ELI5: How come the government was able to ban marijuana with a simple federal law, but banning alcohol required a constitutional amendment?

Any one? Are you kidding? You want me to google that for you? And how can you seriously think that police misusing force and legislature misusing legislation are anything but identical in the realm of political wrongs? Both of those segments (they're not whole branches themselves) are willing to disregard established judicial constitutional principles, simply to get the results they want. Force to cause compliance (or resistance which is even easier to arrest for than whatever they were doing that pissed off the cops in the first place), or illegal prohibitions on possession of physical substances for personal use. Both are denials of due process. You probably have a laymen's understanding of due process, not a judge/lawyer's understanding, so let's just leave that there.

And it's not a matter of whether they're being arrested for protesting. They're being arrested while protesting. Those arrests infringe on their first amendment rights and must be able to satisfy independent substantive due process standards. Cops don't know any of that though, since it's a complicated topic most people in law schools don't even understand that well. They just do what they're told, and they're told by people who spent their entire professional lives working up the rat race-ladder of the cop industry, so how the hell could they have spent the time it takes to learn the intricacies of 14th amendment due process? It's absurd to think they could be expected to learn what graduate students in their 2nd or 3rd years struggle with, after an entire year or two of more simple legal concepts to get them better at the general practice of reading judicial writings and gleaning the rules from them.

Point is, it is related, and you just don't understand that it is because you don't entirely understand due process. Both policies on the use of force and legislation regarding marijuana are subject to the same strict scrutiny due process standard, because they both involve fundamental rights, and both fail those tests because the laws/policies are overly restrictive for their stated means. They're related.

Also, in general, when people are asking questions, it's helpful to talk about things that are related, though which are not direct answers to the questions. Maybe you don't get how something that isn't directly related could still be related, though.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread Parent