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The Difficulty of Untraining Drug Dogs How to Smell Marijuana

93 points by matt4077 9y ago

aphextron 9y ago
>What are we going to do about all of the victims of the Drug War sitting in jail while weed entrepreneurs make bank amid the Green Rush? This is one of the particularly nasty bits of hypocrisy our society has allowed to flourish over the past decade. We now have a situation where (almost exclusively rich white men) are making millions of dollars selling legal marijuana on an industrial scale, as red state prisons sit full of petty dime bag dealers (overwhelmingly people of color) doing decades of hard time for something that is not even a crime a few hundred miles away.
- leopoldo 9y ago
  That's a tough one. And I think these sentences need to be reviewed and some of them revoked. However, the underlying problem was that these people who are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment. Their sentences need to be revised, but it's probably not something I'd exonerate from all guilt. According to the Ex Post Facto law [1] definition, a court could issue amnesties or pardons for scenarios like this, but I don't think it would be an automatic process over all convictions. >> Disclaimer: IANAL [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
  - jonreem 9y ago
    I believe it is morally wrong to keep people imprisoned for actions that are now legal, especially given the viciousness of our penal system. This is a great injustice of our time.
    - sturadnidge 9y ago
      If you commit a legal act today that becomes illegal in the future, is it reasonable to be retrospectively convicted? 2 sides of the same coin.
      - k3d 9y ago
        It's absolutely fatuous to assume that this has to be a symmetrical relationship. No inherent contradiction exists between the two statements.
      - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
        Not the "same coin" at all. See "lex mitior": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
      - jonreem 9y ago
        If you simply follow the basic compassionate principle that you should lock up as few people as necessary for as short a time as necessary to maintain the law then the answers are obvious for both cases: If someone committed an act which was illegal at the time and is now legal, they should be freed. If someone committed an act which was legal at the time and it is now illegal, they should not be prosecuted. They're not two sides of the same coin at all. EDIT: This compassionate principle is known as "lex mitior", which simply means that you should apply the mildest version of the law (from the perspective of the accused) in these cases. This is also in line with the widely accepted innocent-until-proven-guilty principle.
      - pizza 9y ago
        Not the same. > Congress is prohibited from passing ex post facto laws by clause 3 of Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...
        sturadnidge 9y ago
        That is not the case in UK however, which is where I'm drawing my (outlier, going by Wikipedia) experience.
        pizza 9y ago
        Fair enough, that's pretty interesting actually
  - dogbreath 9y ago
    > people who are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment But consider that their actions are the reason why marijuana is becoming legal. The public sentiment against the War on Drugs is partly or mostly due to outrage the public felt at long sentences for possessing or dealing in marijuana. The people who did the most to get the laws overturned (even though they did it unwittingly) do not benefit from the changes. Everyone should benefit from the relaxed laws going forward except for the people who suffered to make it possible?
  - sp332 9y ago
    Marijuana was explicitly prosecuted [edit: criminalized] more aggressively to target certain groups of people. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich... The laws were never just and that's why the "criminals" should be exonerated.
    - irrational 9y ago
      Why did you put criminals in quotes? Even if you don't agree with the law, breaking the law makes one a criminal. Of course probably everyone is a criminal. Who hasn't jaywalked, gone over the speed limit, killed a neighbor's pet, done remodeling without permits, etc.?
      - jdblair 9y ago
        I haven't killed a neighbor's pet. Is that a common infraction?
        johnsonjo 9y ago
        Well I know a couple of pets I’ve had have been ran over by drivers. Possibly that is what he is implying.
      - merinowool 9y ago
        Not if the law is corrupt. Would you call people who "committed" same sex intercourse criminals if the place they did it had such laws that it was a "crime" to do so? What about people of which presence was declared unlawful because of their race and administered death penalty on the spot?
        freedomben 9y ago
        Should that maxim become universal standard, I don't know that we would be better. I think you could make a case that at some level, every single law is corrupt, especially if we allow for relativism (every law will be in someone's opinion, corrupt). The word loses all meaning at that point.
  - anonytrary 9y ago
    > are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment. "Sorry, we weren't enlightened 20 years ago, so you're going to stay in jail" is an embarrassing cop-out. This is a systematic flaw in the legal system, and is unjustified. If it took decades to figure out that marijuana was wrongfully illegal, then those persecuted under such a law should be removed from incarceration at once. How can it be any other way? This is common sense. Keeping people in prison for actions now known to be harmless is a terrible and embarrassing flaw in moral structure.
    - jstarfish 9y ago
      Maybe if a law is found outright unconstitutional, sure, exonerate those who are serving time for it. This isn't the case with marijuana. No conclusion has been reached that it is "wrongfully illegal," it's just not something we want to continue prosecuting for. This does not excuse the actions of those currently in prison for drug offenses-- we aren't punishing them because marijuana is/was illegal, we're punishing them because they decided they didn't have to abide by the law at the time it existed.
      - anonytrary 9y ago
        > we're punishing them because they decided they didn't have to abide by the law at the time it existed. Should we punish lawmakers for implementing oppressive laws which prevented good people from pursuing viable businesses? Why can't there be accountability in the reverse direction?
        another-one-off 9y ago
        We can't criminalise making mistakes, even if it is lawmakers who are making them. I see wisdom in a general amnesty for light drug crimes if it is decriminalised; but it isn't like there is a double standard being applied here. This is how a fair legal system works - the consequences of your actions are clearly known when you act, and you face the consequences of your actions once the legal system catches up to you.
  - merinowool 9y ago
    Given that: Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman told a journalist that the main purpose of the War on Drugs was to attack Nixon's "enemies" and that they knew the WOD was based on lies about drugs: > "You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on-drugs-how-president-nixon-tied-addiction-to-crime/254319/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on... I think those people should not only be exonerated, but also treated as victims of Nixon corrupt politics and given hefty compensation. Advocating for the War on drugs should be a criminal offence.
    - RaceWon 9y ago
      90% of the world's heroin supply is from the Poppy fields in Afghanistan, and everyone knows where those fields are. Do we (the USA) destroy those plants in our Drug War efforts... nah. Some reports say US troops even guard them.
      - acct1771 9y ago
        Many reports.
        RaceWon 9y ago
        I believe it was in the book "Everything We Had" (although I am not certain of the source, because I read about it a while ago) that the only reason we were in Nam, was so the CIA could protect the Poppy plants which they needed to fund their Black Ops.
        nyolfen 9y ago
  - sturadnidge 9y ago
    Ex post facto applies both ways - you can do something legal today and be punished in the future if it becomes illegal (UK tax law has some good examples of this). It would be inconsistent to say past crimes should be revoked if the law changes, but present legal acts cannot be retrospectively classed as illegal if the law changes in the future. That's a contradiction I'm sure many people operate under however (myself included). I am also not a lawyer :)
    - rubidium 9y ago
      Ex post facto is not required to operate the same way for new laws vs laws being removed. In fact, there are good reasons for when criminal laws are changed to automatically review people prosecuted under them. The law was made for people, people weren't made for the law.
      - sturadnidge 9y ago
        Sure, but in terms of consistency they are 2 sides of the same coin.
        doesnt_know 9y ago
        There doesn't appear to be any law of physics or higher power that enforces us to make these two things consistent, why would you assume they have to be?
        DonHopkins 9y ago
        In terms of consistency, time should be able to flow in either direction. But it doesn't, apparently.
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        Yeah just like rich people are forbidden to sleep under bridges and eat from the garbage, absolutely consistent.
    - poizan42 9y ago
      So what you are saying is that symmetric ex post facto is more important than people's freedom?
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Would you hold the same position if instead of being imprisoned for drugs, they were imprisoned for homosexuality or marrying someone of a different race?
  - OrganicMSG 9y ago
    Depends on what you view the law for. Personally I think the law is a tool that acts as a proxy for group morality, and is useful as much as it serves that aim. The law itself is not sacrosanct and can be wrong, which is why we revise it. Under this view, those who broke a law we then get rid of should be released, as we have agreed that the law was wrong, we also have agreed that they were right. If the law itself is not put on a pedestal, then if the law was wrong then those people who broke it should also no longer be regarded as criminals as we are simultaneously admitting that it was also wrong to have labelled them as such in the first place.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    The obvious answer to this is: change the law. Do whatever is necessary to enable the bureaucracy to remove all drug related charges from a persons record.
- pitaj 9y ago
  The states have unilaterally decided to legalize while pushing extensive regulation on the market. This raises the barrier to entry and has resulted in those who can afford to comply, primarily white businessmen, coming out on top. In places like California, these regulations have resulted in the black market continuing to exist en force.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- charleyma 9y ago
  Would love to see more direct sources/citations, but I thought this reddit thread on what happened to victims jailed to be interesting, most of those individuals still had to serve out their time as the law was repealed vs being ruled unconstitutional https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37yzhw/when_prohibition_was_repealed_did_they_just/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37yzhw/when_...
- avs733 9y ago
  The problem is that for the people with the power (on all sides...) this is largely a feature not a bug.
- Latteland 9y ago
  Seattle has started to cancel old convictions. https://mashable.com/2018/04/28/seattle-throw-out-marijuana-convictions/#ls6H78KsViqr https://mashable.com/2018/04/28/seattle-throw-out-marijuana-...
- currymj 9y ago
  Massachusetts will give priority in getting licenses to marijuana retailers that employ people with prior drug convictions. additionally, if the owners (or immediate family members) themselves have drug convictions there is assistance with taxes, accounting, and so on along with help soliciting investment. a lot of this also applies, with slight differences, to people regardless of conviction history who have lived for a long time in "areas of disproportionate impact". i hope these provisions succeed in their goals and become the norm for other states that want to legalize cannabis. see here: https://www.mass.gov/news/press-release-12122017-cannabis-control-commission-continues-public-policy-discussion https://www.mass.gov/news/press-release-12122017-cannabis-co...
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    I'd argue the correct thing to do is wipe all criminal records clean of drug related convictions, and do all the good things in your comment.
    - lopmotr 9y ago
      I would too but does this happen with other crimes when the law changes? I would hope it's automatically applied for everything that becomes legal. Being convicted of a drug crime isn't more unjust than for having gay sex or drinking alcohol.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        Here’s at least one example where a progressive modern democracy agrees with your point: http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-11/criminal-convictions-for-homosexual-acts-in-queensland-quashed/9037076 http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-11/criminal-conviction...
    - NicoJuicy 9y ago
      They did break the law though, the entrepreneurs jumped the wagon when it was legal. There is another big difference and it's taxes.
- pugworthy 9y ago
  This is a pretty popular item to bring to these discussions. I'd be interested in seeing some actual statistics though as to number of those incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes. I'm not questioning one way or the other, but I'd like to see some statistics to better understand this.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Some simple numbers courtesy of the ACLU[1] "Marijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana." So that's 7.2 million arrests simply for possession. In 2010 police arrested someone for weed-related things every 37 seconds. However it is important to note that an arrest is not a conviction. Most are fined or are placed into community supervision. About 40,000 inmates of state and federal prison have a current conviction involving marijuana. That's a lot, and there are likely a lot more that ended up in prison due to problems with having an arrest record (that should also be wiped imo) so that is a lower limit but the point is that overall - even without a ton of active prisoners there is still a massive effect of all those arrests. Also it's worth noting that black people are nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for these things even though usage rates are the same across races. [1] https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers
  - OrganicMSG 9y ago
    I know that this is not a good sample by any means, but from my own life thus far here in the UK as someone with a middle class accent and pale skin tone, who smokes a bit of pot and these days stay out of trouble, however used to get exceedingly drunk and got into numerous stupid drunk incidents in public, I have been held in police station cells 6 times and officially cautioned twice. 2 of the times in the station were alcohol related, everything else is weed from stop and search. One thing to note, as soon as I opened my mouth in each incident, there was no further threat from the police of taking it to court, despite me having no decent legal representation. Sounding posh goes very far with the police here.
  - iguy 9y ago
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Change the law. Marijuana is illegal everywhere in the US. Weed growers exist and make millions only because the DOJ has chosen to exercise discretion, which they can stop doing at any time. When it’s actually legalized, nobody will be making money, as it’s an agricultural commodity that is pretty easy to grow. In terms of justice for those who are incarcerated, all governors have pardon powers, and legislatures have the power to take actions as they deem appropriate. It is a political problem.
  - rileymat2 9y ago
    I am not sure no one will make money if legalized, tobacco companies have a history of profitability.
  - freedomben 9y ago
    Growing weed may be easy, but it isn't that easy. Marijuana is a lot pickier about grow conditions than most people think (if you want a quality product at least. Crap weed is much easier to grow). It also takes several months from seed to being smoke/edible-making ready. Just the harvesting and curing process alone is a massive PITA. There will always be a market for quality grown weed, just as much as you buy produce at the grocery store.
    - ModernMech 9y ago
      Not only that, but the extracts are one of the most popular form. Then there's profit to be made in pipes, vapes, accessories, etc. Can't grow those.
  - gowld 9y ago
    You are conflating legalized with deragulated.
    - Spooky23 9y ago
      Nope. At the federal level it is very much still illegal. Many states decriminalize or legalize use or possession. The dispensary or grow operations are a different story.
- khhh35575544 9y ago
  If you can't do the time...
- xrange 9y ago
  > red state prisons sit full of petty dime bag dealers Does anyone know where to get at the raw statistics for this kind of information? So that we can figure out how many prisoners there are in red states vs. blue states for marijuana possession?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ralusek 9y ago
  The legal repercussion for getting involved in selling Marijuana at industrial scale has diminished substantially within certain avenues. Nobody is preventing or encouraging anybody from a particular race to capitalize off of that opportunity. There is nothing hypocritical at work whatsoever. The activity has become less and less criminal, so people with a lower threshold for criminal repercussion have become more involved as the threshold lowers. What is hypocritical about that? It's like saying that it's hypocritical that people who drank when prohibition was active were in jail, and then people who drank after it was repealed were not in jail. I fail to see the hypocrisy. I also fail to see where race comes into play.
  - gboudrias 9y ago
    Your way of viewing things is so foreign to me (and I'm a foreigner so makes sense I guess). I think prisons should be all about rehabilitation. If you crime is selling drugs, and selling drugs is no longer something we train people out of... What's the point of staying in prison? Race does come into play as well, because your argument seems to be that it's "fair" that these people are still imprisoned. But by and large, they were set up by a society that left them few other choices, which is far from fair. Refusing to release them is tantamount to denying the error of our past ways. It was always a trap, ever since the lies that enabled marijuana prohibition in the first place.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - ryanlol 9y ago
    >I also fail to see where race comes into play. This is what the advocates of racist policy always say. Enforcement is where race comes into play, you don’t see it because you don’t care. Otherwise it’s very hard to miss.
    - ralusek 9y ago
      It's not hard to miss if you don't bother to get beyond "systemic racism" as a justifiable and primary explanation for the disparity in racial outcomes. If you are interested in a more wholistic understanding, then you should be aware that it, like most social phenomenon, is very complicated. You hear things like "crack carries a much heavier sentencing than powder cocaine, because crack is done by black people and powder cocaine is done by white people." It sounds like it might be a racist policy, but it simply is not. First of all, the drugs are not demographically comparable. Crack is a street drug, cocaine is a white collar and party drug. There are vastly differing levels of criminality surrounding them. Crystal meth, a drug much more comparable socio-economically to crack cocaine, not only carries the exact same federal sentencing as crack, but is predominately done by white people. Another might be if you look at the different rates of incarceration for drug offenses by racial breakdown. Black people and hispanics are clearly over-represented as compared with their representation of the population. They are also, however, over-represented in their involvement in drug criminality. That isn't to say that their level of criminality is exactly proportional to their over-representation, because they do get incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates, but it is important. Where the disproportionality manifests can be found in statistics that while entirely true, often make no attempt at controlling for location or socioeconomic factors. For example, black people with identical drug usage as white people for something like Marijuana encounter much higher rates of incarceration. It sounds racist, but, surprise, is complicated. Geographically and socioeconomically, there are massive differences in average black and average white distributions. Black Americans tend to have disproportionately higher representation in heavily policed urban areas, white Americans tend to have disproportionately higher representation in suburban areas. The extent to which this is motivated by racist policy is also, as is expected, very complicated, but should not be conflated with differing outcomes in criminality and arrests. If you want to go over specific statistics, I'm happy to, but I don't find the explanation that systems are just inherently racist to be a satisfactory explanation for complicated problems, because systems that are inherently racist have trivially simple solutions. We are not dealing with the Civil Rights Movement 2.0.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  > We now have a situation where (almost exclusively rich white men) are making millions of dollars selling legal marijuana on an industrial scale, as red state prisons sit full of petty dime bag dealers (overwhelmingly people of color) doing decades of hard time for something that is not even a crime a few hundred miles away. While I am supportive of freeing low level nonviolent offenders and sealing their records, I think the insinuation here that those locked up somehow deserve the profits from the new industry is silly. Running a black market business is very different from running a real business. Look at what's happening in Humboldt county to see that just because the product is the same the business is not.
jhowell 9y ago
Maybe they can become companions to people who get out of prison once their marijuana convictions are tossed.
- leopoldo 9y ago
  Imagine the dog going bananas every time his owner tries to smoke a joint.
  - freedomben 9y ago
    As long as smoke-time includes a fun ball or toy for the dog, he'd be in heaven. They love the smell of weed cause it means a reward.
jey 9y ago
> cocaine is odorless until its fermented in a human environment What does this even mean?
- delecti 9y ago
  From context it seems to mean that cocaine itself isn't detectable, but that a person who has consumed cocaine can be detectable by odor. I can't find anything backing that up though.
  - rconti 9y ago
    and I don't see how drug dogs trained this way would help detect cocaine in, say, a suitcase, vs a person who had used cocaine but was carrying none with them.
  - adrusi 9y ago
    That's how i read it at first, but it could also be that cocaine goes through fermentation during it's extraction, and that if that's done near human settlements, air pollution contaminates the final product, making it detectable.
- rhombocombus 9y ago
  it sounds like unsubstantiated nonsense. Cocaine, like many chemicals, has a particular odor.
  - sp332 9y ago
    -
    - 8_hours_ago 9y ago
      Only if it is ingested.
  - marshray 9y ago
    I'd love to see a dog detect the odor of an undoped polycrystalline silicon wafer.
kentt 9y ago
I was under the impression that drug dogs we're mostly ineffective[1] anyway so this shouldn't be an issue. I guess this article would imply I'm misinformed. I'd welcome correction. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/04/federal-appeals-court-drug-dog-thats-barely-more-accurate-than-a-coin-flip-is-good-enough/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f4481f79bd6e https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/04/...
- exelius 9y ago
  Drug dogs don’t need to be effective; they just need to establish probable cause.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    That is to say, drug dogs are extremely effective, it’s just that their job is different from what their name might make you think. As long as it doesn’t result in evidence being thrown out, a drug dog that alerts when drugs aren’t present is a feature, not a bug, for the police.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    To put an even finer point on it, drug dogs don't need to establish probable cause, and they don't, they just provide a back door around the 4th Amendment.
    - exelius 9y ago
      Legally they check the box, which is the important part.
    - greenleafjacob 9y ago
      Yes drug dogs need to establish probable cause, that is how they meet the requirements of the fourth amendment.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 9y ago
wollstonecraft 9y ago
Dogs are actually trained to always "signal" the handler. You can't swear a dog in under oath- instant probable cause.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  Yeah, I assumed this was the standard mode of operation -- when officers are "sure" there are drugs, then bring in the dog as an "impartial observer" to show probable cause since everyone knows that dogs don't lie. Unless, of course, they are signaled to lie by their handler.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
darkstar999 9y ago
> You can’t retrain dogs when it comes to marijuana,” adds James Woodford, a forensic chemist who created and patented the odor of cocaine that serves as the industry standard when it comes to training dogs to sniff out the substance. That sounds like a fun job... I wonder how he did his research?
- ralusek 9y ago
  He doesn't like cocaine, he just really likes the way it smells.
firmgently 9y ago
Considering that laws are 'supposed to be' part of the structure that helps society be pleasant/bearable for its members... On the one hand you have people who inhale smoke from a burning plant despite there being a law against doing so. On the other hand you have people who want to lock a human being in a cage, sometimes for the majority of their lives, because of the abstract notion that they 'broke a law'; no matter what that law was or whether it's reasonable or justified. I know which kind of person I'd rather be surrounded by in society. Seeing the way people toss around the concept of incarceration so lightly is somewhere between monstrous and disgusting to me.
- HumanHater 9y ago
  While smoking marijuana is victimless crime selling it is certainly not. There are a lot of laws one might need to break to successfully sell drugs. Also a lot of convicts financially supported Mexican cartels and bear some responsibility for their crimes. At the end of the day they new all the risks, chose to play this game to make fast easy money, and they lost. It is like casino where you could win $5M or lose and spend 5 years in prison. Now letting the winners to keep the money but let losers go would not be exactly fair.
  - ryanlol 9y ago
    >Also a lot of convicts financially supported Mexican cartels and bear some responsibility for their crimes. Lawmakers created the Mexican cartels, and therefore bear most of the responsibility for their crimes? >letting the winners to keep the money but let losers go would not be exactly fair. Frankly it feels that you care much less about fairness than you care about enforcing terrible laws.
squozzer 9y ago
I am not sure retraining is necessary. Even in states where weed is legal, they probably want to clamp down on "illegal" (untaxed) weed. No one has to go to jail or even lose their stash - I expect a fine would suffice. That pushes the question as to whether "regular" law enforcement would involve itself in weed searches or if a state revenue department would handle it. Moonshiners might have a useful perspective on this.

93 points by matt4077 9y ago

>What are we going to do about all of the victims of the Drug War sitting in jail while weed entrepreneurs make bank amid the Green Rush? This is one of the particularly nasty bits of hypocrisy our society has allowed to flourish over the past decade. We now have a situation where (almost exclusively rich white men) are making millions of dollars selling legal marijuana on an industrial scale, as red state prisons sit full of petty dime bag dealers (overwhelmingly people of color) doing decades of hard time for something that is not even a crime a few hundred miles away.

leopoldo 9y ago
That's a tough one. And I think these sentences need to be reviewed and some of them revoked. However, the underlying problem was that these people who are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment. Their sentences need to be revised, but it's probably not something I'd exonerate from all guilt. According to the Ex Post Facto law [1] definition, a court could issue amnesties or pardons for scenarios like this, but I don't think it would be an automatic process over all convictions. >> Disclaimer: IANAL [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
- jonreem 9y ago
  I believe it is morally wrong to keep people imprisoned for actions that are now legal, especially given the viciousness of our penal system. This is a great injustice of our time.
  - sturadnidge 9y ago
    If you commit a legal act today that becomes illegal in the future, is it reasonable to be retrospectively convicted? 2 sides of the same coin.
    - k3d 9y ago
      It's absolutely fatuous to assume that this has to be a symmetrical relationship. No inherent contradiction exists between the two statements.
    - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
      Not the "same coin" at all. See "lex mitior": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
    - jonreem 9y ago
      If you simply follow the basic compassionate principle that you should lock up as few people as necessary for as short a time as necessary to maintain the law then the answers are obvious for both cases: If someone committed an act which was illegal at the time and is now legal, they should be freed. If someone committed an act which was legal at the time and it is now illegal, they should not be prosecuted. They're not two sides of the same coin at all. EDIT: This compassionate principle is known as "lex mitior", which simply means that you should apply the mildest version of the law (from the perspective of the accused) in these cases. This is also in line with the widely accepted innocent-until-proven-guilty principle.
    - pizza 9y ago
      Not the same. > Congress is prohibited from passing ex post facto laws by clause 3 of Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...
      - sturadnidge 9y ago
        That is not the case in UK however, which is where I'm drawing my (outlier, going by Wikipedia) experience.
        pizza 9y ago
        Fair enough, that's pretty interesting actually
- dogbreath 9y ago
  > people who are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment But consider that their actions are the reason why marijuana is becoming legal. The public sentiment against the War on Drugs is partly or mostly due to outrage the public felt at long sentences for possessing or dealing in marijuana. The people who did the most to get the laws overturned (even though they did it unwittingly) do not benefit from the changes. Everyone should benefit from the relaxed laws going forward except for the people who suffered to make it possible?
- sp332 9y ago
  Marijuana was explicitly prosecuted [edit: criminalized] more aggressively to target certain groups of people. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich... The laws were never just and that's why the "criminals" should be exonerated.
  - irrational 9y ago
    Why did you put criminals in quotes? Even if you don't agree with the law, breaking the law makes one a criminal. Of course probably everyone is a criminal. Who hasn't jaywalked, gone over the speed limit, killed a neighbor's pet, done remodeling without permits, etc.?
    - jdblair 9y ago
      I haven't killed a neighbor's pet. Is that a common infraction?
      - johnsonjo 9y ago
        Well I know a couple of pets I’ve had have been ran over by drivers. Possibly that is what he is implying.
    - merinowool 9y ago
      Not if the law is corrupt. Would you call people who "committed" same sex intercourse criminals if the place they did it had such laws that it was a "crime" to do so? What about people of which presence was declared unlawful because of their race and administered death penalty on the spot?
      - freedomben 9y ago
        Should that maxim become universal standard, I don't know that we would be better. I think you could make a case that at some level, every single law is corrupt, especially if we allow for relativism (every law will be in someone's opinion, corrupt). The word loses all meaning at that point.
- anonytrary 9y ago
  > are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment. "Sorry, we weren't enlightened 20 years ago, so you're going to stay in jail" is an embarrassing cop-out. This is a systematic flaw in the legal system, and is unjustified. If it took decades to figure out that marijuana was wrongfully illegal, then those persecuted under such a law should be removed from incarceration at once. How can it be any other way? This is common sense. Keeping people in prison for actions now known to be harmless is a terrible and embarrassing flaw in moral structure.
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    Maybe if a law is found outright unconstitutional, sure, exonerate those who are serving time for it. This isn't the case with marijuana. No conclusion has been reached that it is "wrongfully illegal," it's just not something we want to continue prosecuting for. This does not excuse the actions of those currently in prison for drug offenses-- we aren't punishing them because marijuana is/was illegal, we're punishing them because they decided they didn't have to abide by the law at the time it existed.
    - anonytrary 9y ago
      > we're punishing them because they decided they didn't have to abide by the law at the time it existed. Should we punish lawmakers for implementing oppressive laws which prevented good people from pursuing viable businesses? Why can't there be accountability in the reverse direction?
      - another-one-off 9y ago
        We can't criminalise making mistakes, even if it is lawmakers who are making them. I see wisdom in a general amnesty for light drug crimes if it is decriminalised; but it isn't like there is a double standard being applied here. This is how a fair legal system works - the consequences of your actions are clearly known when you act, and you face the consequences of your actions once the legal system catches up to you.
- merinowool 9y ago
  Given that: Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman told a journalist that the main purpose of the War on Drugs was to attack Nixon's "enemies" and that they knew the WOD was based on lies about drugs: > "You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on-drugs-how-president-nixon-tied-addiction-to-crime/254319/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on... I think those people should not only be exonerated, but also treated as victims of Nixon corrupt politics and given hefty compensation. Advocating for the War on drugs should be a criminal offence.
  - RaceWon 9y ago
    90% of the world's heroin supply is from the Poppy fields in Afghanistan, and everyone knows where those fields are. Do we (the USA) destroy those plants in our Drug War efforts... nah. Some reports say US troops even guard them.
    - acct1771 9y ago
      Many reports.
      - RaceWon 9y ago
        I believe it was in the book "Everything We Had" (although I am not certain of the source, because I read about it a while ago) that the only reason we were in Nam, was so the CIA could protect the Poppy plants which they needed to fund their Black Ops.
        nyolfen 9y ago
- sturadnidge 9y ago
  Ex post facto applies both ways - you can do something legal today and be punished in the future if it becomes illegal (UK tax law has some good examples of this). It would be inconsistent to say past crimes should be revoked if the law changes, but present legal acts cannot be retrospectively classed as illegal if the law changes in the future. That's a contradiction I'm sure many people operate under however (myself included). I am also not a lawyer :)
  - rubidium 9y ago
    Ex post facto is not required to operate the same way for new laws vs laws being removed. In fact, there are good reasons for when criminal laws are changed to automatically review people prosecuted under them. The law was made for people, people weren't made for the law.
    - sturadnidge 9y ago
      Sure, but in terms of consistency they are 2 sides of the same coin.
      - doesnt_know 9y ago
        There doesn't appear to be any law of physics or higher power that enforces us to make these two things consistent, why would you assume they have to be?
      - DonHopkins 9y ago
        In terms of consistency, time should be able to flow in either direction. But it doesn't, apparently.
      - throwaway2048 9y ago
        Yeah just like rich people are forbidden to sleep under bridges and eat from the garbage, absolutely consistent.
  - poizan42 9y ago
    So what you are saying is that symmetric ex post facto is more important than people's freedom?
- mikeash 9y ago
  Would you hold the same position if instead of being imprisoned for drugs, they were imprisoned for homosexuality or marrying someone of a different race?
- OrganicMSG 9y ago
  Depends on what you view the law for. Personally I think the law is a tool that acts as a proxy for group morality, and is useful as much as it serves that aim. The law itself is not sacrosanct and can be wrong, which is why we revise it. Under this view, those who broke a law we then get rid of should be released, as we have agreed that the law was wrong, we also have agreed that they were right. If the law itself is not put on a pedestal, then if the law was wrong then those people who broke it should also no longer be regarded as criminals as we are simultaneously admitting that it was also wrong to have labelled them as such in the first place.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  The obvious answer to this is: change the law. Do whatever is necessary to enable the bureaucracy to remove all drug related charges from a persons record.
pitaj 9y ago
The states have unilaterally decided to legalize while pushing extensive regulation on the market. This raises the barrier to entry and has resulted in those who can afford to comply, primarily white businessmen, coming out on top. In places like California, these regulations have resulted in the black market continuing to exist en force.
- deleted 9y ago
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charleyma 9y ago
Would love to see more direct sources/citations, but I thought this reddit thread on what happened to victims jailed to be interesting, most of those individuals still had to serve out their time as the law was repealed vs being ruled unconstitutional https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37yzhw/when_prohibition_was_repealed_did_they_just/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37yzhw/when_...
avs733 9y ago
The problem is that for the people with the power (on all sides...) this is largely a feature not a bug.
Latteland 9y ago
Seattle has started to cancel old convictions. https://mashable.com/2018/04/28/seattle-throw-out-marijuana-convictions/#ls6H78KsViqr https://mashable.com/2018/04/28/seattle-throw-out-marijuana-...
currymj 9y ago
Massachusetts will give priority in getting licenses to marijuana retailers that employ people with prior drug convictions. additionally, if the owners (or immediate family members) themselves have drug convictions there is assistance with taxes, accounting, and so on along with help soliciting investment. a lot of this also applies, with slight differences, to people regardless of conviction history who have lived for a long time in "areas of disproportionate impact". i hope these provisions succeed in their goals and become the norm for other states that want to legalize cannabis. see here: https://www.mass.gov/news/press-release-12122017-cannabis-control-commission-continues-public-policy-discussion https://www.mass.gov/news/press-release-12122017-cannabis-co...
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  I'd argue the correct thing to do is wipe all criminal records clean of drug related convictions, and do all the good things in your comment.
  - lopmotr 9y ago
    I would too but does this happen with other crimes when the law changes? I would hope it's automatically applied for everything that becomes legal. Being convicted of a drug crime isn't more unjust than for having gay sex or drinking alcohol.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      Here’s at least one example where a progressive modern democracy agrees with your point: http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-11/criminal-convictions-for-homosexual-acts-in-queensland-quashed/9037076 http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-11/criminal-conviction...
  - NicoJuicy 9y ago
    They did break the law though, the entrepreneurs jumped the wagon when it was legal. There is another big difference and it's taxes.
pugworthy 9y ago
This is a pretty popular item to bring to these discussions. I'd be interested in seeing some actual statistics though as to number of those incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes. I'm not questioning one way or the other, but I'd like to see some statistics to better understand this.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Some simple numbers courtesy of the ACLU[1] "Marijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana." So that's 7.2 million arrests simply for possession. In 2010 police arrested someone for weed-related things every 37 seconds. However it is important to note that an arrest is not a conviction. Most are fined or are placed into community supervision. About 40,000 inmates of state and federal prison have a current conviction involving marijuana. That's a lot, and there are likely a lot more that ended up in prison due to problems with having an arrest record (that should also be wiped imo) so that is a lower limit but the point is that overall - even without a ton of active prisoners there is still a massive effect of all those arrests. Also it's worth noting that black people are nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for these things even though usage rates are the same across races. [1] https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers
- OrganicMSG 9y ago
  I know that this is not a good sample by any means, but from my own life thus far here in the UK as someone with a middle class accent and pale skin tone, who smokes a bit of pot and these days stay out of trouble, however used to get exceedingly drunk and got into numerous stupid drunk incidents in public, I have been held in police station cells 6 times and officially cautioned twice. 2 of the times in the station were alcohol related, everything else is weed from stop and search. One thing to note, as soon as I opened my mouth in each incident, there was no further threat from the police of taking it to court, despite me having no decent legal representation. Sounding posh goes very far with the police here.
- iguy 9y ago
Spooky23 9y ago
Change the law. Marijuana is illegal everywhere in the US. Weed growers exist and make millions only because the DOJ has chosen to exercise discretion, which they can stop doing at any time. When it’s actually legalized, nobody will be making money, as it’s an agricultural commodity that is pretty easy to grow. In terms of justice for those who are incarcerated, all governors have pardon powers, and legislatures have the power to take actions as they deem appropriate. It is a political problem.
- rileymat2 9y ago
  I am not sure no one will make money if legalized, tobacco companies have a history of profitability.
- freedomben 9y ago
  Growing weed may be easy, but it isn't that easy. Marijuana is a lot pickier about grow conditions than most people think (if you want a quality product at least. Crap weed is much easier to grow). It also takes several months from seed to being smoke/edible-making ready. Just the harvesting and curing process alone is a massive PITA. There will always be a market for quality grown weed, just as much as you buy produce at the grocery store.
  - ModernMech 9y ago
    Not only that, but the extracts are one of the most popular form. Then there's profit to be made in pipes, vapes, accessories, etc. Can't grow those.
- gowld 9y ago
  You are conflating legalized with deragulated.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    Nope. At the federal level it is very much still illegal. Many states decriminalize or legalize use or possession. The dispensary or grow operations are a different story.
khhh35575544 9y ago
If you can't do the time...
xrange 9y ago
> red state prisons sit full of petty dime bag dealers Does anyone know where to get at the raw statistics for this kind of information? So that we can figure out how many prisoners there are in red states vs. blue states for marijuana possession?
deleted 9y ago
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ralusek 9y ago
The legal repercussion for getting involved in selling Marijuana at industrial scale has diminished substantially within certain avenues. Nobody is preventing or encouraging anybody from a particular race to capitalize off of that opportunity. There is nothing hypocritical at work whatsoever. The activity has become less and less criminal, so people with a lower threshold for criminal repercussion have become more involved as the threshold lowers. What is hypocritical about that? It's like saying that it's hypocritical that people who drank when prohibition was active were in jail, and then people who drank after it was repealed were not in jail. I fail to see the hypocrisy. I also fail to see where race comes into play.
- gboudrias 9y ago
  Your way of viewing things is so foreign to me (and I'm a foreigner so makes sense I guess). I think prisons should be all about rehabilitation. If you crime is selling drugs, and selling drugs is no longer something we train people out of... What's the point of staying in prison? Race does come into play as well, because your argument seems to be that it's "fair" that these people are still imprisoned. But by and large, they were set up by a society that left them few other choices, which is far from fair. Refusing to release them is tantamount to denying the error of our past ways. It was always a trap, ever since the lies that enabled marijuana prohibition in the first place.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- ryanlol 9y ago
  >I also fail to see where race comes into play. This is what the advocates of racist policy always say. Enforcement is where race comes into play, you don’t see it because you don’t care. Otherwise it’s very hard to miss.
  - ralusek 9y ago
    It's not hard to miss if you don't bother to get beyond "systemic racism" as a justifiable and primary explanation for the disparity in racial outcomes. If you are interested in a more wholistic understanding, then you should be aware that it, like most social phenomenon, is very complicated. You hear things like "crack carries a much heavier sentencing than powder cocaine, because crack is done by black people and powder cocaine is done by white people." It sounds like it might be a racist policy, but it simply is not. First of all, the drugs are not demographically comparable. Crack is a street drug, cocaine is a white collar and party drug. There are vastly differing levels of criminality surrounding them. Crystal meth, a drug much more comparable socio-economically to crack cocaine, not only carries the exact same federal sentencing as crack, but is predominately done by white people. Another might be if you look at the different rates of incarceration for drug offenses by racial breakdown. Black people and hispanics are clearly over-represented as compared with their representation of the population. They are also, however, over-represented in their involvement in drug criminality. That isn't to say that their level of criminality is exactly proportional to their over-representation, because they do get incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates, but it is important. Where the disproportionality manifests can be found in statistics that while entirely true, often make no attempt at controlling for location or socioeconomic factors. For example, black people with identical drug usage as white people for something like Marijuana encounter much higher rates of incarceration. It sounds racist, but, surprise, is complicated. Geographically and socioeconomically, there are massive differences in average black and average white distributions. Black Americans tend to have disproportionately higher representation in heavily policed urban areas, white Americans tend to have disproportionately higher representation in suburban areas. The extent to which this is motivated by racist policy is also, as is expected, very complicated, but should not be conflated with differing outcomes in criminality and arrests. If you want to go over specific statistics, I'm happy to, but I don't find the explanation that systems are just inherently racist to be a satisfactory explanation for complicated problems, because systems that are inherently racist have trivially simple solutions. We are not dealing with the Civil Rights Movement 2.0.
Eridrus 9y ago
> We now have a situation where (almost exclusively rich white men) are making millions of dollars selling legal marijuana on an industrial scale, as red state prisons sit full of petty dime bag dealers (overwhelmingly people of color) doing decades of hard time for something that is not even a crime a few hundred miles away. While I am supportive of freeing low level nonviolent offenders and sealing their records, I think the insinuation here that those locked up somehow deserve the profits from the new industry is silly. Running a black market business is very different from running a real business. Look at what's happening in Humboldt county to see that just because the product is the same the business is not.

jhowell 9y ago

Maybe they can become companions to people who get out of prison once their marijuana convictions are tossed.

leopoldo 9y ago
Imagine the dog going bananas every time his owner tries to smoke a joint.
- freedomben 9y ago
  As long as smoke-time includes a fun ball or toy for the dog, he'd be in heaven. They love the smell of weed cause it means a reward.

jey 9y ago

> cocaine is odorless until its fermented in a human environment What does this even mean?

delecti 9y ago
From context it seems to mean that cocaine itself isn't detectable, but that a person who has consumed cocaine can be detectable by odor. I can't find anything backing that up though.
- rconti 9y ago
  and I don't see how drug dogs trained this way would help detect cocaine in, say, a suitcase, vs a person who had used cocaine but was carrying none with them.
- adrusi 9y ago
  That's how i read it at first, but it could also be that cocaine goes through fermentation during it's extraction, and that if that's done near human settlements, air pollution contaminates the final product, making it detectable.
rhombocombus 9y ago
it sounds like unsubstantiated nonsense. Cocaine, like many chemicals, has a particular odor.
- sp332 9y ago
  -
  - 8_hours_ago 9y ago
    Only if it is ingested.
- marshray 9y ago
  I'd love to see a dog detect the odor of an undoped polycrystalline silicon wafer.

kentt 9y ago

I was under the impression that drug dogs we're mostly ineffective[1] anyway so this shouldn't be an issue. I guess this article would imply I'm misinformed. I'd welcome correction. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/04/federal-appeals-court-drug-dog-thats-barely-more-accurate-than-a-coin-flip-is-good-enough/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f4481f79bd6e https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/04/...

exelius 9y ago
Drug dogs don’t need to be effective; they just need to establish probable cause.
- mikeash 9y ago
  That is to say, drug dogs are extremely effective, it’s just that their job is different from what their name might make you think. As long as it doesn’t result in evidence being thrown out, a drug dog that alerts when drugs aren’t present is a feature, not a bug, for the police.
- rhizome 9y ago
  To put an even finer point on it, drug dogs don't need to establish probable cause, and they don't, they just provide a back door around the 4th Amendment.
  - exelius 9y ago
    Legally they check the box, which is the important part.
  - greenleafjacob 9y ago
    Yes drug dogs need to establish probable cause, that is how they meet the requirements of the fourth amendment.
deleted 9y ago
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9y ago

wollstonecraft 9y ago

Dogs are actually trained to always "signal" the handler. You can't swear a dog in under oath- instant probable cause.

Johnny555 9y ago
Yeah, I assumed this was the standard mode of operation -- when officers are "sure" there are drugs, then bring in the dog as an "impartial observer" to show probable cause since everyone knows that dogs don't lie. Unless, of course, they are signaled to lie by their handler.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

darkstar999 9y ago

> You can’t retrain dogs when it comes to marijuana,” adds James Woodford, a forensic chemist who created and patented the odor of cocaine that serves as the industry standard when it comes to training dogs to sniff out the substance. That sounds like a fun job... I wonder how he did his research?

ralusek 9y ago
He doesn't like cocaine, he just really likes the way it smells.

firmgently 9y ago

Considering that laws are 'supposed to be' part of the structure that helps society be pleasant/bearable for its members... On the one hand you have people who inhale smoke from a burning plant despite there being a law against doing so. On the other hand you have people who want to lock a human being in a cage, sometimes for the majority of their lives, because of the abstract notion that they 'broke a law'; no matter what that law was or whether it's reasonable or justified. I know which kind of person I'd rather be surrounded by in society. Seeing the way people toss around the concept of incarceration so lightly is somewhere between monstrous and disgusting to me.

HumanHater 9y ago
While smoking marijuana is victimless crime selling it is certainly not. There are a lot of laws one might need to break to successfully sell drugs. Also a lot of convicts financially supported Mexican cartels and bear some responsibility for their crimes. At the end of the day they new all the risks, chose to play this game to make fast easy money, and they lost. It is like casino where you could win $5M or lose and spend 5 years in prison. Now letting the winners to keep the money but let losers go would not be exactly fair.
- ryanlol 9y ago
  >Also a lot of convicts financially supported Mexican cartels and bear some responsibility for their crimes. Lawmakers created the Mexican cartels, and therefore bear most of the responsibility for their crimes? >letting the winners to keep the money but let losers go would not be exactly fair. Frankly it feels that you care much less about fairness than you care about enforcing terrible laws.

squozzer 9y ago

I am not sure retraining is necessary. Even in states where weed is legal, they probably want to clamp down on "illegal" (untaxed) weed. No one has to go to jail or even lose their stash - I expect a fine would suffice. That pushes the question as to whether "regular" law enforcement would involve itself in weed searches or if a state revenue department would handle it. Moonshiners might have a useful perspective on this.