Want a mandatory minimum 2 year jail sentence? If Congressman Sensenbrenner has his way, you'll get your very own if you don't turn in friends, coworkers and relatives to the cops for merely talking about drug use!
I've sparred with Dave from Diablog in the past, but want to thank him for pointing out this pathetic piece of legislation that hadn't even registered on my radar. More after the jump...
direct from Diablog:
Thanks to Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) we're closer than ever to realizing George Orwell's vision of 1984. He's introduced a new bill which Congress is debating right now which takes the War on Drugs to unprecedented Orwellian levels of intrusion into personal privacy and could literally turn almost anyone into a criminal. The bill is H.R 1528 the "Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act", which will make it illegal not to report drug use or drug related activity to the police and provide mandatory sentences of at least 2 years for those who don't turn in relativees, friends, neighbors or people they observe doing such dangerous things as smoking a joint or if you just hear them talking about using drugs. It also makes it illegal to refuse to cooperate with a drug investigation, including making it a criminal offense not to wear a wire and go undercover if asked by law enforcement.
One of my best friends lost her job at a major U.S. company after testing 'positive' for marijuana on a drug test. Yet she hadn't even smoked any!
On the advice of her mother, who used to work in a blood bank, she had an independent lab test her again within a day or so. No pot...but the lab worker there said the immune-boosting vegetarian supplements she was taking (which contained goldenseal, if I remember correctly), may have caused a false positive on the first test.
The company refused to give her her job back anyway, or even allow another test by their own lab.
Can you imagine the amount of time these kinds of cases would take up in already-flooded court dockets, too? Vindictive divorced couples accusing (or threatening to accuse) each other of recreational drug use to obtain better custody arrangements or settlements, for example. I'm sure you can think of others. And although I don't smoke myself, I'm pretty darn sure I would object to wearing a wire so the local cops could entrap the punk rock kids at the back of the coffeeshop, sharing a solitary joint among themselves.
Am I understanding the implications of this law correctly?
Let's say I live with someone who sells drugs (which, for the record, I do not), and we live next door to a school (again, for the sake of conjecture), and in our state, you get your house confiscated for selling drugs anywhere near a school.
If I don't turn him in or refuse to help convict him, I receive a mandatory 2 year jail sentence. But if I do turn him in, my house gets taken away, too. So what earthly reason would I have to want to cooperate?
Laws like these are just bad news.