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.