Haven't gone through this whole thread but, my father, a very law abiding individual when I told on someone as a kid related a story to me. He grew up in Europe under German Occupation on a Greek Island within sight of the Turkish coast, their neutralerstwhile WWI buddies. What he said has stayed with me. He said that on his Island (he was a teenager that smuggled food and supplies to the partisans in the mountains, kept his eyes opened, smuggled copies of BBC newspaper, ect..) Again he said that the penalty for colaborating with the Germans was death.
Having said that, he was careful to live a law abiding life, especially with the IRS and profited in the country from abject poverty to making a good living- graduating from an IV Leaugue grad school, through honest, hard work.
He also told me that for the Spartans of ancient Greece, stealing wasn't considered bad, the shame was in getting caught stealing. His point of this story was that the career criminals new how to get out of trouble were as if you are a one time or occasional one you are likely to get caught...well sort of... he just wanted to telll the story about sparta and he was comming to terms with me getting arrested for a dime bag of weed in a small town (ironically, the penalty for my underage friends that got cited with EtOH was worse.) In the big city next door they gave me my weed back on 2 different occasions. My penalty- I paid $6.00 to go to a class for juvenile drug offenders once a week for a month or 6 weeks.
We are members in the resistance in a world wide war against prohibition. The growing chorus of opponents are retired politicians. The perpetrators...people who have a vested interest in the drug war. On both ends of the political spectrum are William Buckley Jr, a conservative and Milton Friedman, and on the other end George Soros but also Joseph D. McNamara, the guy on the pro prop 19 CNN commercials. He was chief of police in 1976-1992 and publically spoke out against the drug war then. He argued that to catch the big fish, you use confidential informants with promises to let them go, drugs, money, ect. He likened it to the military-industrial complex. The difference is that he was, a cop for 35 years, vetran narcs detective, and Police Chief of Kansas City, and then San Jose, 3rd largest city in CA and center of the Silicon Valley, he was privy to insider info the public wasn't.
So when you snitch, though its tough not to, you are being a collaborator and the Narco-industrial complex grows with Each snitch. Plus it helps Calderon put the competitors of his favored cartels out of business.
To establish the rule of law and good public image of law enforcement, drug prohibition needs to be chiped away at all fronts.
Darn, if only I had a partner, motivating one another may go a long way in actualizing this.
) but if i ever got one i really would care even less about the reprocussions afterwards. I figured if i ever got any record id fucking well earn it.