&gt; Why did our society make this error?<p>&gt; How do we prevent making the same mistake in the future, regarding other issues?<p>&gt; About what issues are we making the same mistake right now?<p>- Drugs are a classic victimless crime; prosecutions tend not to be motivated by someone filing a complaint. Rather, it is the responsibility of the police to detect the crime and mete out punishment as they see fit.<p>- Society has reward processes in place for police who identify and punish drug offenders.<p>Those two are sufficient for a lot of abuse. There are some aggravating circumstances:<p>- It&#x27;s easy for the cops to prey on low social classes, because they don&#x27;t report to them. The higher social classes aren&#x27;t really interested in what&#x27;s going on elsewhere. A doctor&#x27;s kid is unlikely to be the victim of planted drugs, and so is the doctor. That&#x27;s not because doctors&#x27; kids aren&#x27;t using so many drugs, it&#x27;s because the police aren&#x27;t really supposed to deal with the higher classes at all.<p>I see some other commenters saying that, e.g., society is always driven (at least in significant part) by racial tensions. While I don&#x27;t actually disagree, I think this is at root an issue of social class rather than race directly. Police preying on a community of white-collar professionals will be reformed.<p>Since these communities don&#x27;t have the political power to get rid of predatory police, the police are acting without supervision. It shouldn&#x27;t be surprising that they do what they feel like.