It's a 24 year old movie. Around that time the history of the drug war involved a lot more petty criminalization (look how far we've come). This discussion can veer.
A simple policy could easily end those supply chains and large distributors. Just legalize it. Coke, meth, heroin. Legalize it, only allow it to be sold retail (no more street drugs), only allow licensed manufacturers to produce it, only allow them some very modest (capped at 2% over cost, maybe) profits. You get to choose where it's sold (out of liquor stores, most likely, instead of crack houses). You get to starve the cartels to death (they're cut out completely). No cops dying in shootouts, no dealers dying in shootouts, no bystanders dying in shootouts. And if you want tweekers to stop stealing copper wiring for scrap, just get rid of piss tests too... if drugs are so awful that people who give suck dick for it, then they're also so awful that people will get a minimum wage job scrubbing toilets for them. It's just that they can't because of piss tests.
Instead, we'll get another 100 years of half-assed decriminalization, where it's still illegal to sell, dealers are still motivated to kill cops, deadbeats, and rivals, where 100,000 people die because it's laced with fentanyl and even decriminalized illegal street drugs can't be regulated. I eagerly await all the downvotes this opinion will get.
100%. Decriminalizing possession only solves part of the problem: not ruining users lives even more than they have already done. Cracking down on dealers just incentives them to substitute stronger and more dangerous drugs in the pipeline.
One more change I would like to see: get rid of advertising this stuff. Giant billboards pushing alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis, are bad for all of us.
Even if it were just doing that (and I don't believe that's either the objective or the practical application, minor possession offenses targeting users are the vast majority of convictions), your street level dealer is so far down the chain to have no effect on supply and is a member of the community that you're hoping to help by imprisoning.
Ignoring the fact that the word "typically" was highly operative, he's a great example of the point you're trying to undermine. The government never would have gone away empty handed with no conviction of any sort like they did the first time they went after Menendez in the late 2010s. A normal peasant would have had their life ruined and been just barely scraping by in the 2020s when he was doing the things that ultimately got him put away.
I just find it odd to describe something that happens at the federal level on average once a year[1] as atypical. (And I'm sure even more frequently at the state level).
How many lawmakers, judges, and executive appointees do you imagine are in the habit of committing crimes? Less than 250K people are convicted of crimes every year among the entire population. That's <0.075%
Convictions seem like a distraction from the narrative here: Menendez fucked over his constituents. Obviously every politician that does so should be equally castigated. The court is irrelevant in this context and should be considered a trailing symptom.
