This story is about not only a wasteful, inefficient system and a six year injustice committed against a productive and from all accounts harmless man. It's about an the creation and perpetuation of an entire underclass.

I am specifically not litigating the wastefulness, inefficiency, or injustice of our drug laws.

This is a problem I have in general with _Reason_ (and also with Radley Balko, who I also enjoy reading and often agree with, and whose writing introduced me to _Reason_). They have a bad habit of building emotional narratives around cases where the facts don't support them. As a result, every time I read one of these pieces, I find myself having to dig in to see where I'm being manipulated. Often, it turns out I'm not, and the piece is completely honest. But sometimes they're not.

This isn't a dishonest piece, just kind of a dumb one. Other stories about narcotics laws have turned out to be directly misleading: key facts of the case had been withheld to create an undue perception of victimhood, because victimhood suits the ideological agenda of the writer.

We don't know if he took drugs himself.

Was that mistake enough to warrant the results?

What have I gained from him going through that?

How sorry do you feel for the short order cooks with postgraduate degrees who weren't caught with Oxy?

This is simply not a story about someone who's life was ruined.

Losing your medical license and then going to prison at age 53 because your intractable pain practice was targeted by a sting operation and you were found one time to have not followed the absolute letter of the 3498739847 page law on how to prescribe vicodin to a cancer patient: that is a story about a ruined life. This isn't.

        Arm amputated? 
        Stop crying and use your brain
        You still have one left

Wow, that's an understatement. He got his life ruined, plain and simple. I'm surprised he didn't commit suicide.

The hilarious thing is how counterproductive this is for the state. He was earning a significant amount of income, and paying income tax on that. After losing his job the state and federal governments lost thousands that he was paying them in income tax revenue in the short term, and in the long term his reduced earning potential over his lifetime will cost tens or hundreds of thousands. All this to punish someone who was a productive member of society and who harmed no one with his actions.

1. He accepted what he knew was an illegal drug at the concert, and kept it, planning to 'give it away'. Who does this?

2. His passenger was carrying screens and a pipe, and he had an illegal prescription drug in his pocket. Why would he consent to a search?

3. He went to court and plead 'no contest'-this is equivalent to a guilty plea. Why not spend the time to tell his story? He gave the judge no opportunity to be lenient.

4. After getting on probation, he made no effort to educate HIMSELF on the rules. Instead, he operated on assumptions.

I'm not arguing that the drug laws are good or bad, but this guy screwed up.

I mean you can sit there comfortably from the throne of hindsight and easily see where he screwed up, but that does absolutely nothing to further the conversation.

Remember that he was in possession of a CII substance. That's plain and clear. There was no way out of it.

I don't think the option of pleading not-guilty, asking for a jury trial, and crossing your fingers hoping for a hung jury or jury nullification would have been wise.

I also see why the judge made him notify his employer, considering he was a bonded stock broker.

After that, the "process" took over.

You can say that about everyone and everything. We are, of course, masters of our fate.

> He accepted what he knew was an illegal drug at the concert, and kept it, planning to 'give it away'. Who does this?

Everyone who doesn't want to offend a friend, but at the same time, has reservations about taking whatever was given to him?

> His passenger was carrying screens and a pipe, and he had an illegal prescription drug in his pocket. Why would he consent to a search?

Fear?

You clearly have no experience dealing with an aggressive police officer. Neither do most people. So when they encounter one, they take a submissive posture and pretty much agree to everything without thinking.

> He went to court and plead 'no contest'-this is equivalent to a guilty plea. Why not spend the time to tell his story? He gave the judge no opportunity to be lenient.

Because nobody cares. Not your defense attorney, not the prosecutor, not the judge, nobody. They see dozens of these sob stories every day. They don't have time for it and they don't care. You broke the law, you're going to pay and you're going to pay the same thing the guy before you did.

Have you actually been to municipal/county court? I recommend you go. It's open to the public. Very educational. You don't have to stay long to figure out how things work.

> After getting on probation, he made no effort to educate HIMSELF on the rules. Instead, he operated on assumptions.

Which is what 99% of people do? Laws and systems should be designed for the worst of us to be able to live well ... not the best and brightest.

> this guy screwed up.

He most certainly did.

1. No officer, I do not consent to any searches of my property.

2. I'm sorry sir, but I have a constitutional right not to respond to your inquiry. I am exercising that right.

3. You smell marijuana? You may not search my property. (cop searches anyway - guess what? if he doesn't find marijuana, anything he does find is not admissible in court)

4. Defense Attorney: Just plead guilty, it'll be fine. You: No. Go talk to the prosecutor. Do your job. Get me a plea-bargain in writing and I'll consider pleading guilty. And before you hand me that piece of paper, all of you talk to the judge and make sure everybody is on the same page.

Also, every state is different, so make sure to know your local law! In New Jersey, they have something called PTI (Pre-Trial Intervention) for first time offenders. A much better option for those who know they're heading for the gallows. Know the law and don't trust people to give you accurate information! Even your defense attorney!

It's good to have some rehearsed answer to that question. Explicitly invoking the Constitution will work, but can be combative. As annoying as it is to my inner idealistic 25 year old, I try to be as obsequious and polite as I can to police officers; they deal with genuinely unpleasant people on an hourly basis, and being nice to them often works a kind of mental jiu jitsu on them. It probably never matters but I figure the habit might someday save me a lot of real trouble. Also, it gets me out of a _lot_ of tickets.

Can we oppose drug laws without surrendering our critical thinking faculties? I'd like to think we can.

For an otherwise lawful person to lose their career and most of the prospects for their near future, their schooling, a decent place to live, and be subjected to idiotic and hypocritical drug classes twice a week for a year, and then in turn to be given bad advice by their probation officer which leads to further punishments ... well, yes, despondency to the point of suicidal desires depends then entirely on the individual's emotional constitution. (Before you object to that, you should know that merely losing her job led to a downward spiral which has resulted in my mother attempting suicide three or four times -- that I know of -- and my father then attempting suicide just so that he wouldn't have to deal with her anymore.)

His record may have been expunged, but as he says in the article, that didn't matter once the various private background check organizations had gotten ahold of it.

I think the article did a pretty damn good job of a case study which should make "the system" look ridiculous and over-punitive in this instance. I think that the subject of the article made a good point when he said that it makes sense that many otherwise-lawful citizens might turn to illegal sources of income during a situation like this.

So I find him to be quite a sympathetic character. In what way am I surrendering my critical thinking faculties?

This person, on the other hand, "had his life almost ruined" because he went from stock broker to exactly that same kind of job after committing a felony. Note well: the rest of his punishment was "watching movies twice a week at Narcotics Anonymous for a year" and "9PM curfew for a year". The criminal record itself was expunged.

I think that you're understating the rest of his situation because it better suits your argument that his life wasn't ruined. For instance, yes, his record was expunged, however, as noted in the article, his record is still showing up in private background checks -- thanks in part to getting an extra year of probation after being charged with violating his probation because his PO told him it was OK to work late.

Had I not been as fortunate as I have been, that trashed credit report easily could have cost me the most lucrative tier of jobs available to me, because employers routinely screen applicants based on credit history.

Being screwed over by Sprint is not a felony. Similar screwups have no doubt cost thousands of people jobs.

I'm not sure what the appropriate public policy response to this situation is. We benefit enormously from employment- at- will. There are people on HN who will also convincingly argue that we benefit enormously from credit reports and credit scoring (among other things, the system we had before credit scores was overtly racist). It's a complicated issue and I have no glib answers to provide.

Someone else probably got his job, and paid the same taxes.

Whoa, what?

I don't understand how you saw that. No prior arrests or convictions, claims to have never been addicted, first arrest of this type, had lucrative career removed from him and income potential ruined. Should they have added that he liked kittens?

In other words, he got off a lot easier than a 19 year old carrying a bag of weed would on the West Side of Chicago.

There are much more sympathetic stories about people's lives being ruined by drug laws. For instance, there are doctors who specialize in the treatment of intractable pain --- as you can imagine, the life stories of the people who they are treating are heartbreaking. Some of those doctors have had their entire careers destroyed; some of them have received lengthy prison sentences. All because they prescribed drugs that can in fact be lawfully prescribed.

(There is a backstory to those stories too, of course; a terrible injustice has been done to those doctors, but not out of malice. It turns out that there really is a special breed of asshole doctors who prescribe things like fentanyl for recreational addicts.)

Also: he got the conviction expunged. The people with "nearly indelible black marks" don't have that option.

This goes to the concept of "character," which I honestly don't understand. Why do we insist that people be flawless in all aspects of their lives? I find history to be full of examples of people who excel at one trait but are terrible at another.

Doesn't he get a private life, uncorrelated with work? I mean, I'd understand it if the article pointed out he was a heavy drug user who needed to steal for a habit, but the only thing this guy seems to have done wrong was handle stupid laws in a poor way. Does that stop him dealing with stocks? I don't think the two correlate, and I think people ought to have to make more significant mistakes before its time to discard them.

I guess what I feel here is this could be anyone, and I'm uncomfortable with such a punishment for a small error.

Proud to say that Chicago has de-criminalized small amounts of Marijuana. (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-06-28/news/ct-met-ch...)

I am sympathetic to the police here (there are probably many very good public policy reasons to get West Side dealers off the street) but the law itself is a bit of a clusterfuck.

One pill. Have a sense of proportion. And go read Les Miserables. You are being Javert.

The doctors who are being screwed over by our drug laws aren't breaking the law. They are the victims of an error prone and occasionally capricious effort to suppress illegal narcotics dealing by unscrupulous doctors.

This guy did break the law, did it knowingly, and got caught in part because he displayed poor judgement in dealing with the police and prosecutors.

I am not saying "do not have sympathy for this guy". I'm saying, "meter that sympathy out in comparison to people who have truly been ruined by capricious drug laws".

May be. But those stories don't make this story "light". He still had his life destroyed, for what? Some lame laws, and some inefficiency in the system?

In the headline.

There are so many laws on the books this is virtually guaranteed to be true of everyone on this site.

Am I violating some federal law somehow as we speak? Perhaps, but I am not aware of which one. This guy was fully aware of what he was doing.

I actually hadn't known the legal status of oxytocin, though I was familiar with it from all the studies about it being related to people's natural production of it. I have been out of the US for a long time and I don't exactly know any of the raver-type people, but it's not (or at least wasn't) a famously abused prescription drug like valium, ritalin or adderall.

Edit since HN won't let me reply: Good point. I hadn't realized you were restricting your "he broke the law" point to felonies. I suppose sharing a drink with a 20 year-old (still very common) would be a better comparison in terms of punishment then. I have read articles about parents allowing their teens to drink at home safely instead of going out getting jail time for this.

Oxy is more or less prescription heroin. It is at the heart of the illegal prescription drug trade, in a way that valium, ritalin, and adderall are not. Oxy is not comparable to adderall or valium. It has a far, far higher abuse potential.

So what? There's nothing particularly dangerous about prescription heroin in pill form. It's an excellent cough suppressant and pain reliever. And certainly there's nothing particularly dangerous about possessing one pill of it. (I'd actually be a bit surprised if you couldn't find a leftover pill or two of, say, hydrocodone in the average medicine chest.)

Given that you say you don't like the drug laws, I don't get your apparently fanatical devotion to obeying these laws that you don't like and that obviously don't serve their allegedly intended use either in general or in this specific instance.

I'm guessing you think this guy did take some oxy at the event he was at. If so: so what? Why do you care? Why does having possibly taken a drug (with no apparent ill effects) make him unsympathetic to you?

Remember, we've got a president who admits to having done cocaine and pot. Surely you'll grant that taking a prescription pill is safer than doing cocaine obtained from a nonmedical source?

Rush Limbaugh did much, much worse and how has he suffered? This guy had one freaking pill and that he was dumb and agreed to let the cops search him -- as everyday Americans submit to even worse searches by TSA -- is justification for what he went through?

The person in this story was prosecuted, plead guilty, and had his record expunged after agreeing to 12 months of addiction therapy.

No amount of prosecutorial discretion was ever going to equalize outcomes between a young Merrill broker in Florida and Rush Limbaugh, one of the richest blowhards in right wing media.

And yet he cannot get it expunged from all the companies that got that info from the state. It will forever haunt him. For One. Freakin. Pill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/us/17expunge.html?pagewant...

As a person who was truly in the wrong place as the wrong time, I agree with this statement. A seemingly good call could turn into a bad call instantly.

The fact that he consented to search tends to argue otherwise.

That wording, including the use of present participle ('carrying') and plural-like word ('narcotics'), makes it sound like this was an ongoing activity with multiple doses.

He had one pill in his pocket. His story, that he'd just received it at the concert from which he was returning, with no intent for or history of use, is plausible. (Even if we assume he's shaded the story to make himself look better, the prosecution and damage to his livelihood was not based on any other evidence.)

Most people will not find someone completely unsympathetic as soon as they "straight-up break the law", especially if the discussion is about the law itself. The point of the article isn't that 'James' is innocent, but that the punishment is disproportionate, and (via the details of the required classes) often absurdly wasteful and mistargeted.

The fact that there may be other even more sympathetic stories doesn't weaken this one. Their stories are additive in the case against the drug war, not competing with each other for a rationed amount of available sympathy.

For example, some people are going to figure a licensed professional doctor in trouble for suspect prescriptions should have known better (and received a strong defense at trial). But, hearing about James' naive errors -- holding a single pill, consenting to the car search, relying on his lawyer and probation officer -- they may recognize mistakes they might themselves make, and sympathize more deeply.

Drug laws are not bad. The current state of drug laws in the states, however, is appalling. I believe, for instance, that some substances should always be strictly controlled / banned like Heroine or Cocaine for instance.

I believe Marijuana should be legal (at the VERY least, decriminalized) and treated similarly to alcohol and tobacco.

Psychedelics are clearly a gray area, they seem harmful but really not enough research has been done. Creative breakthroughs aside, I'm not really sure how addictive or destructive they are.

In summary, drug laws are not bad in general; they are just bad at the moment, in the U.S. specifically. It's just such a shame that democracy doesn't lend itself to perceived criminal leniency.

No politician looking to get elected is going to advocate taking it easier on criminals even if those criminals he wants to be easier on shouldn't even be criminals in the first place.

I blame Nixon. /endrant

Do a little research and you'll find that even for heroin and cocaine the harm done to society by their being illegal far exceeds any conceivable harm done by the drugs themselves. When and where cocaine has been legal, people drank tea from the leaves as a mild stimulant similar to caffeine. When heroin was legal people took it in pill form and addiction was safe and affordable - the main long-term documented negative effect of regular heroin use is constipation. Many people have lived a long and healthy and productive life addicted to these drugs in exactly the same way I've lived one nearly continuously addicted to caffeine (in my case, preferably administered in the form of Diet Coke - your tastes may vary).

When alcohol was illegal, whiskey was cheaper than beer and people went blind drinking wood alcohol; when alcohol was legal again the average potency of what was fashionable to drink declined. That same dynamic applies to every other drug - making a drug illegal makes a more potent, more dangerous product available where leaving it legal lets people use it far more safely - an outcome you can only be opposed to if you carry some sort of Victorian anti-fun meme or if you're convinced that everybody in the world is insane, untrustworthy and lacking in judgment except the angels we've found to regulate the rest of us.

I recommend the book Licit and Illicit drugs, which you can read for free here:

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/cumen...

You could also just look up any of the drugs you're worried about in an old-fashioned paper encyclopedia.

Well, that's the point. When you have a doctor sorting something out for a very poor, dying, patient who is in immense pain most people are going to agree that the doctor should be protected.

So let's move down the scale of sympathy, and see if we can still get people to agree that drug laws are causing more harm than they solve. Because if we want to change drugs laws we want to talk about the majority of drug users, not about obscure edge cases.

So, we talk about a man with a small amount of an illegal substance; having broken one law (speeding); in a car with a friend with drug paraphernalia; having spent time with other drug users; who admits to trading (him saying "I was going to give it away" was stupid, he should have said he was going to flush it.) - now we have someone pretty unsympathetic.

We ask how society benefits from him finding it harder to get work; from spending all that time and money pushing him through a system; from him taking resources that could have been used on more serious addicts; etc.

With no previous convictions, and no evidence of drug misuse he could have been asked to be available for random drug testing for a year.

It's not as if he was working with machinery, or driving vehicles, or working with children. Drug use among bankers isn't going to end up with a factory on fire.

Therefore he CLEARLY deserves to have his career ruined. Also, he should probably be humiliated and stigmatized for the next couple years... then for the rest of his life just to be on the safe side.

The whole "war on drugs" is absolutely crazy, by the way.

For what he did, he didn't deserve one percent of that punishment.

The criminal record itself was expunged.

He lost his job. But that wasn't punishment. Thousands of people have lost jobs simply because of bad credit reports.

The guy who called me hateful also wrote a haiku about me. Think of that whatever you will. I'm just procrastinating on HN (I a client meeting today that keeps getting delayed, so I can't sink my teeth into anything). I do not see this thread as any kind of epic battleground in which social justice issues are going to be resolved.