The moral of the story is one I personally learned when I litigated and won the first appellate decision that drug law prosecutions and civil forfeiture of all your property, based on the same drug law accusation, was a violation of the Constitution's Fifth Amendment prohibition against multiple punishments for the same offense. There is no way out through the courts when politics of the drug war rule. There are far more industrial and household accidents, injuries and fatalities from consumer goods and appliances than from all the illegal drugs combined. But those sellers are not incarcerated. Neither are the tobacco and alcohol distributors who cause more than 450,000 and 100,000 deaths each, respectively.
Drug laws are hot politics.
Judges are afraid to uphold the constitutional rights of drug case defendants or the judge is a former prosecutor who will not uphold your rights. If you want to get yourself or a loved one released from that unfair drug sentence, you will not likely do it through the courts. The system is rigged against the nonviolent drug case defendant. I received some statistics from the Bureau of Justice that are revealing. Between 1980 and 1995, prisoner petitions filed in US District Court nearly tripled, from 23,230 to 63,634, and keeping pace with prison population growth, Appeals to the Courts of Appeal quadrupled, from 3,675 to 14,981.