“The Failed Promise of Legal Pot” (Atlantic) says that, even in states where marijuana is ostensibly legal, there are still police officers, court employees, and prison industry workers getting paid. The article characterizes this as an unexpected defect in the change to the laws but I am wondering if it instead reflects a political compromise. The laws got changed in such a way that the people who were benefiting financially from the old laws are still able to earn money under the new legal and regulatory regime.
So maybe this is actually success, not failure?
Think of it like single-payer health care: it would actually be the best choice for the most people but it would break too many rice bowls.
We also have people arrested for making moonshine, even though alcohol is legal and taxed/
Did they really think the criminal activity would end overnight?
I don’t recall all the work being done in The Wire being done over pot. The real money is in heroin and crack.
Legalize all drugs, then let civil lawsuits filter out the truly harmful ones.
Generally speaking, bureaucracies of any kind, governmental or not, once created rarely go away. When polio was cured, the March of Dimes found some other crippling diseases that they wanted to cure rather than declare victory and make themselves unemployed.
In my mid-sized, coastal FL city, nearly half of every day’s arrests are for possession of less than 20 grams of marijuana (that less than seven-tenths of an ounce). These people are actually booked into jail and locked up until bond is posted.
(The other half of daily arrests are for driving without a license and non-support of spouse and/or children.)
Drug enforcement has very rarely actually been about drugs. It has just been a way for cops and prosecutors to jail career criminals without needing to rely on flaky ghetto witness testimony. The cops and D.A. in practice do not really bother peaceable drug users. They find the guy they know is breaking into cars or pimping or shooting people, and they bust him on narcotics possession.