Law /
Statistics of crime rates in Poland [44]
The problem is that the chemists are really entrepreneurial and already have the next analogs lined up to hit the market once the existing ones become banned.
Ewa Kopacz came up with a clever solution to this - instead of banning them, the sellers get prosecuted under food safety laws. It's a very effective way of shutting down the sellers, as they can't prove that the 'food' is safe to consume.
I believe there was some push to decriminalize personal possession of small amounts but I don't know if that passed though or not.
No, people in Poland are pretty much against such laws. PiS were always dead against it, and PO never saw any political gain in it. There are always some pro-weed groups in the Sejm, but they don't have popular support.
While in others it'd be a ticket - like in Ohio it'd be a $200 some dollar fine you wouldn't even have to go to court for.
What I've seen suggested is quite clever. You give someone a fine like a parking ticket, but you train the officers to try and elicit where it came from. If they can do it, you can bust the big guys while the small time guy gets a fine and nothing more. Makes sense to me.
Isn't that the prosecutor's job?
This is the somewhat insane system used in much of Europe. The judge in this case also investigates - so what happens is that the judge calls the parties to court to ask some questions, then adjourns the trial for weeks while he continues the investigation. It's complete nonsense - the American-style adversarial system makes so much more sense. The other issue is that the judge is required under the investigative system to be familiar with everything in the case, whereas in the adversarial system, he/she is only required to establish whether the defendant is guilty or not based on the evidence presented by the prosecutor.
In some areas, the police conduct sobriety checkpoints and they'll almost always nab at least one person a day.
Yep, it's very common on long weekends to be stopped. One cool thing that the police started doing was quick checks - they approach you at the traffic lights, get you to quickly blow into the machine and if you're clear, off you go. Much better than stopping people at checkpoints.
The limit is far less than in the US too - I believe it's like .02
Yep, .02 it is. Must say, it's a good law - Poles are idiots on the roads, and letting them have any more than 0.2 in the system is asking for trouble.
