Legal Issues Surrounding The Legalization of Drugs in United States

The United States, along with much of the world, is engaged in a “war on drugs,” and the legal system is the main weapon in that war. Although governments spend some money on education and drug treatment, by far the greatest expenditures are for legal interdiction, confiscation, and incarceration.

This enormous legal effort to control illicit drugs has resulted in a patchwork of state and federal laws that defies understand­ing. In some places, arrest for a marijuana cigarette may result in a simple citation like a traffic ticket; in other locales, a person could receive a felony sentence. If the differences in laws are not enough, you must also consider the discretion of the local prose­cutor. Some enforce the letter of the law, while others simply won’t prosecute minor drug-related offenses. You just never know, and neither will the child you are educating.

For most drugs other than marijuana, the issue is much sim­pler—possession and distribution results in a felony conviction. And all you have to do to be charged with the higher crime of “distribution” is give a drug to someone else. If you give a con­trolled substance to someone and he or she dies, you can be pros­ecuted under a little-known federal law that carries a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty years. So if a teenager gives an Ecstasy pill to a friend and she has a bad reaction and dies, the federal authorities have the power to prosecute that teenager, even if it ruins her life. Kids need to know just how harsh the rules can be.