Prof. Questions Gov't Monopoly on Marijuana

yahoo ^ | 12-12-05

[Chena]

It figures -- the government can't even grow a weed right.

LOL!

[Prime Choice]

Geez...touchy-touchy.

[publiusF27]

Show me one line of the United States' Constitution where the Federal Gub'mint is granted the authority to ban the care and feeding of a plant.

OK, but you'll probably be sorry you asked by the time you get done reading about it.

[Wolfie]

Five people receive government grown marijuana under the Federal Investigative New Drug Program, which began in 1978.. Bush The Elder closed it to new patients in '92, when a wave of AIDS patients began applying.

Stockbroker Using Uncle Sam's Medical Marijuana for 20 Years

[headsonpikes]

I'm still trying to imagine the mental state of folks who think that the DEA is expert about anything besides snagging gubmint bennies and lying through their teeth.

There are boot-lickers; there are brown-nosers; and then at the very bottom of the pit there are those who support the so-called War On Drugs!

[TKDietz]

"The real crime? Actually, the reality is these pukes are all guilty of some really nasty stuff ~ the kind that gets you executed in the Third-World, and a promotion to be the boss of your production segment in Socialist Europe.
Plea bargaining should be abolished as rapidly as new prisons can be brought into service."

You're full of it. First off, there isn't nearly so much pleading down from terribly serious crimes to simple drug crimes as you seem to think. I just did a plea on a guy on a delivery charge this morning. He did plead down from straight delivery to conspiracy to deliver to reduce the time he'll have to spend before he can parole out, but he'll still have to do about three and a half years before he'll be eligible for parole. Sometimes we can get a delivery or possession with intent to deliver charge reduced to a simple felony possession, but generally that's only going to happen if there isn't a good case on the underlying charge or if there are several co-defendants caught at the same time with the stuff in a car or something and the cops know who the real dealer is. The others might get stuck with just a possession charge. What doesn't happen though are cases where a guy is charged with something like robbery and then is allowed to plead to nothing but simple possession. Maybe the robbery might end up being worked down to a theft of something, depending on the circumstances, but if the guy had drugs he'll end up with a conviction for that too. Some of the people in prison fro drug possession are people initially charged with delivery possession with intent to deliver, but generally when that happens prosecutors either had a really weak case or the guy was just minimally involved or it only involved a tiny amount, or some or all of these factors are present. Most of the others there on possession charges went had prior criminal records, often other possession charges, so the prosecutor insisted on a prison sentence. It is true that few in for nothing but possessing a small user amount of drugs were people with clean records prior to their drug arrest, but that has happened in some cases.

Anyway, on abolishing plea bargains, that would absolutely bankrupt us. You know don't you that a good 95% or better of all criminal cases are resolved by plea. Nationwide only around 2.5% ever go to trial. In most cases people plea to the charges they were originally charged with. Many of them go to prison. I've pled four people so far this week and in three out of four cases my clients accepted prison sentences and will end up doing two years or more before they can get out. Three out of four pled to the charges they were originally charged with, and the one I already told you about was only modified slightly. He was just in the room when a drug deal for a tiny amount of meth occurred, but it wasn't his dope and he wasn't profiting from the transaction. He probably would have gotten a better deal had he not already been on a suspended sentence for possession.

We arrest more people now than at any point in our history. We incarcerate more people than we ever have, on a per captita basis and in total. Prior to 1980, our per capita incarceration rate had never been higher than 137 per 100,000 in state and federal prisons. The old record had been set in 1939, but for most of the twentieth century our incarceration rate hovered around 100 per 100,000, sometimes less, sometimes more, but it rarely ever topped 120 per hundred thousand. Today it is 486 per 100,000. If you count those in jails along with those in prisons, it goes on up to 726 per 100,000. This is the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. We now have more people behind bars on a per capita basis and in total than any other country in the world. The only countries with incarceration rates anywhere close to ours are places like Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other wonderful places like that...and the others sharing the top ten spot with us are all a good bit behind us with incarceration rates in the 400's to 600's per hundred thousand range. All this locking people up entirely unprecedented in this country. There is nothing conservative about it. It is costing us a fortune, and you want to kick it up several notches?

I cannot imagine how we would ever try all the criminal cases we get. The caseload in the criminal justice system is staggering as it is. Even only trying about 2.5% of the cases those of us working in the system have more work than we can handle. The dockets are so full it takes us months and months to ever get a courtroom for a trial. If we couldn't plea bargain our cases, there would have to be several more courtrooms built even in my small town. We'd have to hire several more judges, bailiffs, court reporters, clerks, security personnel, prosecutors and staff to help them, public defenders and staff to help them, and on and on and on. The cost would be astronomical. Citizens would revolt because every time they turned around they'd be being called in for jury duty.

People have just gone prison crazy in the last twenty-five years or so. I don't know what the hell people are thinking. Prison isn't worth a flip for doing anything but keeping the really bad people off the streets and away from the rest for a while. The problem is that we put so many in nowadays that we have to keep letting them all out earlier and earlier because we just cannot afford to keep building more and more prisons. In many cases we aren't able to keep the really dangerous people in prison nearly long enough because we are always having to make room for the new guys. It's crazy. We are spinning our wheels and blowing a fortune in the process. People need to understand that prison is a limited resource and we need to wise up and make the best possible use of it.

[vin-one]

yup, Cops always have the best stuff......

[philman_36]

It figures -- the government can't even grow a weed right.
First - It is an herb, not a weed.
Second - They can grow it right. The problem is that they grow "dirt weed", and plenty of it.
(hey, give 'em credit where credit is due)

[philman_36]

...who would be surprised to find the government say "our research shows pot isn't a good medicine" while only allowing research on the worst stuff it can come up with?
BUMP!

[philman_36]

Seriously, if this guy thinks the government grown marijuana is too weak then he is a serious smoker.
Put down the Kool Aid and step away from the pitcher.
I'll help bring you up to speed...
MEDICAL MARIJUANA RESEARCHERS BUMMED ABOUT POOR MISSISSIPPI POT QUALITY Denver Rocky Mountain News (pro and con on potency)
Pot researchers say government weed is weak (AP-at the very bottom)

Study Shows Therapeutic Benefits, No Adverse Effects in Long-Term Marijuana Users
DRUG WAR BRIEFS:Feds' Marijuana Inferior May 22, 2002 (yes, that's three years ago boys and girls)
After waiting years for approval to do research on marijuanas medicinal properties, researchers in San Mateo, CA, report that the federal governments marijuana supply, grown at the University of Mississippi, is of inferior quality.
Associated Press reports: In the world of high-grade marijuana, sticks, seeds and stems are not welcome ingredients. Medical marijuana researchers said they found such cannabis chaff among pot from a government farm, and say their patients deserve kinder buds.
I can get some more if you'd like...

[philman_36]

And to bring you up further to speed...
Craker's suit...Scientists File Suit Claiming Feds Are Obstructing Marijuana Research

Hey Wolfie, ya just gotta love #43 in the above pdf!
Anything that Kerry and Kennedy both support has got to be horrible.

[philman_36]

"Stuck
on
Stupid"
>>snicker<< You're "sending out an SOS".

[publiusF27]

Interesting post. Do you have a source for this part?

We arrest more people now than at any point in our history. We incarcerate more people than we ever have, on a per captita basis and in total. Prior to 1980, our per capita incarceration rate had never been higher than 137 per 100,000 in state and federal prisons. The old record had been set in 1939, but for most of the twentieth century our incarceration rate hovered around 100 per 100,000, sometimes less, sometimes more, but it rarely ever topped 120 per hundred thousand. Today it is 486 per 100,000. If you count those in jails along with those in prisons, it goes on up to 726 per 100,000. This is the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. We now have more people behind bars on a per capita basis and in total than any other country in the world. The only countries with incarceration rates anywhere close to ours are places like Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other wonderful places like that...and the others sharing the top ten spot with us are all a good bit behind us with incarceration rates in the 400's to 600's per hundred thousand range. All this locking people up entirely unprecedented in this country. There is nothing conservative about it.

[TKDietz]

I did that post all from memory as my computer with all of my saved links died. I'm working with a new PC and will have to pull these up as I go so I might not be able to find all my sources without spending more time than I have, but I'll give you what I can.

Number and rate per 100,000 of prisoners in state and federal prisons from 1925 through 2004:

http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t6282004.pdf

Incarceration rate for jails and state and federal prisons combined (note: I've seen from government sources the incarceration rate listed as 726 and 724 per 100,000, not sure which is correct):

http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t6132004.pdf

Number of adults in jails, prison, on probation or parole from 1980 to 2004:

http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t612004.pdf

"Prisoners in 2004," short USDJ Bureau of Justice report with all sorts of data on incarceration rates, national and state by state, race and other demographics of prisoners, types of offenses, etc.:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p04.pdf

International incarceration rates:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/r188.pdf

*This is a 2003 government report from the UK. I've seen better but don't have time to keep looking. You can get the basic stats from the first page, no need to dig through all the volumes of information. Note how they say their incarceration rate of 139 per 100,000 in 2003 was the highest among the countries in the European Union.

[TKDietz]

Here is what appears to be a newer list. You have to click on the "World Prison Brief" link and then click "Highest to Lowest Rates." Then you can choose to look at prison populations by country or have it listed by incarceration rates per country. The list appears to have the latest available data. According to this list, one of the countries I listed as being in the top ten with respect to incarceration rates, Kazakhstan, has now dropped to number 24. The others I mentioned are still in the top ten and we are still number one by a good margin. Note that the "Prison Population Totals" list shows China as having the second highest total number of people incarcerated at 1,548,498, compared to well over 2 million incarcerated in the U.S. China has over a billion people, we have something like 280 million. No other countries have a million or more people incarcerated. Russia has a little over 800,000 incarcerated, Brazil a little over 330,000, India a little over 322,000, Mexico slightly over 201,000 and the rest of the countries in the world listed have under 200,000 incarcerated. From what I have read about 25% of the people incarcerated in the world are incarcerated right here in the land of the free where less than 5% of the world's population lives.

http://www.prisonstudies.org/

[publiusF27]

Thanks! I was finding some material, but it seemed a great deal of it was dated, and I had to wade through lots of lefty garbage to get to some of it.