My personal belief is that you can put all of this down to bike-shedding, or more formally Parkinson's Law of Triviality.
Add a little risk/reward to the mix and an overarching system that impractically punishes failure to convict or prosecute, leading to risk-averse approaches, and you get a nice system that is happy to prosecute the low-level weed peddlers instead of the real players. Those people land on your desk or you get them from a traffic stop. Try to go further and you might lose your job or your pension. And, of course as a prosecutor or AG, make sure you plea-bargain everyone to boost your incarceration stats.
Lots of easy wins to cook the books without really touching on the real problem. So you've got Too Big To Fail in the black markets and the criminal world too.
(I hasten to avoid saying 'criminal-underworld' because our righteous overworld tends to be just as bad, if not worse in some cases.)
Add a little risk/reward to the mix and an overarching system that impractically punishes failure to convict or prosecute, leading to risk-averse approaches, and you get a nice system that is happy to prosecute the low-level weed peddlers instead of the real players. Those people land on your desk or you get them from a traffic stop. Try to go further and you might lose your job or your pension. And, of course as a prosecutor or AG, make sure you plea-bargain everyone to boost your incarceration stats.
Lots of easy wins to cook the books without really touching on the real problem. So you've got Too Big To Fail in the black markets and the criminal world too.
(I hasten to avoid saying 'criminal-underworld' because our righteous overworld tends to be just as bad, if not worse in some cases.)