Johnny Depp’s recent trial comes to mind – he openly admitted to doing cocaine but as far as I’m aware no action was taken
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In the US, we have something called the “corpus delecti” or “body of the crime” rule. It’s a complicated rule, but essentially it requires that there be some evidence, beyond a mere confession, that a crime occurred. A person cannot be be convicted if their “confession” is the only evidence that the crime occurred.
It’s derived from the days when people could be called before the king, coerced into confessing to imaginary crimes, then prosecuted for crimes that likely didn’t even occur.
So, for a statement like “I was high on drugs that day,” without extrinsic evidence, there is really. nothing to prosecute.
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