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48 prevented fatal accidents sounds great! Now how many accidents would we prevent if we criminalized alcohol?
And how many more if we banned cars?
If we just criminalized dying, we wouldn't have to worry about fatalities at all.
It wouldn't be very good for those empty-ish parts of Ohio. Maybe if we also gave everyone a horse.
Always wanted a horse...
Not sure if satire, or bad at history...
Or maybe times have changed?
Criminalizing any drug just means gifting billions to organized crime and destroying the lives of millions of consumers by criminalizing them. Legalization and a focus on protection of minors, education about drugs, addiction prevention and rehab programs is what improves peoples lives. If you think criminalizing alcohol might be a good idea you should read about "The Prohibition" and how it made the american mafia the stinking rich empire it is.
What should be strictly criminalized is driving under any influence and that is the case in most countries.
Imo also driving cars in urban spaces should be criminalized but that is a different topic.
Generally speaking I agree with you. I was trying to highlight the simplified moral calculus on display that equates the immeasurable harm that strict prohibition has created to the potential harm of losing dozens of lives. Due to the inherent complications of these questions, neither is unequivocally good or bad, but they're presented as a dichotomy that simply does not exist in reality.
There are plenty of other ways to go about it, just like we compromised on alcohol a century ago. As a society we agreed that it comes down to personal responsibility, so how is weed really any different? Pointing to the potential harm that legalization could cause while ignoring precedent and common sense is disingenuous at best and purposely misleading at worst.
I doubt strongly their criteria for linking those accidents to pot goes beyond "this person smoked pot recently enough for it to show up in urine".
Of course they're against losing the easiest excuse they have to harass poor and/or ethnic people.
And makes no mention how many fewer people would be in prison if recreational marijuana happened. How many fewer cases would go through the courts. Nope. Nothing.
Now that is very un-American of you to say! Who do think would slave all day in the for profit prisons then? /s
Who would they arrest if marijuana was legal?
I'd expect no less from #fascists.
So like what's the deal with Ohio? Is dumb their main export?
It's not Ohio, it's police unions fighting to keep arresting people for nothingcrimes. Same response from cop unions everywhere and every time anyone's proposed ending prohibition.
This is pretty much it. Other than civil forfeiture - AKA legalized literal armed highway robbery of cash - ~~taxes~~ tickets and fines make up a startling amount of the police budget in a lot of places, maybe most of them. And we wonder why they stopped using cruisers and they all have SUVs now. In my suburb, every goddamned one of them - and there's an awful lot for some reason - is driving around in a SUV. The only cop car I've seen around is the County Sheriff.
So...how's that working out for you guys? Do you enjoy being despised or does it come naturally?
I usually separate between good and bad cops. Headlines like this don't make it easy though.
I'll make it easy for you, there are no good cops.
I don´t like cops because they make me uncomfortable and I would agree that probably the majority of cops are assholes but I refuse to judge all individuals in a group based on generalization.
They are a street gang except nobody pressured them into it. They constantly do crimes that would get anyone else incarcerated yet they almost never face any repercussions at all. They steal from normal citizens through asset forfeiture without ever bringing charges against their victims. They cover up the crimes of their peers. Murders, rapes, theft, brutal beatings all done and covered up by the very ones entrusted with upholding the law and protecting the citizenry. Their entire organization is built from the slave chasers, and their racist, power-drunk actions and policies have only become increasingly dangerous for us, the people. The generalization is earned.
I respect your opinion and I can identify with it. Bad experiences with members of a certain groups naturally lead to generalizations and I guess just like me you had bad experiences with the cops. However - while most generalizations are not arbitrary, that still does not make them true for every individual in the generalized group.
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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THE POLICE PROBLEM
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The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.
99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.
When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.
When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."
When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.
Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.
The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.
All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
That's the solution.
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