A life sentence.
Silliness aside, I didn’t know this was a thing. Yikes.
You are not a victim if you break the law, and it's not victim blaming to say that you should follow the law and work to change it if you disagree with it. Plenty of people never smoked pot when it was illegal then started using it recreationally when it was legal recreationally. If you want to break the law I could care less for something victimless like low level recreational drug use but don't be surprised when some regressive jurisdiction nails you for it and punishes you. That doesn't make you a victim, it makes you someone who got caught breaking the law.
Many people are victims of unjust laws from laws against pot to laws against homosexuality. Thousands of people across the US and across the world are routinely victimized by unjust laws and corrupt police.
Pick pretty much any disadvantaged group and there will be or have been a law that keeps them in their place. I guess they should just follow the rules and complain via the methods the oppressors specify?
"You lose your rights if you break the law" in the legal system of Three Felonies A Day is equivalent to no one having any rights.
Personally, I still take issue with the idea of locking other human beings in cages. I think a police force that strictly follows the ideals laid out by Sir Robert Peel is about as close to ethical as it can get while still having people whose full-time job it is to enforce society's collective will on others. I believe there will always be better conflict resolution techniques than violence. That being said, the Peelian principles do lay out a seemingly ideal compromise in a society haunted by trauma and violence. Maybe even a path to a society where we don't lock anyone in cages anymore.
I hope I can assume that you retract your earlier statement about the term "victim" as it relates to people having their lives destroyed by unjust laws.
From the miscegenation laws mentioned earlier to anti-weed laws to anti-gay laws to any number of other laws, much of our current system of creating and enforcing laws is based around victimizing various people.
It seems the line is arbitrarily drawn at "getting high". Is this because you dont personally like the idea of other people getting high or is there some other logical basis for your determination?
Say holding some religious belief is illegal. By all accounts what religion you believe in is a choice. Is the person who is punished for their religious belief a victim? They could have just chosen not to hold that belief but they "went against the law". So theyre not a victim?
I am going to disengage from this conversation as I suspect this stance has less to do with any logical reasoning and more with personal conviction. Which is fine, no shade on anyone for their personal convictions. As long as they dont go around trying to force that on other people. ;)
I agree that bad people do exist. And I'm sure that prosecuted crimes are committed disproportionately by those we'd define as "bad people." But I don't think that bad acts committed by good people are any better than those committed by bad people. And I don't think that a bad person who resists committing bad acts should be treated worse than a good person who also resists committing them.
All of this is caused by the drugs being illegal, which prevents them from seeking justice in the usual way if someone steals from them or rips them off etc.
If you were to legalize drugs and release them, they would no longer have any incentive to resort to violence.
And the same logic applies to people in other situations. If you regularly get shaken down by two bit thugs and the police do nothing no matter how many times you report it, you're likely to eventually take matters into your own hands, even though that isn't exactly legal. So should the police use any excuse they can to arrest you, for the situation they caused, because people in that situation are disposed to commit a violent crime the state can't even prove?
It's called bargaining in the shadow of the law. If you have the ability to take someone to court, they know that too, and know you'd win, so they're willing to settle up with you peacefully rather than both of you incurring the costs of going to court.
When a small time drug dealer's car needs service covered under warranty, they don't go in and threaten the dealership with violence, they drop off the car and expect the dealership to honor the contract. Which the dealership does in the same way as they do for anyone else, because the dealership doesn't know anything about their extracurricular criminal activity and can't use it to renege on their obligations by threatening to turn them in to the police.
You must not have met many weed dealers before have you? Specifically the examples where a "drug dealer" would be violent are so divorced from my own lived experience that it really makes me wonder if this is how some of society really thinks weed dealers act like.
Its also a really funny idea.
I get it you think to be a weed dealer you need to be some kind of hardened criminal who commits all sorts of various crimes or whatever, but im here to break it to you that the hollywood criminal drug dealers youre imagining dont really exist. Many people do all sorts of illegal things because we live in a country with many overly restrictive and draconian laws. Very few of those people are the dangerous criminals you are imagining. Most of them are regular people who dont have the religious reverence for arbitrary laws that some other memebers of our society have.
Pretty much every grow bust they find guns, etc. Even in countries where it should be almost impossible to get those guns.
This was decades ago so I suppose its possible that in the intervening time everyone involved in the weed trade has reverted to the violent Hollywood drug dealers of yore, though I find that unlikely.
There really is this perception among more sheltered circles that if you break some given law you must be some kind of stoic gangster type. Its really not true.
Maybe in the 70s when weed came in bricks shipped in by the cartel. During that time the people moving pounds were probably actually dangerous people. During my time as a delinquent though, weed was grown in the mountains by families who were more likely to be caught donating to the local homeless shelter/passing out food and blankets to the homeless than they were "using violence on people on the street"
I promise you, you dont need to live in fear of weed dealers. They are really not that dangerous.
That isn't the case IME, most people in the black market dealing with weed are pretty non-violent up until you are talking millions of dollars, which 5lbs will never be. They tend to only deal in weed or weed derivatives at those levels as well. It just doesn't make economic sense to do otherwise. What little bloods and crips style stuff of favela fame is a lot less common now too from what I can tell.
[1] https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/bank-robbery-...
(Simple drug possession, of any drug, in any amount, is not among that set for me.)
They can hold whatever stance they do and I'll do the same.
As another commenter said, it's far better to focus your efforts on changing the laws. If they are truly unjust, then changing them will have wide support. We can already see this with the relaxation of Marijuana laws.
Even if you personally disagree with something and think it should be changed, you still have to "read the room" and see if society agrees with you. If not, then bide your time and wait for society to catch up.