• 4am@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      How about if I’m not bothering anybody then don’t even arrest me?

      • hyper@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        Edit:

        How about if I’m not bothering anybody then don’t even arrest me?

        I misunderstood that comment above. My bad.


        What do you mean? People get arrested for possession of weed for example that they plan to consume by themselves, not bothering anybody. Then they get locked up. You rather lock them away, than try to rehabilitate them? This applies to so many cases. Of course there are cases where the verdict says prison but at least try to keep people out of prison. But wait the prison system is a corporation trying to make money.

        • RogueBanana@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          Uh did you misread it? That’s exactly his point, people getting arrested when they weren’t even bothering anyone.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    And not only is the first part necessarily the worst, but once you’re in the system they make it hard to get back out by throwing all sorts of arbitrary requirements on you to fulfill, with little to no flexibility. 10-week class that occurs right in the middle of your work-day? Fuck you. It all serves to essentially keep you in the system as it keeps on fucking with your life. Not to mention prison/jail, which brands you with a permanent scarlet letter that bars you from even working at many jobs even after you’ve gotten out.

    • crashoverride@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Same thing with having one of those breathalyzer things on your car. You have to pay to have it installed, pay a monthly fee in addition to all the other shit you’ve already paid for. And then you can only go a very few certain places. Makes it incredibly difficult to recover from that. It’s not to punish you or keep you off the road after a DUI, it’s so they can extract more money from you

    • HorseWithNoName@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      And then they charge you hundreds to thousands of dollars for those classes so that once you do find a job, they just garnish your wages.

      They charge you for drug tests and “renting” ankle monitors, and if you don’t pay they just throw you back in jail. Which sometimes has its own fees. Even public defenders can have fees depending on your state/county, and they will threaten to take you to small claims court over the $50 they billed you without telling you. For counsel that literally exists to represent poor people. Ask me how I know.

  • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    The logic is deterrence.

    I mean it’s stupid, but that’s what the supporters think.

    The thing they are missing is that no one commits a crime thinking they will get caught. So ever increasing the deterrence doesn’t help.

    Drugs is a public health issue, no really criminal. Prohibition doesn’t work with things done at scales like drugs and alcohol. You’re just feeding the criminal gangs.

    • NuraShiny [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      It’s not deterrence, that’s not the point. Deterrence does not work.

      It’s about sending people to prison so they can do cheap labor. It’s also about racism because it’s disproportionately targeted towards minorities. It absolutely makes sense in that light.

      • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        I’m sure that is the motivation of some, those involved, but the vast majority of support will be voters who think deterrence works.

        • NuraShiny [any]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          It’s the prison-industrial complex paying the politicians to push this stuff through. Voters don’t matter to the politics being pushed, they just get told later that they wanted them.

          • epyon22@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Policy at a macro scale is very different than policy at a citizen level. While both inform the other many decisions are made on either side without understanding consequences. Banning drug use at a home or even a town level could make sense and work in the head of household’s favor but that one town or house banning the use could make things worse for another, but from the smaller level makes a ton of sense, unfortunately.

            • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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              1 year ago

              Maybe. But not all police forces and legal systems are like this. In the developed world, the US is a bit of an outlier.

    • Wogi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The logic is subjugation. These laws are applied largely to a specific group of people, and even if they don’t spend life in prison, their ability to build a life for themselves afterwards is neutered, and they lost the right to vote.

    • Tehzbeef@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The logic is it also ruins other peoples lives. No one exists in society in a nut shell or as an island. If your choice to use drugs would expose, entice, or otherwise encourage a person to use drugs then it is reasonable in my opinion for the state to protect people from it.

      That being said clearly our approach isn’t working. There shouldn’t be laissez-faire drug use all over but there shouldn’t be life in prison immediately consequences either.

      The most succesful drug rehabilitation programs are mandatory rehab facilities that are a choice alternate to going to jail for an equal amount of time.

      Also housing first models are incredibly effective. But… the entire western world uses housing as an investment vehicle and commodity so it is diametrically opposed to housing first initiatives. If the average citizen is paying 50% of their income for housing and then “junkies” get given free housing the political party that implemented it would be booted so fast.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That’s because it’s not logic - it’s propaganda. The war on drugs was always built on a solid bedrock of oppressing minorities, black people in particular.

    • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What? White people like smoking weed? Well its probably ok then. What? White people enjoy opioids? Oh no, it’s a crisis we better get people the help they need. Don’t worry big pharma drug dealers, you can keep your fortune, just say sorry.

  • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s perfectly circular, like this man’s dome.

    Don’t forget that drug laws are often racist e.g. cocaine possession carries a lesser punishment than crack, cannabis is a schedule 1 substance, etc. This goes some way to explaining the legal rationale.

    • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      How is this racist? I don’t doubt that you’re right but I’m not understanding what makes that racist. Are black people significantly more likely to have crack than cocaine or something? At first glance it seems logical to me that cocaine has less of a punishment than crack, but that’s based off of a somewhat limited understanding of the effects of the two drugs.

        • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          They are the same pharmacologically, but the effects between snorting and smoking vary greatly.

          Regular cocaine powder is cocaine hydrochloride. Crack is made by mixing cocaine hydrochloride with ammonia and then burning off the hydrochloride which makes it a freebase. People don’t smoke regular cocaine until it has been turned into freebase. Smoking cocaine powder is just wasteful compared to snorting it.

          Smoking crack results in a more rapid absorption into the bloodstream—compared to snorting the powder. Therefore, the effects are more rapid and quicker to dissipate than if someone just snorted cocaine.

          Crack is cheaper than powder cocaine, because crack has less cocaine per dose, and is still very potent. So poorer areas get flooded with crack, as no one can afford to be addicted to cocaine powder in the lower class.

          So, in conclusion, it is absolutely discriminatory to have harsher punishment for crack than cocaine. Even if crack is more potent, it has less illegal substance in it by weight than cocaine powder does.

      • tuwwut@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        The racist associations between crack and black people are rumored to actually be an intentional thing. The US government says the allegations have no merit, but the CIA has been accused of funneling large amounts of crack cocaine into the black neighborhoods of LA. Here’s one article about it on a .gov but you can find many other sources on google: THE CIA-CONTRA-CRACK COCAINE CONTROVERSY Relevant quote from the original source accusing them:

        For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.

        This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the “crack” capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.

  • Piers@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Regan’s administration started the war on drugs. Convicting drugs users of a criminal crime has the effect of taking the right to vote away from people who tended not to vote for the Republican party and allowed them to be legally used as slave labour. At least one member of that administration has explicitly stated that this was a strategic decision to win elections.

  • arefx@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’m from the city this cop was from and if I remember correctly he was shot in the head and survived but obviously not the same. Maybe he died I don’t really remember.

    I’m not a fan of the police but on a human level some awful stuff happened to this guy.

    Edit: looked it up because I was curious he underwent brain surgery and survived.

    Fuck the police as a whole tho

    • DaBabyAteMaDingo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I used to have that same belief but watching “good” cops cover for bad ones made me realize they’re all scummy.

      • arefx@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I agree even this guy but life has nuance and I felt this was info that is pertinent to the meme.

      • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        There is always some nuance, but in general most morally upstanding people drop out of training or are pushed out of the force in some way.

      • Ibex0@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s the rub, ask yourself why doesn’t it happen more often that a “good cop” calls out a “bad cop?” It just seem so rare. I don’t understand why, these are people from the same community. 🤷‍♂️

  • timdave@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Just a reminder that cops exist simply to uphold the status quo! Our first police squads were created to hunt down escaped slaves! Fuck - and I really mean this - the police.

      • Kra@mtgzone.com
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        1 year ago

        Yeah just generalize and dehumanify the people that pay attention that people don’t break the law, steal, murder and destroy stuff.

        You know they are human too? Also would you generalize other large groups of people like this? Without police there would be anarchy and the most violent criminal gangs would make the rules.

        You sound like a very annoying person that I would not want to be around.

  • TheBlue22@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Cops do not, never have and never will “protect and serve” a regular person. They protect and serve the elite.

    There is a good reason we say ACAB, fuck the police and call them class traitors

  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    It didn’t say what mechanism would be used for the drugs to ruin your life. Prison works just as well as turning tricks for smack as far as life ruining goes.