You and I have the power to end the drug war without begging politicians to repeal or amend existing law, no matter how large the incentive is for police, banks, drug cartels, and politicians to keep it running.
How to end the drug war - Jury Nullification
The keys are in a little known right called Jury Nullification that anyone who sits on a jury can use to protect those who are being oppressed by bad law such as the war on drugs.
At it's root, it comes down to your right to vote Guilty or Not Guilty no matter what your reasons are.
Even if someone is obviously guilty of the charges brought against them, you can vote Not Guilty.
This effectively is a vote against the law itself.
How can this end the war on drugs?
If people in government cannot get a jury to convict people on drug charges they will eventually be forced to stop arresting and trying them.
The lower the conviction rate becomes, the less the financial incentive to keep up the war on drugs becomes.
How to use jury nullification as a juror
Be available for jury selection
- Potential jurors are normally pulled by voter registration records. This means that you will likely need to register to vote in order to be called for jury duty.
- Check your local regulations if in doubt
Once called for jury duty:
- Make no mention that you know anything at all about jury nullification. If you mention it, you will not be selected to be on the jury.
- Answer the jury tampering (er, Voir Dire) questions like any average man or woman and hope to get picked.
Once selected to sit on the jury:
- Do not mention jury nullification. Doing so could have you up against the law depending on the initial questions asked when you were being chosen for jury selection.
- No matter the evidence, vote not guilty.
Does jury nullification undermine the law?
Realistically, it only undermines bad law.
Do you believe any of the following are a defense against bad law and will come to your rescue?
- Honest Judges
- Honest Lawyers
- Honest Politicians
I don't and you probably shouldn't either.
How to use jury nullification as a defendant
The only way to use jury nullification as a defendant is to represent yourself.
No lawyer is going to risk losing their license by telling a jury about nullification.
How NJ Weedman avoided prison for drug charges:
Better than plea bargaining?
The probably depends on where you live and whether or note you can get the jury to warm up to you or not.
Why end the war on drugs?
In addition to ruining countless lives, the drug war has cost us, as a people, over 1 trillion dollars.
Check drugsense.org to see current spending so far this year.
And for what? To see that, let us see who is harmed and what the pentalities are.
I'll use findlaw for most of the definitions here and famm.org for federal mandatory minimum penalties, many of which are higher for different states.
Possession of a controlled substance
Definition:
Possession can include:
- Having a controlled substance on you
- Knowingly having a controlled substance in your home, place of work, car, or elsewhere.
- Unknowingly having a controlled substance in your home, place of work, car, or elsewhere if people believe you should have known about it.
Penalties:
Manditory minimums kick in when you have enough for it to be called intent to distribute (see below).
Who is harmed?
No one.
Intent to distribute
Definition:
Since one cannot be in someone elses mind, this typically is defined as possessing more of a particular substance than one should have for personal use.
Note that this can become a charge even if you have only a very small amount of a prohibited drug.
Penalties:
These primarily depend on how much you have and what type of drug you have.
- 5 years - 1st offence and only a small amount of a drug
- 10 years - 1st offence and a good amount of a drug
- 20 years to life - 2nd+ offence
Who is harmed?
No one.
If someone is harmed, then mandatory penalties tend to double.
What about the children!
If people are selling to children and the children get hurt you can go after them for negligence, wrongful death, or whatever else the actual crime is. No drug laws needed.
If you worry about your kids trying to buy drugs, you might want to educate them. Kids aren't stupid.
Insanity
Does it make any sense to throw someone in a cell for years (or for life!) because they had some drugs on them?
Costs of the drug war
In addition to direct spending by government agencies, there are a number of other costs that many people don't consider.
Prison Costs - 1 billion dollars per year + 300,000 jailed
According to the Vera institute of justice, in 2010 the average annual cost to tax payers for keeping someone in jail was $31,286 per inmate.
This doesn't account for the cost of police and court personnel needed to arrest, try, and convict drug users, which would likely triple that number.
So, as a tax payer, are you willing to pay over 30 to 90 thousand dollars each year to keep someone in a cell for using, buying, or selling drugs?
Keep in mind that with 330,000+ drug offenders in prison (about 1% of the population), even at 30k per year we are talking about paying $990,000,000 (almost 1 billion per year) just to keep these people in cells.
Asset forfeiture - 5 billion dollars stolen per year
According to this article on washington post, police took more property from american citizens in 2014 than burglars did, totaling over $5,000,000,000 (thats 5 billion).
When the police can take your stuff without even charging you with a crime, you can expect that there are more than a few innocent victims that have been framed with drug crimes simply to bolster budgets.
Other costs
When considering costs, you should also consider the cost of having someone labeled as a convict to both them and their families.
If these people couldn't have been convicted of an actual crime that caused someone else provable harm, then do you really believe that they...
- should be jailed
- lose their property
- become unable to get a decent job
Instead of Drug Laws
Wouldn't it be a lot saner to simply go after criminals, letting people know that being high on drugs is no defense against committing a crime?
No help from politicians
The war on drugs will not end by changing or repealing laws unless a huge portion of the population not only becomes aware of what is going on, but gets off of their butts and starts protesting or refusing to elect anyone that is for it.
The financial incentive is too great
Those perpetuating the drug war make billions of dollars annually by doing so.
This means there are huge special interests (police forces, jail systems, courts, and a variety of government contractors) that will do whatever they can to keep it going.
Political suicide
Coming out and stating that you want to repeal all drug laws will quickly get you labeled as a crazy in the media, meaning that doing so is generally akin to political suicide.
Even if there were non-crooked politicians out there willing to do what is right, they would be out of politics quickly by taking such a stance
One major hurdle
Drug offense sentences these days are so large that most people will take a plea rather than face even the minimum federal sentence, making it so that those running the drug war can often skip the trial process completely.
I don't know of any good solution to this, but I'd be willing to bet that if we stopped convicting then more people would start demanding a trial.
For the record
I'm neither a regular drug user nor a dealer. I just feel that these laws are wrongfully ruining peoples lives.
Image Credits:
All images are copyright their respective copyright holders. Notes on where they were found are under each image.