

Have Marijuana Tests Resulted in Tens of Thousands of False Convictions? - Alex3917
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/147613

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ericingram
You are free to form your own opinion about "illegal" substances, but no one
should be penalized for behavior that does not infringe on the rights of
another individual. In short, Marijuana and all other drugs should be legal.
Acts which violate the rights of others, committed under the influence of
substances (or any condition really) is no different than an act committed
with a clear mind/body.

Trying to prevent crime by criminalizing victimless actions only creates more
crime.

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runT1ME
I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, how would you feel about me
constructing a nuclear reactor in my backyard for fun? Or manufacturing a bomb
or rocket?

~~~
king_jester
Smoking marijuana isn't the same as building a bomb. If I accidentally light a
joint, the people in my immediate radius aren't blown to pieces (although they
might choose to get blown).

~~~
InclinedPlane
I think runTIME may be making a subtly different argument.

Let's say I have a 1,000 acre ranch and I build a nuclear reactor on it. I go
to extreme lengths to make sure it's safe and secure. As far as my neighbors
are concerned my operating a nuclear reactor has no impact on them. However,
now I have the potential, should I choose, to make nuclear weapons,
radiological "dirty" bombs, or otherwise contaminate the general vicinity (for
potentially very large values of vicinity) with radioactive byproducts. It is
for this reason that the operation of nuclear reactors is highly regulated.

One could imagine how this argument might apply to personal drug use. Drug use
itself may not instantly impact anyone else but suppose that, as in personally
operating a nuclear reactor, it enabled individuals to have a far greater
negative impact on society than other normal human behaviors might.

I don't buy it and I'm not sure if that's the argument that runTIME was
making, but it's an interesting argument I think.

~~~
runT1ME
Yes. If it turns out that people on PCP or some other hard drug are more
dangerous/quicker to violence, is there a limit of how much personal freedom
we should grant if there is an increased _risk_ of possible damage to society.

~~~
chopsueyar
Do people on PCP commit a different class of crime if they kill, stab, or eat
someone?

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anigbrowl
_The most egregious example occurred in 2006. U.S. District Judge William
Alsup found the D-L test to be a specific identification test and declared,
grandiosely: “Despite the many hundreds of thousands of drug convictions in
the criminal justice system in America, there has not been a single documented
false-positive identification of marijuana or cocaine when the methods used by
the SFPD [San Francisco Police Department] Crime Lab are applied by trained,
competent analysts.”_

I am surprised, as Judge Alsup has a good reputation in general...but an
opinion is only as good as the quality of the data it's based on. The SFPD
Drug Lab has turned out to be disastrously unreliable, and was shut down a
couple of months ago. <http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/ca/massullo_order.pdf> If
you are interested in reading about the conclusions of the judge who
investigated the goings-on.

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yanowitz
Interesting article, horrific story, but one oddity stuck out: "The Duquenois
test was developed in the late 1930s by a French pharmacist, Pierre Duquénois,
while he was working for the United Nations division of narcotics."

The UN wasn't founded until 1945. How did he do this work for the UN in the
late 30s? Should that be late 40s?

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jat850
It could have implicitly meant the League of Nations, precursor to the United
Nations, and simply misidentified (or simplified) it as such.

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lucisferre
One could argue that Marijuana being illegal has resulted in hundreds of
thousands of false convictions.

