Why can big celebrities openly admit to taking illegal drugs, and have little to no action taken against them?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

1. They’re not under oath when they make these statements. Anyone who charges them would have to prove in court beyond reasonable they actually did the drugs at a specific time and place, and said celebrities are going to be uncooperative about confirming they did them.

2. They could have easily done them outside whatever jurisdiction decided it might be worth it to actually go after one of these cases. “I did cocaine” isn’t “I did cocaine in the jurisdiction of California”.

3. Prosecutors have discretion over cases they go after, both over whether they think they have a realistic chance of winning, whether it’s something actually worth trying to prosecute, and whether it’s in the public interest. These sorts of cases score very low on all these criteria.

/Example: Years back there was a brief “scandal” where a famous model was photographed in a nightclub with a bunch of lines of white powder on the table in front of her. The cops actually looked into it but the prosecutors decided not to bring a case as they had no way to prove what those white lines were. Like, we’re all pretty sure it’s cocaine, but there’s a lot of white powders out there.

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