What makes a dude in NYC smoking weed around children sketchy is the fact that it is illegal, not the fact that it is weed.  You know that guy bought the weed illegally, and you are only slightly irrational for worrying about mal intent.  If he was eating pixie sticks and pixie sticks were as illegal as weed, it would be the same.  

The simple solution is to make weed legal.  If the weed is legal, the guy is about as sketchy as a dude eating some McDonalds food, and the McDonalds food is absolutely and unquestionably worse for you.  McDonalds will most certainly kill you very dead if you use it too often.

I remember in high school it was always easier to get drugs (weed in particular) than it was to get booze.  You could filch a little booze from your parents here and there, but take too much and they catch on.  It was nearly impossible to buy though.  Most responsible adults would tell  you to screw off if you handed them a $20 and ask them to buy you some vodka.  Drugs on the other hand were easy.  Why?  Someone selling drugs didn’t give a shit what my age was.  You could go to a dealer and they will get you whatever your want if you had the cash.  There was no “booze dealer”, but there sure as hell were drug dealers.

Booze is a vastly more lethal and mind altering drug than weed.  Before making an argument over weed, consider booze.  Can we tolerate X when it is the vastly more lethal and mind altering drug alcohol?  Yes?  Okay, than stop freaking out.  The only thing that ever makes weed worse than booze is the fact that weed is illegal.  Make it legal and it suddenly becomes safer and less harmful than alcohol.

In your jurisdiction I believe it’s actually just an infraction subject to a fine, although if the keys were also in the ignition it could add up to a DUI.

Is the drug war a war on black people?

In a word, yes.

I’d bet a lot more white people than black get off with a wrist slap for marijuana as well.

Of course it is. And of course that affects poor white people as well.

Have you read Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow”? It’s inspiring a whole new awakening to how much the so-called War on Drugs specifically targets POC, and to some extent brown folks too, and to how the criminal justice system in general has played a huge part in eviscerating urban areas (thereby encouraging drug sales, and usage).

One recent example among many, many others:

“DEA Agent Says He Was Told Not To Enforce Drug Laws In White Areas” –

http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/11/dea_agent_says_he_was_told_not_to_enforce_drug_laws_in_white_areas.html

Would this same scenerio have happened anywhere I’ve ever lived? Guy sitting outside a playground enjoying a doobie in full view of everyone? Not for long, someone would have called the cops and they would have showed up pronto. I was a lot less sure of same respone in Harlem.

Is the drug war a war on black people? Is it outright racism? Well, there are certainly a lot more people of color in the jails and prisons, also a fair number of poor, white folks. I tend to think of the drug war as a battlefront for a larger class war. In communities were it has become ‘normal’ to see a man sitting in front of a playground smoking dope, I see lot of easy arrests plumping up police stats that seem to operating on a quota system. I see for-profit prisons with enviable profit margins and they need bodies; they’re not too fussy about why, just that the charges stick. The new old ‘slavery by another name’.

As for welcomeaboard’s story, I can’t for the life of me figure out why it matters that the setting is an urban, apparently black one.

Surely it’s obvious that the passage of Prop 13 in the late 70′s is the real reason for the California teen crime rate beginning to fall down to the national level.

Those would-be delinquents saw the bright future of lower property tax rates ahead of them and resolved to shape up!

I’m all for decriminalization, I just think we should wait before throwing the party.

While I strongly favor decriminalization of pot in the U.S. for so many reasons, including the results above, I had to have a long conversation with myself before deciding not to call the cops.  When I told my hostesses later what I’d seen up the block, they were upset, partly about the behavior but mostly because of their heavy financial investment in the neighborhood.  The neighborhood, the hostesses, the man sitting in the car smoking dope, and the kids playing in the little playground, all black.  Me? — fishbelly white, middle-aged woman from Colorado, a stranger in a strangeland and a guest on vacation in NewYork and Harlem for the first time.

I don’t want anyone sitting outside a playground smoking dope for any reason, with children playing and watching fifteen feet away.  The man in the car wasn’t looking at the kids; he was probably just there mellowing out after a long day.  But I could see why a cop might be inclined to suspect him of ‘intent to sell’.  Kids everywhere today seem to have access to a whole lot more folding money than I ever did at the same age, and there was a high school just up the block.

It was a moral dilemma — what was the right thing to do?  No one else seemed surprised or upset (except the two hostesses)  So, I did nothing.

Indeed, the article itself seems to cite the drop in drug-related arrests to the new law (duh) and the drop in other crimes more to the improvement of the socioeconomic status of poor communities.

“Drug-related juvenile arrests overall fell by 47 percent between 2010 and 2011. Violent crime arrests fell by 16 percent; homicide arrests by 26 percent; rape arrests by 10 percent; and property-crime arrests by 16 percent.”