Times Record There are many myths about the drug war, promulgated by both proponents and opponents. For the most part they are guilty of those acts, but that's not why they are in prison.
Most state laws are similar.
There are not enough people involved with those quantities of drugs to account for our inmate population growing from 400,000 to over two million in under 30 years. The large majority of drug war prisoners are there for violating the drug conspiracy laws. In the 1980s a simple one-sentence change made conspiracy to commit a criminal act the equivalent of the act itself, with the same penalties. It has been broadly defined by the Su-preme Court to make merely having knowledge of a drug crime and not reporting it to be conspiracy. The main reason for charging conspiracy rather than actually selling, possessing or using drugs, however, is that the conspiracy laws now allow imposition of those dreadful mandatory minimum sentences on users and the smallest of sellers.