5 Ways Law Enforcement Has Bungled Drug War Raids

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http://www.alternet.org/drugs/155313/5_ways_law_enforcement_has_bungled_drug_war_raids/

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1. The Oaksterdam Outrage

The House Minority leader's admonishment of the Obama administration's Bush-like excesses may have had nothing to do with Chong proper, as it was greenlit after San Francisco locals leaned on Pelosi after too many Bay Area dispensary crackdowns messed with their lives and heads. But you can draw a line through those recent San Francisco dispensary shutdowns back across the Bay to Oaksterdam University, the Oakland-based for-profit college created by activist Richard Lee and punitively raided for tax arcana this April. As the force behind California's Proposition 19 and Oaksterdam University's conscientious cannabis curriculum, Lee was the effective leader of the Bay Area's legalization movement. But now he's dethroned, Oaksterdam is displaced, and the tolerant Bay Area has evidently been made an offer it can't refuse. The gangster jargon is on purpose: "Every time you close down someone like Richard Lee, no one is cheering louder than Mexican cartels," cannabis law attorney Lisa Gygax told the San Jose Mercury News after Lee relinquished his cannabis-related business ownership in preparation for possible federal indictment. Speaking of gangsters...

2. D'ope! Mexico's Going to Get High, Dude

Like the lucrative-for-some war on terror, the war on drugs' global bungle stumbles onward. Lately, it's been stomping drug warriors right in the church pews of President Felipe Calderon's native Michoacan, prompting outrage from Mexico City's Catholic bishops caught in the crossfire. The irony that the ongoing Mexico drug war is the logical afterbirth of America and Mexico's joint Operation Michoacan -- whose hypermilitarized response to an increasingly permissive drug culture either has no future or is the future -- is lost on no one. Even the cannabis is laughing: One of Mexico's biggest recent drug busts ever uncovered tons of tightly wrapped packages with noted pothead Homer Simpson woo-hooting, "I'm going to get high, dude!" A deeper irony is even more laughable: Mexico used to smuggle pot from South America, but like the rest of us recessionary strivers has decided to rely less on foreign imports and grow at home when possible in a warming climate. Maybe they'd stop shooting up Tijuana and Rosarito for economic primacy if we stopped sending middle-class partiers there in search of cheap drugs and thrills.


3. (Masturbatory) Police Story

Officer Joseph Harvey got off easy, so to speak. During a drug raid in Philadelphia, Harvey allegedly had nothing better to do than order a woman to strip and watch him masturbate. But he seems to have friends in the right places: The case against him has been thrown out thanks to a laggard district attorney's office that took too long to prosecute it, and thereby denied Harvey his constitutional right to a speedy trial. The DA's greatest bungle would seem to be that it already had what ruling judge Barbara A. McDermott complained was "the benefit of an extensive investigation resulting in solid physical evidence" courtesy of an Internal Affairs probe. But I guess that depends on whether you're a seven-year police vet, or a poor kid holed up in an abandoned Kensington house with a creepy guy with a gun who's asking you to watch him do horny things. Or the frail Korean couple in Philly a couple years previous who were forced to the floor of their store during a baggy raid by narcotics officers who destroyed cameras and raided cash registers. Different strokes for different folks.

4. Beam Me Up, Peace Officer

Lame paramilitary drug raids aren't just ludicrously performed on empty houses, warehouses and for-profit universities, but also cars. That's what two Trekkies found out the weird way after Illinois police officer Michael Reichert pulled them over after a convention, in search of contraband. (What, robots?) The good news is that, like in Star Trek itself, nothing really bad happened, but there were lots of dangerous, dystopian impulses at work. Using a variety of tricky tactics and canine training, Reichert more or less coerced the Trekkies into giving up their Fourth Amendment rights without even knowing it, which then allowed him to search their car without probable cause and is evidently an at-will perk of the policeman's job. At the other end of Reichert's spectrum disorder are the Minneapolis State Patrol officers recently accused of getting citizens -- including some Occupy Wall Street activists it wanted to turn into snitches -- "high as fuck" as part of its excellently named Drug Recognition Evaluator program. Sure, the plan sounds simple: Get a bunch of people high, so you can spot high people. But like most drug raids, er, interventions, this doomed enterprise had little future from ignition. By the time a shocked (shocked!) City Hall sorts out the hypocrisy, the drug war may have its funniest black eye yet.

[malcolmkyle]

1. Corrupt to the core!

"Narcotics police are an enormous, corrupt international bureaucracy … and now fund a coterie of researchers who provide them with ‘scientific support’ … fanatics who distort the legitimate research of others. … The anti-marijuana campaign is a cancerous tissue of lies, undermining law enforcement, aggravating the drug problem, depriving the sick of needed help, and suckering well-intentioned conservatives and countless frightened parents." – William F. Buckley, Commentary in The National Review, April 29, 1983, p. 495