To the OP, please understand that what follows is not intended to be a personal attack on you. Rather, is my personal analysis of your situation, and a look at some flaws in your reasoning......
treadlightly wrote:When young and stupid, I didn't always vacate the premises when someone had illegal drugs. Now, it's a totally different story. Light up and I become one with the highway.
I'm wiser.
Your doper friends have friends. Do you trust them? Do you trust their dealers?
How inconvenient would it be to pay a grand or so to replace your apartment door? If the police obtain a no-knock warrant they will bust right in. Who do you think will pay for that? Your friends may have towering legal fees. Just keeping your deposit probably won't cover the damage, and if you fail to honorably settle for damage and the costs of your eviction, your credit is going to take a serious hit. The landlord doesn't even have to call a credit bureau. All the landlord has to do is file in small claims court. The landlord will pay a $75 filing fee and won't pay a cent otherwise. The judgement against you will follow you for years like a puppy from a Stephen King novel.
How do I know? I was that landlord, once. An apparently nice couple who rented from me had ties I didn't know about to the Los Zetas cartel. There was about $1500 in repair cost following a no-knock raid.
The DEA confiscated more than $100,000 in cash in the raid but they had no intention of paying for damage. That was for me and the renters. I wasn't angry, just chapped for being dragged into the situation. The police told me I was lucky they only found meth, not the means to manufacture it. The EPA follows in the wake of meth lab busts. The hazmat cleanup can exceed the cost of a dwelling.
The lady of the house got to stay out of the indictments and keep her infant child because hubby agreed to roll over on Los Zetas, leading to another bust in Chicago. What do you think the Los Zetas thinks of the unindicted members of that household? Think they are completely safe? Los Zetas is known for sending messages with decapitations.
You know your friends are cool, though. Are your friends' friends cool? Any ties to serious crime? They say we're all just six links of indirection from Elvis. How many links away are you from Los Zetas, and if you think that's a ridiculous question, then why did I end up renting to one of their associates?
But it's Austin. Nobody cares about drugs there. Heck, even the DEA gives Austin a free pass, right?
Or, maybe not.
To the OP, the above story is a
perfect example of the laws of unintended consequences in action. The thing about unintended consequences is that you have only ONE means of controlling them, and that is to NOT engage in behaviors which have consequences way out of proportion to the risks involved.
Your situation is a perfect example.
You say that Austin cops don't care if your roommates (or you, or anyone else) possess or smoke weed. This opinion is based on exactly
what? A Wish Sandwich? Have you
actually contacted the APD in person and asked them what would likely transpire IF you, the non-user in possession of a firearm, with roommates who ARE users in possession of weed, were home when your apartment was raided on a tip from someone? (The "tip" being a factor over which you have ZERO control.) Let's say your roommates' dealer(s) gets rolled up by law enforcement. In exchange for a plea, he starts naming names of customers - among whom are your roommates.
And that's just the APD. Do you think the DEA isn't active in Texas? How about the Texas Rangers (not the baseball team)? Austin PD may choose to flout the laws regarding weed (which is STILL a STATE offense), but that doesn't eliminate the state or federal level agencies from the mix.
Just so you know, I don't personally care if your roomies smoke weed. I've been sober for decades, but I smoked a ton of it back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But the stuff IS still illegal in Texas, no matter how you want to parse the risks under which your roommates place you. The risks may be relatively small (in your frankly uninformed opinion.....uninformed because you haven't actually communicated with the APD yet about this), but the
consequences, over which you have ZERO control, can be HUGE.
One thing you'll learn as you get older is that
some risk aversion is conducive to a long, happy, and healthy life. But you can't manage risk if you are not completely informed about the
extent of the risk, and about the extent of the
consequences of the risk. Back in the 1980s, I used to roadrace high performance motorcycles on SoCal closed-course racing circuits. Having seen a couple of friends killed over the years, I was fully cognizant of the risks, and of the potential consequences.......but I was a single man. Then I got married. Then my wife got pregnant with our son, who turned 27 this last Tuesday the 10th of January. Suddenly, the
consequences of getting killed were a LOT higher. I quit racing. But you see, I could easily visualize the pre-and-post-pregnancy consequences, and the
risks were limited to the racetrack, since at that point, a motorcycle for me was no longer a daily transportation, but a special-purpose limited-use vehicle.
You think your risks are low based on an incomplete assessment of what APD will or won't do. Your risk assessment does not take into account what state or federal agencies might do. You're not fully informed about the
consequences, or you wouldn't be here asking about "Guns + Roommates using Marijuana". But you're willing to completely discount the best advice given here. Where I come from, they call that "sticking your head in the sand".
Please realize that many of the members of this forum, myself included, are somewhat libertarian in spirit when it comes to marijuana. Most of us don't and won't use weed, legal or not, because we think it is stupid to do that to yourself, but many of us also think it should probably be legalized - not because it is a good thing, but because society hasn't been able stop its use by making it illegal, spending literally over a $trillion on that effort over the last 40 years, so you might as well let people stupify themselves, and spend that money on other things......or better yet, reduce taxes.
But with all due respect, your question doesn't deal with "what's in the future for marijuana legislation", it deals with "what are the legal realities right NOW". And RIGHT NOW, you've gotten the best answers that a number of men older and more experienced than yourself could give you - based on a
lifetime of risk assessment and the lessons of unintended consequences. If you want to call bull on those answers, that's certainly your right; but you should also completely own, without complaint, the unintended consequences of your faulty risk analysis if it all blows up in your face.
I hope for your sake that it does not; but 64 years on the planet has taught me that it easily could......and you have no control over the if/when of it.
I don't think anyone else is either. I'll sleep just fine whether or not the OP goes to jail, whether he stays or moves, whether or not he takes any of the advice he's gotten here. I don't care if he likes it or not, or whether he takes it or not. He asked a question, I gave him my best response, as did the others. None of us has anything invested in the outcome. Whatever he does with the opinions he asked for is on him.