Jury Duty: Moral Quandry

[Simon_Jester]

I understand the general notion behind it to be sure. But it just seems to be as you said too much of a "good" thing. It seems that in attempting to avoid "efficient but rootless" you have went into the other extreme and made a system that can't get anything done as it is just too easy for people to effectively shut you down at the click of a button. And instead of creating a system that is safe from abuse you simply shifted who can abuse it.

Allowing normal people to abuse a system on the rare occasions they have access to it is better than having powerful people abuse the system every single day.

That said, most of the problems with American politics and how deliberately inefficient it is are at the top level- matters of organization. In a lot of cases they are simply outdated customs that worked well enough in a 'gentler' time when it was easier for political parties to negotiate and compromise.

But the rise of mass media and the creation of dedicated Party propaganda organs for at least one major American political faction have greatly distorted this process. So things that used to (more or less) work no longer work at all.

Let me put it this way: we have a few jobsites that give you a life-time ban if you have a drug conviction or positive drug test. And this is truly life-time. However, they have to policy on hiring felons. So, we could hire a convicted murderer to work on their site with no issues, but Mr. dumbass high school kid can't step foot on the premise for some pot.

I don't mean to derail the discussion here or anything. But is there also not the third option? As in, if the kid knows that being caught with pot nets him such severe penalties why can't the kid just... I don't know... NOT BUY POT?

Because he's a teenager and didn't think through the consequences of his actions until it was too late? Because most of the people who smoke pot in America do NOT get caught and crushed by the judiciary?

Turns out applying huge punishments for minor crimes doesn't actually deter them like it's supposed to, I guess.

Don't get me wrong here. I don't think this system is sane either. But I can see the effect the people making it wanted to achieve. And I can fully understand the mechanisms by which it is supposed to achieve it. The confusing part is why it is not working. If I lived in your system I would not want to be on the same phone call with someone I know knows someone whose cousin touched pot once whilst drunk.

Because again, it turns out that applying massive, terrifying punishment as a penalty for minor crimes doesn't work, or doesn't work as intended. There are a lot of reasons for this.

1) Many of the people breaking the law are young. Young people take more risks and have less understanding of the consequences of their actions. The average sixteen year old has no idea of the full horror that "won't be able to get a good job, ever" implies. The average thirty-one year old does... but that's after fifteen years' more experience.

2) The punishments are so large that it takes disproportionate state resources to enforce them. Therefore enforcement becomes sporadic and inconsistent. A given marijuana user feels perfectly safe, living in a comfy bubble of relatively normal life... until the day they get pulled over for something unrelated and suddenly they're looking at spending the rest of their life in a permanent criminal underclass. Since this happens semi-randomly and infrequently, a permanent community of drug users will continue to exist, and any given person may join that community without realizing how high the risk of eventual arrest is.

3) Nothing is really being done about root causes. There are a lot of reasons why recreational drug trade and use occurs. Even terrible punishments can't change that by itself. Even, say, taking one in ten drug users and shooting them in the head wouldn't make those reasons go away; if anything they might make it worse.

4) The nature of the authoritarian anti-drug attitude creates a rebellious attitude among the drug users. They feel as though the system has already judged them and rejected them- which in turn tends to undermine their own respect for, and fear of, the law. Why bother worrying about the rules if you are already one of the lost and the damned? You might as well be hung for a sheep as hung for a lamb.

[Broomstick]

There's also another factor. Consider this: why is it called weed? Because it's a fucking weed. Marijuana is native to the Americas and it fucking grows almost everywhere. No, it's not the carefully cultivated, deliberately bred for a better high shit the organized dealers stock but the truth is outlawing marijuana is a little like trying to outlaw black-eyed susans or birch trees. It's so easily available, so easily grown, and so everywhere that outlawing it is a joke.