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.
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.)