Spoken like a man who’s never watched Reefer Madness. Ignorance is bliss.
It’s a gateway retail product.
Wrong. I can believe that jaywalking should be illegal and still be angry that the police department is putting attractive female officers in the middle of a city block trying to get young men to cross the street with her.
Yes, you “can.”
What do you actually believe with respect to pot?
Absent the presence of an undercover officer, we might easily imagine that a high schooler would be asked by a classmate to find alcohol. When the last time an undercover officer was sent to try to see if they could score a six-pack from a teenager?
It’s possible to find it outrageous on a basis other than pot legalization.
Kobal2
I always thought it was the pianos that actually caused the problem.
Testy
Both cases, serious waste of resources. Pointless and stupid. Book em, Dano!
I don’t know, but how is this question relevant?
Hell, let’s just take away the vote from all of us guys, and let you women run the world. (Y’all can’t do any worse than we have.)
At pretty much any age, we men are, as a group, pretty stupid when our dicks are trying to call the shots, whether we’re talking about pussy, or manhood-related issues like war.
That’s a pretty sexist statement. I think men and women alike can be pretty foolish when it comes to sex and love. Certainly, a great many women have done dumb shit for someone they cared for.
I think humanity is just a flawed species.
I have a hypothesis which may be relevant to the issue of entrapment in general. Recently, a US representative got in trouble for sending pictures of himself around the internet. By its nature, this kind of behavior is new, except that there have presumably always been those with exhibitionist tendencies, which manifested in different intensities according to the individual. Those we know as flashers have exhibitionist desires intense enough to drive them out to public parks wearing sneakers and a raincoat. In others, the desire did not manifest itself in such behavior, because the barrier to fulfillment exceeded desire. I think perhaps with the internet, we’re going to see a lot of people come out of the woodwork whose exhibitionism is low-level enough to be acted on only when it becomes comparatively easy to do, as it now is on the internet.
Likewise, I think that there are probably many people out there who would commit a horrible act only if the opportunity were handed to them on a silver platter. And we’re not just talking about Muslims angry at America, but many Americans angry at Americans. Let’s say, just as an example, that for every person who would plan the execution-style murder of an abortion provider, there are more than a few who would never actually shoot an abortion doctor if they had to provide the initiative themselves, but would if the logistics were handled for them. To what extent are potential murders who have to be hand-fed the ways and means to commit the crime a threat? And how would spending enormous resources to take out only one such person significantly diminish the threat?
One argument I could see them making is that the real goal is to make impressionable young potential terrorists skittish about trusting fellow Muslims who appear eager to recruit them. I’ve never heard of a law enforcement agency acknowledging such a tactic, but on first blush it sounds like it might be useful to foster distrust in a community.
As for the approach law enforcement takes to pot, I don’t think marijuana is a serious threat, but if you need to count coup, it’s probably easier to pick on potheads. They’re less likely to be armed, and they’re more likely to have property worth seizing than, say, crackheads.
I recently watched A/K/A Tommy Chong, a documentary which may skew the Netflix recommendations I receive for a while. The setup by which the Justice Department nailed Tommy Chong is an eye-roller, and while I don’t have any proof, I blame marijuana for the fact that they fell for it. Tommy Chong had a bong-making business, or his son did I guess, and The Law kept nagging them to ship them to a state where they were not allowed to ship them. They finally sent the guy around to the actual storefront where he ordered one of everything they didn’t currently have on display, and he said he was coming to pick them up when the order was ready. Then the Justice Department sat back and snickered while this order clogged up the loading docs until finally Chong et al just shipped the damned things. Busted.
It was a pro-Chong documentary, but the press conference clips seemed to unabashedly admit that Tommy Chong had been targeted specifically because he made films that “glamorized drugs” and ridiculed law enforcement efforts to combat them. It sounded to me like they were admitting to a backdoor first-amendment violation, but I’m not a civil rights attorney. Anyway, Tommy Chong got I think eight months in minimum security.
It sure looks to me like the whole operation was chicken-shit from end-to-end. They picked on an old pothead because of some films he made decades ago (are they still in heavy rotation at Comedy Central?) to score a facile merely symbolic victory that changed nothing except inter-departmental circle-jerk, a little publicity and career advancement. That’ll teach the young people not to ship bongs across certain state lines!
I’d agree with this if this was something with less consequences for the community itself and global impact this kind of theatre brings.
To follow your example, just imagine how would serial entrapment of potential abortion clinics bombers do to the discourse in American politics.
So, while I agree with your general thinking (as in, you’ll find people in a certain state of mind ready to do things for various reasons) I disagree with a specific reason. On contrary, I think the reason is to maintain the level of manufactured fear for political purposes.
As in, do you really think that they netted Spitzer by chance? Same thing. Someone has an agenda.
According to recent FBI statistics, violent crime has dropped by about 6% and crimes against property by 2.7%.
However there has been a surge in the privation of the penal system since the 1980s by companies like CCA, GEO group and Wackenhut .
In February, CCA (Corrections Coporation of America) sent a letter to 48 cash strapped states offering to purchase prisons outright.
The catch?
The states had to guarantee a 90% occupancy rate.
And who better to stock the prisons with than pot smokers and incompetent terrorists?
Well, anyone besides incompetent terrorists? They go to federal prisons, not state prisons.
I’m pretty sure the Feds haven’t guaranteed a minimum occupancy rate.
No the fed’s haven’t guaranteed an occupancy rate (nor have any states yet, at least to the best of my knowledge) but if you’ll reread the quote I provided, "“It was because of [concerns about] immigration and the** uptick in federal detention contracts **that they were able to survive,” said Emily Tucker, advocacy policy director of Detention Watch.
That’s irrelevant, unless you were using “simply” in some unconventional way.
Does that scenario even make sense to you?
There’s a federal crime committed when you ship bongs to certain states, but not to other states, based solely on the state’s laws?
No.
Under federal law (21 USC § 863), it is a crime anywhere in the country to sell or offer for sale drug paraphernalia, to use the mails or any other facility of interstate commerce to transport drug paraphernalia, or to import or export drug paraphernalia.
You may dislike this law, but you can hardly argue that Chong, and his son, were violating it. They weren’t harangued or tempted into violating it. They had a business which sold bongs.
No. I made a prediction. My prediction is either correct or incorrect.
Assuming that you are using “simply” the way an ordinary person would in that sentence, you are wrong, and I would guess you are wrong about everyone who has posted in this thread so far.