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It’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a situation in which police could be held accountable for recklessly killing someone in a drug raid:

LIMA, Ohio (AP) - An outside review has concluded that a Lima police officer didn't violate any department rules in the fatal shooting of unarmed woman during a drug raid.

The findings are in a report issued by the Montgomery County sheriff's office.

A jury had previously acquitted the officer of misdemeanor negligence charges, so this is basically the second time his actions have been upheld. For the record, this is what a justifiable police shooting apparently looks like:

Chavalia, an officer of 32-years, had testified that he thought his life was in danger when he fired the shots. He said he saw a shadow coming from behind a partially open bedroom door and heard gunshots that he thought were aimed at him. It turned out the gunfire he heard was coming from downstairs, where officers shot two charging pit bulls. [ABCNews]

They’re shooting at shadows now? I could have sworn that’s not how it’s supposed to work. Maybe the liberal arts college where I earned my criminal justice degree was a little too liberal, but then again I’ve also tried out the "shoot/don't shoot" simulator at a police training facility, and the sergeant’s instructions on when we could legally discharge our weapon bore no remote resemblance to the fact pattern in the Wilson case. The finding here seems to be that as long as one officer shoots a dog, other officers may then panic and shoot anything that moves throughout the house.

Can there be any doubt about the message we send to our public servants when we forgive anything and everything they do in the name of the war on drugs? There’s no point in complaining that policies like this will result in babies being shot, because that’s already happened.

The governor has asked for public input on how to solve the budget shortfall.

The drug czar likes to claim that we criticize his ad campaign because we want more kids to use marijuana. Will he say the same about researchers hired by Congress?

Despite investing $1 billion in a massive anti-drug campaign, a controversial new study suggests that the push has failed to help the United States win the war on drugs.

A congressionally mandated study released today concluded that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign launched in the late 1990s to encourage young people to stay away from drugs "is unlikely to have had favorable effects on youths."

In fact, the study's authors assert that anti-drug ads may have unwittingly delivered the message that other kids were doing drugs, inadvertently slowing measured progress that was being made to curb marijuana use among teenagers.

"Youths who saw the campaign ads took from them the message that their peers were using marijuana," the report suggests as a possible reason for its findings. "In turn, those who came to believe that their peers were using marijuana were more likely to initiate use themselves." [ABC News]

Ironically, if reformers actually wanted more kids to use marijuana, we’d support the drug czar’s ad campaign. His propaganda appears to have encouraged use among those viewing the ads, even as marijuana use among America’s youth was decreasing overall. Based on the data, it's entirely possible that youth drug use would be even lower – and U.S. taxpayers would be $1 billion richer – if the drug czar had never run these ads in the first place.