This is simply jawdropping:



The results of the study are available in the MPP-funded report False Positives Equal False Justice.

This research has quite far-reaching implications when you consider the massive number of drug arrests performed each year based on the results of these inaccurate field tests. With nearly a million marijuana arrests in the U.S. every year, the number of people convicted of marijuana possession who never actually had marijuana is certainly much larger than zero. I'd also like to know what other countries use these tests and what procedures exist to confirm the results before suspects are charged and sentenced.

It's a powerfully disturbing development and yet another reminder that nothing in the war on drugs is what it seems. When you pull back the curtain, every stage in the drug prohibition process is exposed as utterly fraudulent and perverted. Literally nothing that happens in the war on drugs is reliably correct.

I wouldn't have though it possible…but if we can't even trust police to accurately identify the drugs they're arresting people for, the drug war is somehow even more shockingly stupid and unfair than I thought.

The Baltimore Sun reports on Cheye Calvo's attempt to bring transparency to the use of paramilitary drug raids in Maryland. Unsurprisingly, the law-enforcement community is not interested in having their activities monitored:

However, the executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association says reporting requirements for SWAT teams should emanate from the law enforcement community, not legislators.

"Our data shows that when SWAT teams are deployed, the violence goes down," said John Gnagey, who was a SWAT team member for 26 years in the Champaign, Ill., police department.

I'd love to know what data he's referring to, because that just strikes me as false on its face. SWAT raids are inherently violent. The violence at Cheye Calvo's house wasn't reduced when the SWAT team showed up and started shooting his dogs repeatedly.

Of course, the SWAT director thinks the legislature should just butt out and let police decide which reporting requirements are appropriate. Did you hear that Maryland legislators? The SWAT team doesn’t want you nosing around in their business.

Police are fond of pointing out that if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about. Perhaps it's about time someone spat that line right back at them.