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Via The Agitator, it looks like the out-of-control narcotics unit in Philly that I keep writing about is even worse than we thought. It was bad enough when they were caught stealing from local businesses, but now one of these guys has been accused by multiple different women of groping them during drug raids. The accounts sound disturbingly consistent and credible.

Really, is there any limit here? Any at all? It's time for the city to jettison these maniacs once and for all.

If the new drug czar wants us to stop thinking of our drug policy as a "war on drugs" maybe he should tell police to stop trying to impress school children with their noisy war machines:

The students at the High Point Elementary & Adolescent Schools were greeted two special visitors who landed an Army National Guard helicopter on the school's baseball field in May.
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Once the dust had settled and the rotor had stopped spinning, students were invited to get an up close look at the Kiowa, which is equipped with counter drug equipment for surveillance and heat sensing. Officer Chiaco explained that observation helicopters like these help fight the war on drugs by assisting the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and local police departments with counter drug operations. [Ashbury Park Press]

See, this is why the drug czar's new plan to pretend there's no war on drugs is destined to fail. People who hate the drug war will find no shortage of examples of gratuitous militarized drug war excesses to point towards. And the drug soldiers themselves will always bask gleefully in the perceived glory of their epic crusade.

In case anyone forgot, the U.S. Dept. of Justice is still trying to extradite famous Canadian marijuana activist Marc Emery for selling marijuana seeds to American customers. But they want everyone to know that the case has nothing to do with his political views:

"We've been very clear it had nothing to do with Mr. Emery's political stand," said Emily Langlie of the U.S. District Attorney's Office in Seattle. [Forbes]

Seriously? Then what the hell did former DEA boss Karen Tandy mean when she said this?

"Today's arrest of Mark (sic) Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement."
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"Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery's illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on." [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

There's no way to spin it and I can't imagine why they'd even bother trying. The DEA said it was political, so it's political. Lying about it now serves no purpose other than to tacitly acknowledge that political prosecutions are a bad thing.

The war on marijuana is considerably less popular than it was even a couple years ago when the crusade against Emery began. Now that the debate over marijuana laws is rapidly gaining acceptance in the political mainstream, the DEA's petty motivations for targeting Marc Emery have become such an embarrassment that federal prosecutors would rather lie shamelessly than admit what they're doing.

Under no circumstances will the prosecution of Marc Emery bring glory or even respect to the drug war trophy-hunters that undertook this obscene vendetta. The guy sold goddamn pot seeds on the internet and making a really big deal of out it will serve only to remind everyone that marijuana grows on trees.

LA Times has the strange story of an LAPD officer raided by his own department. He was apparently innocent of any wrongdoing and the report suggests that he was targeted precisely because he was a good cop who wouldn’t tolerate misconduct from his colleagues.

What a mess. Without knowing all the facts, I'm reluctant to say too much about it, but it's a very interesting report that's worth reading.

Opponents of reforming drug laws have often tried to dismiss our argument as some sort of carefully crafted conspiracy by "well-funded", "pro-drug" organizations seeking to manipulate the public into naively embracing their nefarious agenda. But the truth is that the movement to reform our drug policy is far bigger than the organizations or individuals behind it. It is just self-evident that our approach to drug abuse is deeply defective and anyone can figure that out on their own just by looking around.

Here's how New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof described his decision to write a piece on the merits of legalizing drugs:

"It's been a gradual process," said Kristof about his thinking leading to the decision to confront the issue. "I think that the economy being a particular mess makes me a little more skeptical about spending vast amounts of money incarcerating people on drugs, and then I think the degree to which Mexico has been erupting also has made me wonder." [Huffington Post]

This is beautifully simply and logical. Why are we spending all this money putting people in prison to stop them from using drugs? Why is Mexican drug war violence worse than ever after decades of aggressive drug war strategies that were aimed at reducing violence? Nicholas Kristof isn’t the only one who's just now beginning to think about it this way.

You could support the drug war your entire life and then wake up one morning asking yourself these questions.