Come On, Live Free

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The Gary Johnson Campaign has put out this think piece.

Killing old women in the name of morality.

Helen Pruett is an 76-year-old woman living alone. As is often the case at that age her health is fragile. She previously had three heart attacks but in recent years was doing fairly well, all things considered.

But things took a turn for the worse quite suddenly, unexpectedly and unnecessarily—all thanks to the drug warriors and their ill-considered, counterproductive war on drugs.

While supposedly safe in her home, this elderly woman suddenly found armed thugs shouting and screaming, guns drawn, at every door and window. A swarm of men, with violent intentions, surrounded her. Included in this assault were local and federal agents.

During the raid Mrs. Pruett suffered a heart attack. The drug warriors said they had the house under surveillance for two years and that the "suspect" wasn't there. But Pruett lives alone so the "suspect" is never there. In other words anothe screw up by incompetent, adrenaline driven armed thugs put another innocent person in harms way all to protect us from the evils of drugs. Who will protect us from the evils of the war on drugs?

According to Pruett's daughter the woman is now in the Intensive Care Unit and is "not in good condition." The daughter said: "She was traumatized. Even the doctor said this is what happens when something tramatic happens. He said its usually like a death in the family or something like that just absolutely scares them half to death, and that is what has happened.

The daughter claims she recently learned of another such raid by the SWAT team and DEA thugs where they "went into some other elderly woman's home who was on oxygen and took her oxygen off of her and scared her half to death."

I am the first to say that illegal drugs are not good things. They do harm people, just not as much as the war on drugs. And the harm illegal drugs do to people are a direct result of the choices made by those who are harmed. The war on drugs is a threat to all of us, and Helen Pruett is a living—for now at least—example of that.

The police chief says he apologize for the mistake. That and $1 will get you a drink at McDonald's but it won't cover the cost of intensive care for the woman he scared.

Chief Kenny Dodd defends his decision to draw guns on the old woman. "These were considered high-risk warrants. These individuals are known drug dealers and they were looking at a lot of time in federal prison, when we serve those type of warrants, we usually go in with guns drawn just to protect ourselves." This is precisely the reason officers get shot by innocent people whose homes are attacked because of the constant errors made by these morons.

In a bizarre move Dodd is now claiming: "We didn't botch a drug raid." Instead he says "he and 12 officers went to the home and did surround it" because the suspect, Tim Washington, was thought to live there. But he didn't live there, Pruett did. That the armed drug warriors surrounded the house of an old woman, because they had it wrong as to who lived there, is a botched drug raid no matter how Dodd tries to spin it. Police confirm Pruett had no connection to the man they were looking for, but don't say they botched it. An even more twisted example of police logic is that Dodd says Pruett's home was never part of the investigation, but that it was listed on the warrant the police secured. So, they never actually investigated who lived at the house, got a warrant to raid the property, did so, an old woman has a heart attack as a result, but don't you dare call it a "botched drug raid." How stupid do you have to be to be a cop in Georgia?

Dodd is now trying to spin the claim that Pruett's heart attack had nothing to do with armed thugs surrounding her home. He says: "We were there to serve an arrest warrant. [Yep, on someone who never lived there.] While we were there, she had a heart attack. [And you don't think the presence of heavily armed, potentially violent, men on her doorstep had nothing to do with it?] We rendered aid. [I guess she should kiss your feet because you didn't shoot her on the spot.]" Dodd says: "I just want our citizens to know the truth." So do I. Here it is. Cops are a threat to you life. The war on drugs is now more dangerous that drugs themselves. Dodd botched the drug raid, Pruett is possibly dying because of it. But Dodd makes it sound as if Pruett was lucky the drug warriors were there since they could help get an ambulance for the heart attack they caused.

In the Cory Maye case it lead to the death of a police officer, and Maye's imprisonment. In the Kathyrn Johnson case the drug warriors managed to gun down the dangerous, terrified, and entirely innocent, 92-year-old woman. Annie Rae Dixon was 84 and bed-ridden when the drug warriors broke into her house by mistake and then, according to them, they "accidentally" shot her to death as she lay in her bed. Rudy Cardenas was out for a walk and happened to walk past a house as drug warriors were attacking. The warriors got confused, probably too many drugs, and thought he must be the suspect. Seeing armed men rushing at him he fled and was shot in the back multiple times, killing him.

Here are some facts. The war on drugs kills more people than the drugs do. Yes, the DEA is more deadly and dangerous than cocaine. And, as our cops militarized and turned into violent, armed gangs they have managed to drive out of the drug market dealers who themselves are not armed or dangerous. In other words, the drug warriors and their violence has resulted in the drug trade itself becoming far more violent. We are in arms escalation race between two armed gangs of violent criminals and innocent people like Helen Pruett, Corey Maye and Kathyrn Johnson get caught in the middle.

We witnessed the same sort of stupid violence when the moralists pushed through Prohibition in the United States. Alcohol production had been a peaceful activity until then. Suddenly we had shoot-outs in the streets and an escalation of violence. Government-sponsored, drug-war-related violence breeds more violence at all levels. This means more and more innocent people will die as a result of the escalation of violence, instigated by the drug warriors.

Keep in mind the premises behind the war on drugs and the damage it does to innocent people. And then consider a new book published by Liberty Fund. By consider I mean ponder, not consdier buying it. If anything you may wish to boycott Liberty Fund from here out. This blogger considers this new publication to be a total betrayal of the principles on which Liberty Fund was founded and a sign that the conservative rot in the libertarian movement is spreading. Please note that the arguments in this horrendous book would equally apply to the war on drugs—so the violence in the war on drugs appears to be something that Liberty Fund would have to endorse.

The book in question is The Enforcement of Morals by Patrick Devlin. Devlin wrote the book to attack the liberal principles of John Stuart Mill being used in the debate on legalizing homosexuality in. Devlin wanted it to remain a criminal offense. Liberty Fund's new book says that homosexuality "harm[s] society by undermining its moral structure" the same way that murder and assault" harm the individual. And we "ignore such behaviors at our own peril." They claim this assault on classical liberal vaues will "resonate and reverberate anew" with readers in light of debates on same-sex marriage. Devlin's arguments are an attack on classical liberal principles and marks a dramatic, troubling reversal, nay, a betrayal, of the liberal values once held by Liberty Fund.

This blogger wonders if Liberty Fund has gone to the dark side and certainly will be more hesitant to purchase any books from them. I also note that the results of the logic used by Devlin is what lead sto these deaths of innocent people due to the war on drugs. The principles that Liberty Fund is now pushing literally leads to killing people. Shame on them. For the record, the classical liberal reply to this blatant push for Big Government and collectivist principles is H.L.A Hart's work, Law, Liberty and Morality. Hart, not Devlin, upholds the principles that Liberty Fund formerly espoused.

What really bothers me is that the publication of this work degrades the wonderful books they do publish by mere association. Liberty Fund is not your usual publisher who publishes all sides of a debate. They supposedly, as their name implies, promote liberty. Thus they are putting a stamp of approval on a collectivistic, anti-liberal, statist argument and implying that this is actually liberty. That is is why it is more disgusting for them to do this, than it would be for Random House to do it.

Mississippi Drug War Blues: Prize Winner

This short film from our friends at Reason TV won Best Documentary Short prize at the Oxford Film Festial in Oxford, Mississippi. Even if they hadn't won this is a film everyone should watch about the war on drugs is destroying innocent people. A point I've long made is that illicit drugs harm those who choose to use them. The war on drugs harms people indiscriminately.

Lesson from a lying cop.

A former cop has decided to come forward and admit his numerous crimes as a police officer. Patrick O’Brien says that in his war on drugs he went to court and lied about evidence every single time, without exception.

This rare confession, unfortunately, does not come from an American police officer since Mr. O’Brien worked in New Zealand. In a shocking letter to the Chief Justice of New Zealand, Dame Sian Elias, O’Brien made his confession. He says he has been racked with guilt over his actions.

Mr. O’Brien says that he can not estimate accurately how many people went to prison due to his lies because he stopped counting when it reached 150. In all the cases where he testified, with invented evidence, he says juries returned guilty verdicts, with just one exception. O’Brien wrote: “In every case I lied to the courts and I lied to the juries to obtain convictions against my targets. Telling lies was easy -- ‘policemen don’t tell lies -- and my targets never stood a chance.”

In addition to lying under oath this ex Drug Warrior says that he tampered with evidence presenting in court drugs which were never confiscated from the person on trial. O’Brien says that the lies destroyed him to the point that he eventually quite the police force and left New Zealand. He says his life was “a tragic waste” and that “in what time is left to me” he intends “correcting the wrong that I have done.”

O’Brien has said he wants to apologize to the many people he victimized and will “assist in whatever way I can” those who wish to seek legal remedy.

In 1944 F.A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom. He discussed what happens to a society where is “is one common over-ridding end”. I think Hayek’s perception applies to the sort of moralistic crusades in which Drug Warriors, Moral Majoritarians and others participate. Hayek says once this over-ridding end is agreed upon “there is no room for any general morals and rules” and “it is inevitable that occasionally cruelty may become a duty, that acts which revolt all our feelings... should be treated as mere matters of expediency....”

When I watch the Drug Warriors in action I see Hayek’s warning. They believe they are serving a greater goal and they plow on continuing to do great damage to innocent people. The current antigay campaigns being whipped up by the Mormons and the Catholic Church are similar exercises. No one questions the morality of protecting children from sexual abuse and because no one questions it then it is easy to engage in the sort of crimes against children which this blog has reported on repeatedly.

It behooves libertarians to always question the methods we use to accomplish our gaols. The more convinced we become of the morality of our cause the more tempting it is to use unacceptable methods to achieve them. This can apply to the cause of liberty just as much as to erradicating drug abuse, protecting children or stopping terrorism.

All in all we must be most careful about the causes where we have the fewest doubts. For the more sure we are about the goal we seek, the less likely we are to scrutinize the methods we use to get there.

Drug warriors endanger us all.

By now we all know the story of Mayor Cheye Calvo from Berwyn Heights, Maryland. He, like so many Americans, was the victim of the war on drugs. Note that he was not a victim of illegal drugs. Illegal drugs can only hurt the people who choose to use them. He was a victim of the war on drugs itself, a war that kills, maims, and harms the lives of multitudes of innocents every year.

Calvo’s home was attacked by the jackbooted thugs who enforce the asinine drug laws. It appears that some drug dealers had a plan to ship drugs using the names and addresses of innocent people. The drugs would be shipped to an unsuspecting individual. A courier working for the dealers would intercept the parcel before it was delivered. Though, in at least one case, they actually came by asking for their parcel after it was delivered.

In this case, the drug warriors were monitoring the parcel and perhaps that was enough to put off the courier from intercepting the parcel. It was delivered to the Calvo home, addressed to the Mayor’s wife. The package company left it on the front stoop. Calvo, on returning home saw the package and picked it up. He brought it inside, put it down, and went upstairs to change clothes.

It was then that he heard thugs smashing down his door followed shortly after by gun shots. The drug warriors rushed into his room and assaulted him. In his underwear he was forced downstairs where he discovered the two family dogs had been executed by the drug warriors. His mother-in-law was handcuffed and pushed to the floor next to the dead animals, as the pool of blood around them spread.

Now, even the drug warriors admit that Calvo and his wife were entirely innocent and completely uninvolved in this scheme. But they are defending their actions -- as always.

The lying drug warriors count on public apathy and misinformation. For instance, in this case they justify the murder of two family dogs claiming that they felt threatened. Fuck! They always feel threatened.

They routinely execute family dogs in their botched raids. This is not something that happens periodically or rarely. If they raid a home, if the family owns a dog, they murder the dog in cold blood. Numerous witnesses, to such drug warrior attacks, have testified that they saw dogs being killed, even as the poor animals were trying to flee the drug warriors.

Yes, if a dog is a threat to someone that person has the right to kill the dog. That is true with any threat. But dare I point out that I feel more threatened by these crazed drug warriors than I do by most dogs. Dogs don’t break down people’s doors in the wee hours of the morning and come crashing in with guns drawn. Dogs that kill people are put down. Drug warriors that kill people are honored by other drug warriors. If feeling threatened were itself justification for killing not a drug warrior would be alive today.

Drug warriors are more dangerous than dogs. Drug warriors are more dangerous than the drugs they seek to confiscate. Drug warriors regularly, consistently botch things up and murder innocent people. Mayor Calvo is lucky he lived. He’s lucky he didn’t find his mother-in-law lying in a pool of blood as well.

Calvo’s wife spoke of a young girl who came to her after this horrific incident. The girl asked her how, if the police had done this to her and her dogs, how could this girl ever trust the police. That is a good question. I fear the honest answer is not one that the girl was given --- you can’t.

When the police of this country went from preserving peace to enforcing laws they went from protecting people from crime to protecting government from the people. The police are not there to help us. They are here to control us. And when stupid politicians pass stupid laws it is the job of these officers to pull their guns and force you into submission.

The typical police officer spends very little time actually protecting people from criminals. Most of his time is spent enforcing regulations on the public. A small percentage of his time is taken up standing between you and criminals. The majority of his time is spent controling you for his political masters. There are more laws that violate rights, these days, then which protect them. And most of the police officer’s time today is spent enforcing those laws. In other words, the typical police officer spends more time attacking your rights than he does protecting them.

When government is limited to the proper functions outlined by the Founders, then one should not have reason to fear the police. When government expands beyond those functions of protecting life, liberty and property, then the police are not your friends, they are the armed agents of organized crime. Their job is not to protect rights but to violate them.

They were doing their job when they executed Mayor’s Calvo’s dogs and pointed loaded weapons at Calvo’s head. They were doing their job when they pushed his mother-in-law down to the ground next to the murdered animals. The job of the police today is to violate rights and force you into obeying laws that violate your rights.

I have never been harmed or threatened by illegal drugs. I choose not to use them. I have never used them. According to my own personal morality, I happen to frown on anything that makes one intoxicated so that they inhibit or lose their ability to reason. So I will never use them.

But the drug laws, and the thuggery of the drug warriors, does threaten me. Mayor Calvo had no reason to think drug warriors threatened him until they smashed into his house. When 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston was mistakenly attacked by drug warriors she was terrified. Once again the lying officers started to break down her door, without announcing who they are, which seems routine these days. All the terrified, elderly woman knew was that some bad men were smashing into her home. She took out a handgun and tried to defend herself. The drug warriors executed the old woman -- the same way they execute dogs.

The drug warriors have intentionally created a violent, dangerous situation. They attack people’s homes, often in the middle of the night. They do NOT announce who they are. They do NOT attempt to serve a search warrant. They smash through doors and windows, with guns pulled, screaming orders at people. They use tactics which intentionally create confusion among their victims. And sometimes victims, fearful that they are being attacked by criminals (they are but the police don’t see it that way), defend themselves. If the victims defend themselves the chances the are good that they will be murdered by the cops.

And what will the cops do? Will they take responsibility? Not at all. They will start lying about what happened, as they did with Kathryn Johnston. They will claim that they announced they were cops before they smashed into the house. Invariably witnesses to these crimes say the police are making up their claims. The police will blame the victim of their attack for the attack. And when they can’t do that they will blame drugs and claim this is another reason that drugs should be outlawed and more homes attacked by drug warriors.

Once again the panic mongers have created a scenario where the solution is far worse than the problem. No one says that illegal drugs are entirely harmless. But the harm done by the drug warriors exceeds the harm done by the drugs.

I should also note, in closing, that while I’m glad that Mayor Calvo’s situation is getting publicity, countless innocent victims of the drug warriors are routinely ignored, or given very little publicity, merely because they are not part of the political class. Calvo is a politician, so he gets noticed. Kathyrn Johnston only got attention because she was an old woman. But numerous other victims of the drug warriors are barely noticed and quickly forgotten when noticed.

It’s time to end the war on drugs. And it’s time to start arresting the drug warriors for the violent crimes that they routinely, and regularly, commit.

Dumb and dumber: DEA outdoes NHS in stupidity

Yesterday I commented about “National Health Service logic”. The point was simple. While the NHS faced a reduction in customers receiving dental care it bragged that it was spending more money. They seemed to think that a reduction in services is compensated by spending more money for them.

This is typical bureaucratic logic. Rarely do they ever bother to look at actual output or real value created. Their entire emphasis seems to be on input --- how much they spend and how many bureaucrats they employ. In the real world the idea is to maximize output for the least amount of input. The difference is the value that is created.

Government employees think that the size of the bureaucracy is what is important. Of course, more employees and a higher budget might be a sign of something good, provided that the output is much higher and the created value is greater than before. But, as we saw in the dental service of the NHS the output had declined. Still the spokesman for the NHS thought a higher budget was a good sign.

Another bureaucratic agency, one far more destructive than the NHS, has published comments about their 35th anniversary. The Drug Enforcement Administration recently wrote: “At its outset, the DEA had 1,470 Special Agents, a budget of less than $75 million, and a presence in 31 countries. Today, the DEA has 5,235 Special Agents, a budget of more than $2.4 billion and 87 foreign offices in 63 countries.”

With such massive increases in spending exactly what value has been created?

If we grant the premise that the DEA ought to reduce drug flows there is a problem. They aren’t managing that. Last year John Walters, head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, admitted: "A perennial goal of US anti-drug policy has been to disrupt supplies enough to constrain availability... this effort, however, has consistently failed to achieve lasting increases in drug prices or reductions in drug purity levels. Rather, cocaine prices have been in general decline since 1982. And according to new estimates, which the White House drug czar's office quietly provided to a US senator in January, this decline continued apace in 2006."

Some basic economics will tell you that a long term decline in the price of cocaine indicates that the supply of cocaine is increasing relative to demand. Cocaine is easier and cheaper to find today than it was when the DEA was born.

But, hey folks, they’re spending a lot more money and have a lot more staff. And they brag about that increase in spending and staffing as if that alone justifies their existence. Of course, even if they somehow managed to succeed that would not be sufficient to justify their existence.

Bush: just whistling in the dark.

What a sad, pathetic creature Mr. Bush has become. He doesn’t even appear to believe his own lies anymore. He is the quintessential schoolboy walking through the graveyard at midnight whistling away in the hope of proving to himself, and anyone else watching, that he’s not afraid.

It isn’t as if he didn’t know that Gen. Petraeus would give the Bush “surge” a thumbs up. That was a given long before it was written. The problem is that Bush advisors know they have to tell the man what he wants to hear. The truth is not the issue. Loyalty is. And to Bush loyalty means telling him that his decisions were right and are working regardless of any factual information to the contrary. That’s how Bush got America into this messy war in the first place. He heard precisely what he wanted to hear and ignored anything to the contrary. Worse yet he made it clear that provided evidence to the contrary was grounds for dismissal. A petty man with the mind to match.

In his speech Bush claimed the “the Iraqi army is becoming more capable”. Gee, that doesn’t say much. But a report on the state of the Iraqi army said it will take another year or two before it can contribute much of anything. The report said the police force was corrupt and and should be disbanded.

A symbolic withdrawal of a few troops is only meant as a sop to the voters who are sick and tired of this war. Considering that the troop levels were recently boosted the withdrawal, in reality, may well end with more troops in Iraq than before the “surge”. This is like doubling the price of meat at the grocery store before advertising a 25% off sale. Bush admits the war is going to drag on for years and years to come.

No doubt support for Bush’s perpetual war policy will increase slightly. That will come for the voters who only know what the government tells them. These are the kinds of people who really do think weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq or that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attack. The problem is that these people have notoriously short attention spans. And since Bush gave nothing dramatic in his speech verifying real progress there is no single event to keep their attention. The increase in support is most likely to be a short one. And it certainly won’t last until November of next year.

The real legacy that Bush will leave America, beyond the increasing dead and the deficit will be a Democratic majority and Hillary in the White House. George Bush has singularly destroyed the “small government” principles -- admittedly very weak principles -- in his own party. But this is a man that pretty much botched up every “job” he has ever held.

I suspect Mr. Bush is fully cognizant of his own astounding inabilities to get anything right. That, no doubt, is behind his constant demands that his advisers only tell him what he wants to hear. To disagree is to remind him of how inept he is. One thing you can say about the man -- he is unskilled on a borader range of topics than one normally would expect.

The great misfortune of political power is that it allows the mistakes of one man to impact the entire country. Despise the market if you want but when a businessman makes a mistake the damage is limited to himself, his employers and stock holders -- if any. When politicians make mistakes we are all forced to suffer because of it.

Is this the face of a drug dealer?

Frances Thompson (left) was lucky. The 80-year-old widow could have died when Drug Warriors raided her home. Thompson lives in Atlanta, only a few blocks from the home of Kathyrn Johnston, an elderly woman who was killed by these Drug Warriors only two months later. Some of the same police agents were involved in both raids.

Thompson was startled one day to find armed men invading her home. She wasn’t armed but she did have a cap pistol which she grabbed, no doubt to scare away the burglars she expected to encounter. When she realized the armed thugs who had broken into her home were police she put down the toy. The Drug Warriors then searched the apartment for drugs and an alleged drug dealer named Hollywood. Neither existed apparently, at least not at Thompson’s home.

Police had a warrant to attack Thompson’s home. It was easily secured when they told a judge an unnamed “confidental informant” purchased the drugs from a man named Hollywood at the apartment. Similar claims, now proven to be concocted, were made in the Johnston killing. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports: “The narrative is written as a fact, as if the officer witnessed the transaction.”

A neighbor of Thompson’s tried to warn police before they broke down the door that the apartment was not a drug den but occupied by a deeply religious old woman. The neighbor was told to “Mind you own business.”

Thompson was terrified that day and that terror all came back to her when, two months later, she found out about the killing of Kathyrn Johnston under very similar circumstance. “I thought it was awful. Here it was the same thing that happened to me,” she said.

The Drug Warriors of Atlanta have terrorized innocent people and their terror tactics lead to Johnston’s death. After Johnston’s murder two narcotics officers admitted how they concocted the evidence to secure a warrant for the Johnston home. First, they assumed that one man was a drug dealer. They couldn’t find any evidence to verify that so they planted drugs which were then used to bust the man. They pressured him to give them another “dealer’s” address so they could have another drug bust. He, not a confidental informant as police tried to claim later, gave them Johnston’s address.

Of course if he wasn’t a dealer then he wouldn’t know other dealers. If he were afraid not to give up information he might invent it on the spot. And since police had to plant drugs in order to arrest the man their is certainly good reason to doubt he was a dealer at all. The actions of these Drug Warriors has destroyed confidence in the police in the poor neighborhood where these two women lived.

Journalists found that many in the neighborhood are afraid to speak to them and they say the reason is fear of police retaliation. The neighborhood has crime, lots of crime, and the residents don’t know who fear the most: the criminals or the police. Kathyrn Johnston was so afraid of crime she lived behind bars and rarely left her home or allowed anyone inside. But it wasn’t the “criminals” who killed her, it was the police. One resident of the area told reporters: “I think the community would like to cooperate, but people are afraid to call the police. People are afraid of the cops.” He said: “The police need policing.” The Journal-Constitution reports “the police rule by intimidation and are prone to jumping out of their cars, frisking people and moving one.”

Anti-drug laws make drugs more potent.

Drug Warriors are harping about the increased strength of marijuana. The government’s National Institute for Drug Abuse (shouldn’t that be “against”?) says that the average levels of THC, the ingredient in pot that makes people high, has increased in recent years.

Here is their problem. Multiple millions of adults have smoked pot in their lifetime. And while they may not be thrilled that their adolescent children are doing so they aren’t in the panic mode that the government tries to encourage. So they must find a reason to panic adults who themselves have used pot. The higher potency is the hook.

One of the venal bureaucrats in the agency, John Walters, claims that today’s pot “has more harmful effects on users. This report underscores that we are no longer talking about the drug of the 1960s and 1970s -- this is Pot 2.0.”

Why is this the case? Well, in the article cited above they claim it’s the market’s fault. But there is no legal market in pot only a very distorted market riddled with massive and severe state intervention. Could that intervention be distorting incentives?

Consider the rise of “light” beers and cigarettes with less “tar and nicotine” in them. Why have those drugs, and they are drugs no matter how many Congressmen use them, decreased in potency but pot has increased? A major reason is that they are illegal. Here is why.

The United States government grabs people who smoke pot. It punishes them. It imprisons them next to rapists and killers. It treats these people like vicious, violent criminals when most of them are no such thing. Most are merely doing with pot what the Drug Warriors do with a gin and tonic, a whiskey sour or a beer. Now how nasty these Drug Warriors get depends on the weight of the pot. If you have X grams you are a criminal but if you have X+ grams then you are a major dealer subject to years, sometimes decades, in prison.

But pot smokers are not seeking quantity at all. They want to get a buzz just like the booze hounds in D.C. If the potency of the pot increases then the users can get the same high as before but with less legal risk. Penalties based on the weight of the pot encourages people to use more potent versions of the drug in order to reduce the harm done to them by the Drug Warriors.

Basically a smaller amount of pot gives the same high as before. That makes it easier to hide the stuff, something US citizens find necessary due to the law. Since the product has to be smuggled around the country the more potent the contents the more compact the quantity and the easier it is to avoid armed and dangerous Drug Warriors. Let us be clear on this. Drug prohibition creates incentives to increase the potency of drugs.

I’m not an advocate of drug use, legal or illegal. But I am an advocate of harm reduction. There is no sane reason to make matters worse.

So what was the cop smelling?

How many times have we heard the claim from police officers that they smelled something which their trained noses told them was marijuana. On the basis of their keen sense of smell they search a person, his car, or his home. Something similar happened to Terence Moore, as we reported.

In that case a police officer claimed, after he invented a reason to arrest Mr. Moore, that he thought he saw what appeared to his trained eye as marijuana flakes on the seat of Moore’s car. Of course he searched the car but never took those suspicious flakes out of the care for testing -- because they didn’t exist.

American football player Michael Vick was walking through the internal passport control at the Miami airport when he was told they wished to inspect his bag. Actually you aren’t given an option. In his bag was found a 20oz “Aquafina” bottle. Now since some moron in the British government invented the story that small bottles of liquids can be combined to create explosives on an airplane one is not allowed to take liquids aboard the plane.

Vick was told he could put the bag with his checked luggage or throw it away. Vick thought about and finally decided to chuck the bottle. But even thinking about it was considered suspicious. So one the vigilant morons hired by the American Travel Gestapo decided he would investigate the bottle further since hesitation itself is obviously a potential terrorist act.

According to the report from the State Attorney’s office: “Upon close examination Ms. Joseph discovered the bottle was modified to contain a hidden compartment behind the label.” She told her supervisor and they notified those clever cops.

Detective Kevin Kozak used his keen sniffing ability and, says the report, “immediately noted a strong odor of marijuana and a few dark flakes in the hidden compartment.” Oh, dear things aren’t looking good for Mr. Vick. After all a cop smelled marijuana and you know how reliable they are. And he saw flakes.

The “evidence” was sent off to the Metro-Dade Crime Lab for investigation and found --- nothing! You’ve heard of “seeing things”. Well, apparently the detective was “smelling things.”

Now why Mr. Vick been reluctant to throw out the bottle? Maybe because these special bottles cost about $20 each. Yes, they come apart and are used so you can hide valuables “in plain sight” so to speak.

Now what was the cop smelling with his keen sense of observation?

A chance that justice may be done.

For the first time in a long time I have a small feeling that justice just might be possible in some cases in America when cops go out of control.

I have posted several times on the police killing of Kathryn Johnson, here and here.

The basics are that drug cops in Atlanta attacked the Johnson home claiming that it was a center of drug trafficking. It was instead occupied by a terrified 92-year-old grandmother who suddenly found strange men breaking down her door. She pulled a gun and shot in self-defense. They killed her in return though she only managed to wound the attackers. Too bad!

Once it was determined that there was no drug sales going on there at all. The woman defended her home from what appeared to her to be armed attackers. The police lied in obtaining a warrant. They lied about what happened throughout. And Kathryn Johnson died because of those lies.

Now something very rare has happened. The typical response of the police and local officials to cover up police lies and allow these “legal” killers to escape justice. But prosecutors in Atlanta deserve applause.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that DA Paul Howard “will seek criminal charges, including felony murder, against three Atlanta narcotics officers involved in a botched drug raid”. Please note that it is not the botched part that makes them criminals per se it is the fact that they lied to the get the warrant and acted illegally. The officers are charged with felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, burglary and making false statements and violation of oath. Hallelujah! They deserve it.

The indictment names Gregg Junnier, Jason R. Smith and Arthur Tesler specifically. All three were involved in the murder of Kathryn Johnson. And it was murder. Read the previous posts for clarity on what happened.

The indictment notes that the officers claimed an informant purchased drugs at the home earlier on the day of the raid. It also notes that was a lie and that no such thing had taken place. DA Howard says he “will not rest until every person responsible for [Johnson’s] death is held accountable...”

That has police worried. Legal experts say that “if the warrant to enter Johnston’s home was based on deceit, all actions that occurred after police broke down the door could be considered criminal.” Now that is troubling to drug cops in particular who routinely lie.