Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
What does it cost to house some pothead in a cell for a year? Figure out the cost and send him a bill. If he doesn't pay, fucking impound his car.
I don't understand why smoking is legal and pot is a crime? Drinking is legal, but meth isn't? Yeah, I know there's a huge difference there but a drug is a drug. One shouldn't be legal and drive our health insurance while pot is a crime.
I don't smoke pot, haven't since I was sixteen, but I just don't get why it's against the law....
|
I agree fully. I have probably smoked pot 5-7 times in my life. It is fun, but only on rare occasions. I'm sure some point in the future I'll smoke it again, but who knows.
I think is should be legal. Make it legal, sell it like the do cigarettes and tax it. They could raise a tone of money and would cut back on crime because you would be cutting the middle men out of it. You would have farmers growing it as a regular crop, not drug dealers smuggling it and hiding from the cops. I can understand why meth is illegal. It is a drug that many people use one time and instantly become hopelessly addicted to it. The recovery rate for meth addicts is about 10%. If you make that legal you could have a lot of people use it just out of curiosity and end up down a bad road.
Very few potheads ever see a jail. Unless you have enough on you that they consider you to be a dealer you will just get a ticket and be sent on your way. I have a bunch of friends that are cops and they recently busted a couple of guys that were dealers. They got a decent amount of pot from them, but they literally spent about 350 man hours setting it all up. That operation cost his department over 15K in overtime pay and other expenses. Chances are the guys will eventually get around 10K each in fines and will get probation (they might serve up to 9 months, but chances are they will plead down and take a long term probation). When you add in the cost of the department that busted them then the DA to prosecute and the public defenders office you rack up a lot of expenses pretty quickly. I supposed you could just bill them for it all and if they don't pay it impound their car and suspend their licenses, but then we are talking about criminals here and most of the time they are not very responsible people. They will probably just buy another car and drive illegally. Also if they get out of jail and are looking at 100K in debt they have little motivation to actually get a real job and reform their lives so they will be more tempted to go right back to crime.
I suppose you could hammer on them and seize property and visit them regularly where they live and take anything of value until it is paid back, but then you have the expense of having people carry out those actions.
Trying to profit by having the criminals pay is just something that really doesn't have much hope of working.