Outdated Cannabis Laws are still Impacting Lives
By: Luke Wiese
Tags: Cannabis, Current Events, Marijuana, Self, Prison Reform

Photo by Marco Jimenez on Unsplash

I was always entrepreneurially minded growing up

I worked random odd jobs from the early age of seven (yes, I volunteered to be a paperboy), and just never stopped. There was always some new endeavor to attempt, from selling CD’s and movies to kids my age to going door to door and shoveling snow in the winter.

As I grew up my interests changed, but my money making mindset never really left me. I just couldn’t quite shake the entrepreneurial bug! As shallow as it sounds, that mindset has always been the one constant in my life, it’s a big reason I’ve started blogging as much as I have.

By the time I’m a teenager though, I start to experiment with what I thought was the cool “teenager” things to be doing. I drink a little bit, I start sneaking out, and then I smoked weed for the first time.

This is where I start to get myself into trouble, rather than using my talents for a noble cause I got caught in the shallow pursuit of notoriety. I lost focus on school and sports, and decided high school would be a better time if I focused on partying.

How lame does that sound even reading as a sentence?

However, like I mentioned previously, I may have changed for the worse, but my business mindset never did. I was always that weird kid who’d read about investing and politics, while my peers were more interested in sports and other traditional interests.

S ide note! Being the “weird guy” who happens to read about investing and finance has massively paid off. Embrace your intellectual tendencies.

My first time smoking weed I asked my older friends how much they paid for the bag, calculated the margins, and it dawned on me that I could make some good money selling marijuana on the side.

Not once did I think it’d become a big deal to me!

But my high school experience quickly morphed into some sad cycle of making money to spend on marijuana. It was a lot of working, serving tables, and pursuing various hobbies while selling weed on the side. I never considered my life to be anything less than ordinary!

Fast forward to college.

My peers start handling more significant amounts of money as they start to work regularly. Those college bills will do that to you.

Photo by Charles DeLoye on Unsplash

Twenty something year olds in my college figured out they can make money by selling weed to their friends, and they looked to me as their source, I guess I was just the first person they considered approaching.

One thing leads to another, the snowball effect takes hold, and I’m handling larger and larger quantities of the product.

Eventually I have probably, ten to twenty pounds of weed on me at a time. In hindsight, the entire ordeal got rather out of hand.

Word got around in my town (a small city of 200k or so people) that I was “distributing large quantities of drugs” and the police secured a search warrant on my residence.

In early 2018, I was walking to my car outside my apartment, leaving for the gym, and was detained by undercover state police. They pulled their weapons, identified themselves as the drug task force, and before I fully understood what was going on they slammed me on the hood of my car.

In that moment I realized my life was set to change.

Instead of graduating college, I was now destined to serve some time in prison.

I ended up having to drop out and serve time in the state penitentiary, despite having a previously clean record.

Mandatory minimums were introduced during the drug war to deter drug dealers from selling narcotics on the street. After the laws were introduced judges had no option other than to send people to prison for any kind of distribution crime.

On the surface, that anti-drug, hard on crime stance sounds awesome.

Suddenly the laws sound a lot less great when you realize marijuana is still classified with heroin and methamphetamine in some states.

The judge handling my case clearly felt sorry for me, and even reduced the sentence I had previously accepted. There was simply no way for me to get any leniency, the system makes no exceptions with black and white mandatory minimum sentences.