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Trivia, Page 5 Pages: ‹1› ‹2› ‹3› ‹4› ‹5› ‹6› ‹7› ‹8›
[A] mandatory 5-year sentence is prescribed for distribution of 500 grams of cocaine or 5 grams of crack. [...] Simple possession of 5 grams of crack also produces a mandatory 5-year sentence. The maximum sentence for possession of any quantity of other drugs is one year...
With one prior felony drug offense, the sentence for distribution of 50 grams of crack is a mandatory 20 years to life. [...] With two prior felony drug offenses, the sentence is a mandatory life term without parole. [Under the sentencing scheme of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and subsequent legislation.] [...]
Starting in 1972, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) began its campaign to reclassify marijuana. After some fleeting success in 1988 when an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) declared that the DEA would be acting in an "unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious" manner if it continued to deny marijuana access to seriously ill patients, and concluded that it should be reclassified as a Schedule III substance, Grinspoon v. DEA, 828 F.2d 881, 883-884 (CA1 1987), the campaign has proved unsuccessful. The DEA Administrator did not endorse the ALJ's findings, 54 Fed. Reg. 53767 (1989), and since that time has routinely denied petitions to reschedule the drug, most recently in 2001. 66 Fed. Reg. 20038 (2001). The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has reviewed the petition to reschedule marijuana on five separate occasions over the course of 30 years, ultimately upholding the Administrator's final order. See Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics v. DEA, 304 U.S. App. D.C. 400, 15 F.3d 1131, 1133 (1994).
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In 1970, Congress enacted the Controlled Substances Act (Act), 84 Stat. 1242, as amended, 21 U. S. C. § 801 et seq. The Act establishes five categories or "schedules" of controlled substances, the manufacture, possession, and distribution of which the Act regulates or prohibits. Violations involving schedule I substances carry the most severe penalties, as these substances are believed to pose the most serious threat to public safety. Relevant here, § 201(a) of the Act authorizes the Attorney General to add or remove substances, or to move a substance from one schedule to another. § 201(a), 21 U. S. C. § 811(a).
When adding a substance to a schedule, the Attorney General must follow specified procedures. First, the Attorney General must request a scientific and medical evaluation from the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), together with a recommendation as to whether the substance should be controlled. A substance cannot be scheduled if the Secretary recommends against it. § 201(b), 21 U. S. C. § 811(b). Second, the Attorney General must consider eight factors with respect to the substance, including its potential for abuse, scientific evidence of its pharmacological effect, its psychic or physiological dependence liability, and whether the substance is an immediate precursor of a substance already controlled. § 201(c), 21 U. S. C. § 811(c). Third, the Attorney General must comply with the notice-and-hearing provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U. S. C. §§ 551-559, which permit comment by interested parties. § 201(a), 21 U. S. C. § 811(a). In addition, the Act permits any aggrieved person to challenge the scheduling of a substance by the Attorney General in a court of appeals. § 507, 21 U. S. C. § 877. It takes time to comply with these procedural requirements. From the time when law enforcement officials identify a dangerous new drug, it typically takes 6 to 12 months to add it to one of the schedules. S. Rep. No. 98-225, p. 264 (1984). Drug traffickers were able to take advantage of this time gap by designing drugs that were similar in pharmacological effect to scheduled substances but differed slightly in chemical composition, so that existing schedules did not apply to them. These "designer drugs" were developed and widely marketed long before the Government was able to schedule them and initiate prosecutions. See ibid. To combat the "designer drug" problem, Congress in 1984 amended the Act to create an expedited procedure by which the Attorney General can schedule a substance on a temporary basis when doing so is "necessary to avoid an imminent hazard to the public safety." § 201(h), 21 U. S. C. § 811(h). Temporary scheduling under § 201(h) allows the Attorney General to bypass, for a limited time, several of the requirements for permanent scheduling. [...] Because it has fewer procedural requirements, temporary scheduling enables the Government to respond more quickly to the threat posed by dangerous new drugs. A temporary scheduling order can be issued 30 days after a new drug is identified, and the order remains valid for one year. During this 1-year period, the Attorney General presumably will initiate the permanent scheduling process, in which case the temporary scheduling order remains valid for an additional six months. § 201(h)(2), 21 U. S. C. § 811(h)(2). [...]
...[T]he Guidelines instruct a sentencing judge to base a drug-conspiracy offender's sentence on the offender's "relevant conduct." USSG § 1B1.3. And "relevant conduct," in a case like this, includes both conduct that constitutes the "offense of conviction," id., § 1B1.3(a)(1), and conduct that is "part of the same course of conduct or common scheme or plan as the offense of conviction," id., § 1B1.3(a)(2).
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The settled rule is [...] an expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 361, 19 L. Ed. 2d 576, 88 S. Ct. 507 (1967) (Harlan, J., concurring). The application of that rule involves consideration of the kind of place in which the individual claims the privacy interest and what expectations of privacy are traditional and well recognized.
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