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Notes -
This is the story of America.
There is a very old and very respected tradition of people on death row being granted their last meal of choice before their execution. It's a remarkable gesture - it is a tradition from a society that will allow someone they have decided is not fit to live the dignity of a good meal before they are put to death.
Then one guy ordered a crap ton of food on Texas's dime and then didn't eat any of it. As a result, the judge ended the tradition, and as of last I checked Texas no longer offers prisoners on death row a last meal.
What I love about this story is that it's one of the most perfect microcosms of America - here is a wealthy, powerful society that treats even the people they decide to kill under their laws with some manner of respect, with the leeway to even consider this in the first place, and because of the individual freedoms allotted to every single one of them, they have to account for the edge cases where someone plays defectbot. And you can't even blame the defectbot for it, because going out kicking and screaming and full of spite is a right that is also allowed to the man playing defectbot. Worse, there were probably multiple ways that the ill effects of the man playing defectbot could be minimalized - it would have been trivial to set a budget cap on the last meal, and the tradition could be honored without throwing the whole thing out.
But no, everything has to be this way. I have zero faith in the American justice system's ability to decriminalize possession, or indeed the American state's capacity to apply punitive measures against criminal possession. You could say this is because of bad actors. But an American society that is permissive of these things doesn't have bad actors, simply actors exercising their individual freedom.
Change can come, when a critical mass of American society with suitable amounts of power decides that no, it is no longer permissive of these things, and that the drug-addled vagrants should not be allowed. Then they'll go back to locking them up in sanitariums or prisons, or finding other similarly ugly measures. The experiment doesn't matter anywhere near as much as this - there's no end of ways you can obfuscate or hide results that are unpalatable to certain interest groups.
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