Not exactly, but it's pretty bad. Here's the thing. There are two kinds of legal systems in the US, the civil system and the criminal justice system. In crimin

Not exactly, but it's pretty bad. Here's the thing. There are two kinds of legal systems in the US, the civil system and the criminal justice system. In criminal justice there are tons and tons of protections for the rights of individuals, right to legal counsel, right to face your accusers, right of a jury trial, presumption of innocence, and very importantly the requirement that a trial find you guilty "beyond reasonable doubt" in order to mete out a sentence. In civil law a lot of that doesn't exist (the lowest rung being small claims court) and most importantly the requirement for a conviction is merely a "preponderance of the evidence" standard, meaning that it's more likely than not that the defendant committed the crime (i.e. 50 + epsilon percent chance). The kicker is that with civil forfeiture laws the accused is not a person, no individual has to be found guilty of a criminal offense, the accused is an item, a piece of property. This neatly skirts a lot of the protections of the constitution and civil law. The basic idea is that if you pull over Jim Bob on a country road and you take ten thousand dollars off his person you don't need to put Jim Bob on trial in criminal court and convict him to take any of his stuff, instead you can put the ten thousand dollars on trial in civil court and assess whether there was a greater than even odds that it was in some way involved in a crime (typically drug dealing) and then when a judge says "sure enough, that seems likely" you take that money and you use it to pad out the operating budget of your police agency. Seems ridiculous but it's been a major aspect of the "War on Drugs" for over 3 decades now. Consider, for example, this court case, the United States Versus $124,700 in US Currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U.S._Currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U... This sort of thing happens on a regular basis day in day out. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods and cash are seized every year in the US. And yes, it does sound like a police state. The War on Drugs has been one of the most extreme erosions of rights and liberties in the entire history of the US.