For such an advanced and brilliantly innovative country, it is an amazingly clumsy, unjust, and corrupt desecration of the nation's ideals and squandering of its human resources.
The country's incarceration policy has the benefit to the government of removing almost a million unemployed African American and at least half a million ethnically diverse correctional officers from unemployment statistics.
Treating white collar crime like violent crime appeases the left and slightly balances the racial numbers in the prison system. The percentage of African Americans in the prison system is more than 4 times that in the entire population and there are 4 times more African Americans in prison than in higher education.  More than 5 million African Americans have been disenfranchised because of their legal records and we are now getting back to the level of black disenfranchisement. The per-capita number of blacks to whites in prison is nine times greater, nearly half of American Black males between twenty and twenty-mine are under some form of criminal justice supervision.
In practice, where it is decided whether indicted offenders will be streamed through federal or state courts to prison.  The African Americans are almost invariably fed in overwhelming numbers to the harsher federal system.  no one audible seems to take it amiss.
It is indicative of official American arrogance at its most inflated and obtuse that instead of suppressing drug appetites among it dilettantish bourgeois youth and degraded underclass, or using its immense military strength to secure its borders without strangling legitimate commerce and tourism.
The drug war has been a perfect illustration of the strength of supply-side economics, as the price has come generally down through greater supply, improved product quality, and rising demand, despite the imprisonment of more than one million small fry which are easily replaced by the drug trade kingpins. The War on Drugs has cost $1 trillion, and within America, has almost nothing to do with violence.  Drugs are involved in 1/3 of property crimes but only 5% of violent crimes.
People growing 1000 marijuana plants get mandatory 10 years, alternative policy options will have to be considered.C.Black