I’m doing a study on punitiveness towards of drug users in the US (simple possession), specifically willingness to incarcerate users for substantial periods of time. In my data, people were fairly lenient towards drug users, assigning only token punishments absent special circumstances and aggravating to a fairly minimal extent given prior records. Really unexpected, at least from my standpoint. Here’s the issue:
To justify that leniency is unexpected, I need to document the degree of punishment normally inflicted in drug cases. This has proven harder than anticipated; drug laws are byzantine in their complexity. Does anyone know where this sort of information is helpfully summarized? I’m looking for sentencing guidelines for cocaine in particular.
This site initially appeared great, but I’m less than entirely confident about it:
http://law.findlaw.com/state-laws/cocaine/