In all fairness, it's a fairly reasonable assumption that anybody who has 650 grams of coke is planning on selling most of it.
But not absolute.
Take a typical Methadone maintenance patient, on a typical dose (lets say 100mg/day). In my state, when you're good for 2 or 3 years in the program without any positive UA's, you can get 1 week, 2 weeks, and finally a full month of doses at a time.
If you were driving home from a clinic, after picking up 2 weeks or a months worth of Methadone, and were stopped by the police- (with 1.4g or 3g of Methadone in your possession), he doesn't assume you are going to sell it based on the amount. Because Methadone has been accumulated legally. Even though the street value of Methadone is, mg for mg, not much different from that of Heroin or Oxycodone.
However, even someone with 1.4g or 3g of a CII narcotic in their possession w/o a prescription would still be assumed to be selling it.
This is the core of the problem I have with decriminalizing "personal" amounts of any drug. What is considered to be a 'personal amount' is generally very low. In reality, any amount of any drug can be a personal amount.
I think this case in Dubai is a good example of the extreme position that manifests from this kind of thinking. On the one end, it is assumed, in the US, that a 'large' amount of narcotics must inevitably be for sale and not personal consumption (and thus 'dangerous to society')- while in Dubai, even tiny amounts of drugs, however 'small', must inevitably be dangerous to society.
I think cases like this are very useful for Westerners to look inward at our own positions on criminal justice, the law and drugs.
To me it is just as absurd and barbaric to lock someone in a concrete and steel cage for life for the possession of 100mg of plant material as it is for the possession of 650g of Cocaine or Morphine.
