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.
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
I’ve had one before and without it you can only go to work and the grocery store. With it you just have to blow sober and you are free to drive as you please, it’s like having the judge in the car to make sure you don’t fuck up.
I’ve unfortunately had the pleasure of needing one of these interlock devices installed on my car back in 2010. It’s definitely been awhile but the device only limits where you could go if you had alcohol in your system, and that limit would be NOWHERE. If you were sober you just had to blow clean every 5-20 minutes and I could drive as much as I pleased. The option without the device was no driving except to and from work and maybe the grocery store 1-2 times a week.
In the other article linked by that one it says it’s just a recommendation. Seems weird.
A federal advisory board recommended yesterday that safety regulators require “alcohol impairment detection systems to be included in all new vehicles.” The move is just a recommendation, but it has the weight of law behind it.
Our entire bar/nightclub economy would collapse if nobody drank and drove. Not defending it, just pointing out America has terrible public transportation and very little means to access these places without driving.
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.
Edit: Lots of people not understanding how that’s exactly what cops and shitheads in power think about sending people on drugs to jail. That’s scary.
They are more than happy to send your ass to jail for decades because of minor charges that don’t hurt anyone but yourself. You’re just a number to these assholes. They will make an example out of you if they can.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 CONTROVERSYRelevant 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s the same logic as when Republicans claim Government doesn’t work…
It’s not ignorance or stupidity, it’s a mission statement… Republicans are trying to make Government not work and Cops are actively trying to fuck you over
Government is bad and we should have less of it in our faces. To achieve this goal, let’s make the consumption of certain popular drugs illegal, and while we’re at it make laws restricting what women, trans, gay, etc people can do. This should reduce the government’s involvement in our day-to-day lives.
I just don’t understand it. Less government = good (according to practically every republican I’ve met), so lets vote for more laws which restrict people and give the government more power.
I feel like this attitude and generalized hatred towards every person working as police will make it worse because no one will want to do that job anymore. It has already happend in the USA. This activism against police in general swaps to other countries via internet culture and European countries as well struggle to get anyone work as police. This will make it necessary to lower standards and additionally, more police will be on edge since there aren’t enough people.
I’ve never seen a crime deterred or solved by the cops. You know what prevents crime? Improved standards of living. Secure housing. Gainful employment. Future prospects.
There will always be inequalities, there will always be unhappiness/unrest, there will always be crime to some degree, and thus there will always be the need of some responsibility to deal with it. The important thing is that this group is selected and actively monitored according to strict requirements. The current situation is bad, especially in the US, something needs to change. But saying we don’t need cops is just as stupid as the right-winger’s “I don’t dial 911 🔫🔫” door sign…
I’d go farther: home and job are optional, there would barely be any crime if just everybody had future prospects they were worried of losing for not following the law.
You live in a very different world than I do, apparently. What about domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, infringement on personality rights, etc.?
How much of that is the police stopping? By the time you see it in the news, it’s already happened, committed mostly by people who thought they had nothing to lose, and a few mentally ill.
Domestic violence in particular, is much easier to solve when people can just get up and leave, instead of being tied down by a lack of an alternative.
Police actually intervene a lot, all the time, day and night. Not even a fraction of this ends up in the news. People seek help from police all the time as well: car crashes, fires, protecting paramedics, protecting protestors from counter-demonstrators, protecting mosques and churches, protecting asylum housing, etc. etc. etc.
It seems like you have no idea what police is actually doing and think because you don’t see it it’s not happening. But a lot of completely normal people, with jobs and housing and everything, get in trouble for various reasons and it happens all the time. Just for Berlin for example (that’s 4.7 Million people), you have about 4000 emergency calls a day. Only for the calls that go directly to the police, not even reroutes. And that’s not counting all the regular stuff going on like observations, protection programs, people who come directly to the station, patrols, …
It’s irrational to believe all this will suddenly evaporates just by giving people alternatives. That’s not how people work.
It seems like you have no idea what police is actually doing
You’d be surprised, I actually briefly considered joining some 20-odd years ago, got as far as reading the training materials (then decided there was no chance in hell I’d pass the physical).
What you describe, are one part “first responder” jobs, and another part tasks that wouldn’t be there if people had something better to do. I’m not saying the “first responder” tasks would be gone, or even the religious or political conflicts. I’m saying that actual crime would be a fraction of what it is now, if all people had some guaranteed future prospects. Not jobs, not housing, just the knowledge that as long as they don’t get violent, they’ll have a way to pursue whatever life they want.
People work like pressure cookers; the more pressure you put them under, the more violently they’ll explode when they get past their limit. Some will hit the purge valve and get drunk, beat their family to a pulp, or maybe just verbally abuse them every day (guess how I know that). Some just get piss drunk and do all kinds of drugs on weekends to “relieve the stress”… stress they wouldn’t have in the first place if they had alternatives in their daily life.
Even in Europe, we have an anxiolytic and antidepressant epidemic. That should make us realize where the problems are coming from.
I guess than this is just a matter of different worldviews. I believe without someone enforcing laws “stronger” people will simply abuse and take from “weaker” people. Even when they do not need it, simply because they can.
I feel like this attitude and generalized hatred towards every person working as police will make it worse because no one will want to do that job anymore.
I mean, its a good start, but it really should be coming from governmental policy.
Its tragic that the government of the UK is so ass-backwards that the enforcement jackboot of the government is the thing going “hey, wait, this feels wrong”.
Sure, but the world is too grey to always follow laws exactly as written. If someone is sitting on a beach smoking some weed, they are not going to damage society or others by doing so. Arresting them for drugs that only harm themselves, costs society money for the arrest and provide no benefit to anyone.
Unless our laws are perfect (likely impossible) there will always need to be some leeway for interpretation of the spirit of the law. Cops should not blindly follow laws but understand their intent to prevent harm towards others.
Also, laws are slow to change and don’t often stay up to date with societal changes.
So what you are advocating for is police making their own decisions on a whim, instead of following the rules. I actually thought that behaviour was the problem.
Which part? Understanding how they should follow the law in the real world and the responsibility that brings? They could be wrong or right in any situation (they aren’t lawyers and the world doesn’t conform to laws) and they should be aware of that.
If the law says by possessing marijuana you are a dealer, but a cop finds someone with a small amount, it’s likely for recreation and their possession brings no harm to society or others (what the law wants to prevent). Arresting them may be following the letter of the law, but not the intent (to stop distribution).
Another invented situation: cop pulls over someone driving erratically and too fast, then the driver is a woman who escaped being raped by her date. She was driving erratically because she was emotionally and physically distraught. Is giving her a ticket helping anyone? The cop could say “okay, take it easy and slow while I follow you to make sure you’re out of danger and feel safe getting home”.
Sorry I can’t be more specific, I haven’t gotten years of training on such situations.
In both cases, depending on the laws in your country, you can later object the ticket or the arrest. In an ideal world both cases wouldn’t be a negative, but an inconvenience at most or even helpful contact with the law and police.
Demanding cops to make decisions on the spot is a situation you want to have less of. The more wiggle room police officers have in regards of construing the law, the more you have a mixture of forces that should be as independent from each other as possible. Otherwise you loose the power to challenge these decisions!
A police officer can have an opinion on laws, but they should never act on these opinions. This is necessary to protect themselves and all other people as well. You demand them to be some kind of superhero, but these are just regular people. They have opinions and good and bad days and sympathies, etc. You can’t demand them to just turn that all off and be some kind of super-human moral apparatus. You can and should demand of them to follow the law, though.
The actual difficult question shouldn’t be: “How can I do something that’s technically against the law but I think it’s okay without the police bothering me?”, but: “How can police be constructed in a way that it can still protect the people even when the laws start to actually suck?”
In my opinion that is human rights. Police in every country should have to protect human rights first and the laws of the local government second. Even that’s hard to implement since obviously police officers are also simply a product of their society like everybody else. But at least you have a small fail safe where an officer has a way to not act on a law if this particular officer sees their acting on the law as a human rights violation. There are ways to implement this in training and bureaucracy. Obviously not an easy task. :-) But probably the only one.
But arresting and then having it cleared costs time and energy but adds nothing to society.
Look, I’m not advocating that they should have more freedom. I am saying there is already freedom because the world is not as clear as the law states, so police should be properly trained to be aware of their role.
My general point I think follows from your last paragraph, their role to protect the people comes before following the letter of the law, but they should always try to uphold the intent.
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.
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