Video – Attorney Darryl Stallworth Explains How Drug Laws Have Changed In California Over The Past Few Decades As Well As The Criminal Defense

Ray Hrdlicka – Host – Attorneys.Media

I want to take a look at another part of your website right now, and that is about the drugs.  There’s been a lot of changes in the drug laws of California, of course, and has your practice changed with those drug laws?  I mean, what have you found that’s different today, versus ten years ago?

Darryl Stallworth – Criminal Defense Attorney – Alameda County, CA

We don’t have the hand-to-hand sales of crack cocaine.  That period of the 80s and 90s, when I first started as a prosecutor… though, that filled 75 percent of what we were doing in the criminal justice system.  It was a crack epidemic.  That crack epidemic produced robberies and murders and stabbings and territorial fights that no longer exist at that level.  

There are still some sales, but we’re not investing into drug narcotic task force like we used to in the 80s and 90s.  It’s not being used at the same level.  There are people that are doing better without becoming addicted to this particular type of drug, the old base of cocaine, and what was being transferred.   And so that’s subsided as well.

So, I would say that drug trafficking is down to a minimum.  Now, drug use is still out there, but drug use only becomes relevant when you’re impaired while you’re driving, or it’s impacting your domestic relationship.  A part of the formula that creates that type of violence.  And also for folks who are mentally impaired, the use of drugs also serve as importantly of igniting the formula that I always talk about as the drugs, the anger, the temper and the weapon…that’s where we get a lot of our homicides.