[coryl]

Dealing marijuana doesn't make you an evil person. You should reconsider what you believe to be a "life of crime". He took advantage of a system that doesn't work (marijuana prohibition) and got rich for it.

Laws against marijuana don't make sense. Millions of people are incarcerated for simple possession. Prohibition simply raises the profit margins for it, pushing dealing to organized crime, and eventually violence.

Who in the story was hurt by marijuana directly? No one. No one was evil for dealing drugs, just young and stupid.

[muhfuhkuh]

The cops even were portrayed as having this same attitude. They figured those kids weren't hurting anybody and were relatively harmless small potatoes; but because they became more successful, the situation grew more and more untenable due to the higher exposure to increasingly shadier people.

[rick888]

"Laws against marijuana don't make sense. Millions of people are incarcerated for simple possession. Prohibition simply raises the profit margins for it, pushing dealing to organized crime, and eventually violence."

Millions for simple possession..really?

Unless you are dealing, most cops will not bother you. Many states now also will only slap you with a fine.

Anything illegal will have a black-market behind it. Prostitution, gambling, and even illegal fireworks. The only way to get rid of the organized crime and violence is to legalize everything that is illegal..which isn't very practical.

It's not really prohibition. It's illegal. Alcohol prohibition only lasted for 13 years. Marijuana and many other drugs have been illegal for 70+ years. Otherwise, we would say there is a prohibition on rape and murder.

[coryl]

Sorry, your points made no sense to me. Prohibition means prohibited which means illegal. Marijuana has been used throughout human history over thousands of years, and all of a sudden in 1920s its illegal. Legalizing and regulating things is actually quite practical. The government regulates tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical drugs, our food, the toys our children play with, etc.

You don't see organized crime killing each other over the alcohol and tobacco markets, thats because theres no profit for them, big companies scale better. Illicit drugs however, pay well.

As for the incarceration numbers: "According to the most recent figures available from the FBI, police arrested an estimated 786,545 people on marijuana charges in 2005 -- more than twice the number of Americans arrested just 12 years ago. Among those arrested, about 88 percent -- some 696,074 Americans -- were charged with possession only. The remaining 90,471 individuals were charged with "sale/manufacture," a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use.

These totals are the highest ever recorded by the FBI, and make up 42.6 percent of all drug arrests in the United States. Nevertheless, self-reported pot use by adults, as well as the ready availability of marijuana on the black market, remains virtually unchanged."

[weaksauce]

But they define dealing as having a smallish quantity on your person. I believe the phrase is intent to traffic.

[Snark7]

Today, in the USA, dealing marijuana is a crime. Making a (highly profitable) living off dealing marijuana is, at the very least, a "career of crime".

The individuals in this story did much more than deal in marijuana - they set up a business, made huge amounts of money, wasted it, acted irresponsibly, and were finally caught. Furthermore, they celebrated their exploits. The point isn't that dealing marijuana is crime, the point is that no light has penetrated the thick skulls of these young men. It seems to me that it is possible but unlikely that they will come to see the error of their ways.