My objection to MMS began over a case that had nothing to do with drugs, though I think it’s equally unnecessary in that realm as well. This case was on “48 Hours” and dealt with a Mom and Dad who kidnapped there kids from Social Services. I won’t go into the details but suffice to say they were wronged. The MMS for kidnapping was 25 years and the judge just shook his head in disbelief/anger when he read the MMS. It was a travesty of justice. The only people who MMS effects are those who don’t deserve to be sentenced with it. No real kidnapper is going to get away with a light sentence. They MIGHT get away with an aquittal, but not a light sentence.
You can argue this two different ways. (1) that drug laws themselves are for the most part an unreasonable intrusion into private behavior, or that (2) such laws are not unreasonable, but excessive sentences are unreasonable. I happen to agree with (1), but for the purposes of this thread will argue (2). And my argument is: even if we were to agree that drugs have been rightly prohibited, and that users should go to prison, the question becomes how much prison time is fair? Should a low level dealer who sells to close friends, or a non-dealing user go to prison as long as someone convicted of armed robbery, or rape? With mandatory minimum drug sentences, that can happen and many consider it unfair.
Drug addicts are especially vulnerable to imprisonment. Given the nature of addiction and recovery, even an addict who wants to stay clean may relapse. If he does, does he deserve to go to prison, for an even longer time, because it’s a subsequent offense? I think not. A relapsing addict doesn’t have the same will power and rational to obey the law in that respect, as we might expect a paroled robber to have.
The “sad results” of legal drug use that led to the promulgation of drug laws in the first place did exist, but I think they were very much exaggerated by ignorance and racial prejudice. Cocaine was strongly associated with blacks in the South, which led to Atlanta based Coca-Cola removing cocaine from its product years before the federal law against its free distribtion was enacted. Not only was marijuana associated with Mexicans, but many of the legislators who voted in the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937 really hadn’t heard of it; this in spite of lurid scare stories in the Hearst papers. I think they spent about a morning debating it before they voted in the new law. And of course opium had the Chinese connection.