You Can Go to Jail For 27 Years For Selling Marijuana

Famed NY Giants kicker Lawrence Tynes won't get to celebrate his Super Bowl victory with his brother. As The New York Times reports, Mark Tynes is serving 27 years in prison for selling pot.

"I'm not embarrassed about it," Lawrence Tynes said. "Everyone has skeletons in the closet or whatever. You could go in that locker room and find 50 other stories probably similar to mine. He’s my brother. I love him. He made some bad choices. Rightfully so, he should be punished. But the extent of the punishment, to me, is ridiculous."

So how do you catch 27 years for a marijuana crime? Prior convictions don't help, but it seems that refusing to rat out other people was the biggest factor here:

But Mark Tynes had a record, including felony convictions for possession. And he "paid a heavy penalty for refusing to cooperate," a managing assistant United States attorney told The Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal after sentencing. The others cooperated fully. They became government witnesses. Lawrence Tynes watched as each testified against his brother.

And as tragic as it is to think that selling a relatively harmless substance like marijuana can land someone in prison for decades, consider also that Tynes story never would have been told had his brother not kicked the field goal that put the Giants in the Super Bowl.

Whether they are sitting behind bars or merely sitting around after losing aid for college, the victims of America's brutal war on marijuana typically suffer in silence, injured and marginalized by laws far more potent and destructive than the drug they prohibit.