• Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    drugs are a major part of a lot of peoples lives

    marijuana is and has always been effectively legal. think of how many people you know that smoke every day. how many of them have actually been busted? the laws against marijuana were never about stopping people from smoking marijuana. they’re about making something tons of people do illegal so that they can:

    1. investigate, harass and disrupt inconvenient people whenever they want to for suspicion of doing something the majority of people do

    2. tack on additional charges and jailtime in order to funnel more profits to private prisons and the major orgs that contract out prison slave labor

    • jasory@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      “Marijuana is and has already been effectively legal”

      Absolutely. The war on drugs failed, not because of abuses of police or that it’s impossible to ban products. But because Americans love drugs and has always culturally permitted it’s use. The reason why countries like Singapore don’t have drug problems is cultural suppression, in addition to draconian laws.

      The rest of your comment is irrelevant conspiracism. Prison labor and private facilities comprise zilch to the US economy (billions sounds large until you realize that the US economy is on the order of 20 trillion), infact many people are released specifically because it is cheaper.

      Marijuana use additionally increased with cultural acceptance, it wasn’t illegalised when it would actually have been an effective way to hassle innocents.