Drugs

Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed a federal controlled substance analogue conviction, because the trial judge watered down the necessary jury instruction for obtaining such a conviction, in this instance involving so-called ‘bath salts’. Far from a liberal for criminal defendants nor foranyone...

Police and prosecutors routinely have a knee-jerk claim that a few ounces of marijuana coupled with a few thousand dollars amounts to intent to distribute the marijuana. Let us say that police lawfully stop a suspect’s car, lawfully find two ounces of marijuana and a...

The District of Columbia and Maryland have decriminalized marijuana. The two jurisdictions have also moved forward in their own peculiar ways in giving limited protection to medical marijuana use. Neighboring Virginia lags far behind. For marijuana consumers working in and near Washington, D.C., Virginia’s disadvantageous...

Plenty of people sell imitation items that they claim to be such real illegal drugs as cocaine. The top motivations for doing so likely are seeking a higher profit margin, not having the real product available to sell, not knowing that the product is fake...

The recently-passed federal spending bill bars the United States Justice Department from trying to prevent states from implementing medical marijuana laws. However, this does not automatically mean that the Justice Department will not continue to raid and prosecute non-governmental entities that grow and sell marijuana ostensibly for...

Law enforcement and tough-on-crime politicians rely too heavily on testing for alcohol to determine whether one has violated the drinking and driving laws, rather than to return to the sensible days when breath and blood testing (with breath testing already being highly flawed) was but...

Where I practice law, the potential incarceration penalties and collateral stigma are stiffer for a conviction of possession with intent to distribute illegal drugs ("PWID"), versus for a drug possession conviction, with the PWID penalties being as stiff as for actual drug distribution. Often, prosecutors...

Criminal convictions and sentences can be fraught with immigration land mines for non-United States citizens, and also with land mines for United States citizens wishing to travel abroad. For instance, and counterintuitively, a drug paraphernalia conviction can be more of an immigration kiss of death...

My 2007 blogposting on the above-referenced topic merits updating, as follows: The financial aid analysis must include a review of the federal financial aid statute, at 20 U.S.C. § 1091(r), which says in relevant part: A student who is convicted of any offense under any Federal or State law...

Support our troops is a common refrain —- urging such support regardless of one’s views of the military’s policies and actions — particularly when soldiers are at war. However, eighteen to twenty year olds are treated as responsble enough to carry and shoot weapons in...