Re:Legal Weed is Hurting San Francisco's Hippies
by InclinedPlane on Friday July 26, 2013 @11:26PM
(#6111760)
There are so many more direct and higher order effects of drug prohibition, just in regards to crime.
1: It gives easy revenue for criminals.
2: It puts many people into the "criminal" category, making them much less willing to interact with law enforcement and making it more likely that they will be willing to consort with true criminals.
3: It takes away resources from the criminal justice system, and further perverts it as well. It breeds the sort of police officer who is unskilled at forming a bond with the community they serve and with basic policework and instead focuses on making drug busts. It also breeds the sort of "assumed guilty" plea bargain dominated prosecutor model.
4: As a consequence of 1 and 2, the cognitive dissonance of the law banning victimless drug use causes many police officers to lose their respect for the law as well. And because of the wealth of criminal drug dealing enterprises there becomes a natural synergy which promotes police corruption.
5: Similarly, due to drug forfeiture laws it becomes possible for the way that police undertake law enforcement activities to dramatically affect their own budgets and resources. Naturally police organizations tend to be drawn to the activities which provide the most revenue, drug busts, to the detriment of other policing.
6: Because of the drug/criminal connection combined with rampant police crack downs due to the above factors drug busts can often be dangerous, which pushes police officers even farther away from a healthy relationship with their communities and increasingly toward a militarized relationship which spills over into every citizen/police interaction and further poisons the relationship.
1: It gives easy revenue for criminals.
2: It puts many people into the "criminal" category, making them much less willing to interact with law enforcement and making it more likely that they will be willing to consort with true criminals.
3: It takes away resources from the criminal justice system, and further perverts it as well. It breeds the sort of police officer who is unskilled at forming a bond with the community they serve and with basic policework and instead focuses on making drug busts. It also breeds the sort of "assumed guilty" plea bargain dominated prosecutor model.
4: As a consequence of 1 and 2, the cognitive dissonance of the law banning victimless drug use causes many police officers to lose their respect for the law as well. And because of the wealth of criminal drug dealing enterprises there becomes a natural synergy which promotes police corruption.
5: Similarly, due to drug forfeiture laws it becomes possible for the way that police undertake law enforcement activities to dramatically affect their own budgets and resources. Naturally police organizations tend to be drawn to the activities which provide the most revenue, drug busts, to the detriment of other policing.
6: Because of the drug/criminal connection combined with rampant police crack downs due to the above factors drug busts can often be dangerous, which pushes police officers even farther away from a healthy relationship with their communities and increasingly toward a militarized relationship which spills over into every citizen/police interaction and further poisons the relationship.