I AM a lawyer, though I don't see that that is relevant here. It's not a matter of what's just. It's a matter of what the law is. People have different ideas about what is just. There are disagreementsa bout the law, too, but these are much more constrained, in part because we much maligned professioins are trained to follow rules and obey precedents. You might think that it's just to let people sell drugs. Other might think that drug dealers should be boiled alive. The place where we decide questions like that is called the legislature. Once the legislature settles it for the moment, we are all supposed to apply the rules they adopt on our behalf. That way we don't get, for example, the manifest injustice of one drug dealer walking because of a jury of people like you while his co-conspirator is boiled alive because the jury is of a different composition. If you don't like the law -- the rules the legislature adopts -- try to have them changed. This isn'! t rocket science. It's elementary democracy.
WS: Dura lex, sed lex, huh? I am not a big fan of jurry nullification - I think it opens the Pandorra's box of various grievances againts the legal status quo - many of which I would find objectionable. An obvious example would be a jury refusing to convict someone commiting a terrorist attack on a reproductive health center on th egrounds that he acted to prevent a supposedly greater evil.
I mentioned it only in connection with drug "laws" because I do not think these are not merely laws I disagree with, but vaguely phrased instrument of persecution, discirmination and unrestrained state control. My main objection is that "possession" is not a positive act that you can prove or disprove with reasonale objectivity, but a claim that one makes and others recognize. If you visit my apartment and I take your wallet out of your jacket - this is an positive act that can be proved or disproved, at least in theory. However, if you wallet is in my appartment - that does not constitute any positive act of "possession", unless I make an explicit claim to that wallet. So the only way to establish "possession" of the wallet is to find a proof of a positigve act of me claiming it. Mere location of that wallet on the premises that I own and control does not do.
from that perspective, possession of anything, including drugs cannot be proved or disproved - it can only be recognized or unrecognized, but the redcognition is contingent on a specific claim made by the person who is supposed to be "in possession." It is clear, therefore, that possession (unlike buying, selling, or using) cannot be an act punishable by law because it cannot be proved or disproved, unless the accused is stupid enough to make a formal claim.
Of course, this ambiguity makes drug possession a perfect tool of state persecution, because te agents of the state do not have to prove anything (since nothing can be proved) - all they need is to make a claim for the accused and support it with often flimsily constructed circumstantial 'evidence' e.g. that the object of interst was "found" in the person's car. Needless to say that such "possession" can result from agents of the state placing it there.
Another thing is that "possession" is a purely victimless crime that does not affect anyone but the person "in possession." Unlik eother types of crime, such as assault or theft where the state can legitimately say that it protects some common good by prohibiting such acts, the only ground of its "criminality: is the violation of an arbitray injunction that serves no common good. In the same vein the agents of the state could arbitrarily prohibit virtually anything, say, drinking tea with milk or having oral sex (which they do in certain states) and use it as a pretext for jailining people they do not like.
This is not a law in any true sense, but a tool of persecuting and disfranchising ethnic mimorities and the poor - Jim Crow laws in criminal justice disguise. As such I do not think they were not established through a democratic process and most likely willnot be repelled by a democratic process.
Wojtek