the times he finds little small amounts of pot where he has to make an arrest, take the guy into the jail and do all his paperwork, and how that always takes him off the highway for well over an hour, and then he's got to show up for the court date because you can't just pay the fine on a misdemeanor charge and be done with it. You have to go to court and the officer has to be there to testify in case you want a trial. The particular officer I was talking to would love it if he could just seize the little bag of pot and write a person a ticket rather than having to waste all that time taking the person in, doing all the paperwork and then having to show up in court later on every single case. He thinks he'd probably take a lot more big loads of pot, coke, meth, etc. off the highway if he could do that. And he doesn't even arrest a lot of the people he finds with a little bit of pot. He said he dumps a lot out on the side of the road and only makes an arrest in those cases if the people are jerks or if they have bad criminal records. It's not worth all the time and trouble an arrest involves. If he could write tickets he wouldn't be letting nearly as many people go unpunished and the county would probably make more money.

its not illegal to give a false name for a civil ticket, so its a waste of paper and ink for the cop to even try it. I hope the masswipes enjoy the smell of pot everywhere.

NY decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot years ago, and yet I rarely smell pot burning in public places. I wish tobacco smokers would be as well behaved.

Ha. That was upthread somewhere, one of the less clueful posters mentioning that whole violent rage thing.

I had my time, when I was like 17 - and that was a long time ago I must admit. Did some things some folks might think immoral (or a lot of fun), but violence never entered the picture. We mostly sat around listening to BTO (I am sick of them still to this day), or maybe Uriah Heep (which I still love), and laughed at each other. Some of those days seemed to last forever.

"cleansing of the gene pool"

I always regarded that as one of the good reasons for ending prohibition. But with one concern about meth in particular - my roots are in a place where meth use is rampant, and I know more than my share of people who use the stuff (and BTW nobody who has successfully quit). During the time when they are still healthy enough, they tend to go at it like rabbits, and the meth doesn't seem to impair fertility.

We fostered three offspring from such a couple. Took them in at high school age so we didn't have total impact, but of the three the oldest is headed for big things, one of the younger twins is leading a drug free (if not otherwise hugely successful - she has hooked up with a real loser) life, and the other twin is in on track to end up just like her mother. We're still working on her, she's not beyond redemption yet. Obviously, drugs being illegal is no deterrent to her. What needs to be continuously pounded in is that they will ruin her physical and mental health. She ought to know, looking at her mother the textbook example of a long term meth user, but just as her mother rationalized her own special way of doing it as being not harmful, so does the girl. She has at least cut down, as evidenced by increased appetite and weight gain, but she has been through a couple of those cycles.

I understand your argument, however, if you look at the situation - out of three offspring that were born when the mother was healthy enough to bear them to term

Two are not doing drugs, one is.
With a two to one ratio, the pool is being cleansed.

If the parents die then the offspring are able to be brought up in a household that doesn't have the actions of drug abuse to copy.

The pool gets cleansed, one way or another.

What throws it out of whack though is the number of abortions this woman has had - 6 that I know of - before, between, and after the first daughter and the twins. So at least 6 of 8 pregnancies ended in that and who knows what the fate of those 6 would have been. I'd like to think there would have been intervention to force better circumstances upon them, but reality does not support belief in that ideal. We obviously would have done what we could but it took until their teens for us to get the influence of drugs out of the home life of the ones we did.

She was down to visit just yesterday - wearing her 0bama sweatshirt - though I seriously doubt she bothered actually voting (unless some Acorn type oufit offered her something of value to do it).

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