Yesterday afternoon NPR presented a lengthy story on murder in present day New Orleans:

New Orleans’ murder rate is as high as it was in July 2005, but the city’s homicide squad employs one-quarter the staff it had before Katrina. Day or night, working conditions are beyond difficult.

Early in the piece the reporter noted that many think that the high murder rate, nearly double that of pre-Katrina New Orleans, is due to strife between gangs over drug sales turf. This may be true and midway through the piece one police officer is interviewed who very explicity describes the battles going on over various street corners. Yet of all the murders that are reported in the story only one closes with its cause: a 15 year old boy is killed by someone who thinks he stole his FEMA money.

Not drugs but Fema money.

However, if the good folks in New Orleans would like to dramatically reduce, if not eliminate, the drug turf murders and mayhem they can do so easily: legalize the sale and use of currenly illegal drugs. There are few murders over the marketing and sale of goods and services that are not suppressed by governments.

So, New Orleans, solve your drug related murder problem. Reject the failed war on drugs.

There are reason’s a plenty to toss out the current us federal office holders, all of them, and most of the domestic reasons get lost behind the bloody headlines of democracy’s international warfare.
Radley Balko at The Agitator provides near daily, oft multiple times a day, examples of federal, state and local government representatives abusing individuals, families and associations of individuals.
Asset forfeiture llegislation is a particularly heinous weapon in the government arsonal of extortion and theft tools and today Balko highlites a particularly onerous use of asset forfeiture:

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that police may keep the $124,700 they seized from Emiliano Gonzolez, an immigrant who by all appearances was attempting to use the money to start a legitimate business.
This is an outrageous ruling. Consider:
# Gonzolez was never charged with any crime in relation to the money, much less convicted.
# Gonzalez had an explanation for the money that a lower court found both “plausible” and “consistent.” He brought several witnesses forward to corroborate his story (in the preposterous land of asset forfeiture, property can be guilty of a crime, and the burden is often person the police seized the property from to prove he obtained it legally).
# The government offered no evidence to counter Gonzolez’s explanation.
Instead, the court ruled that the mere fact that Gonzolez was carrying a large sum of money, that he had difficulty understanding the officer’s questions, that he incorrectly answered some of those questions (due, Gonzolez says, to fears that if police knew he was carrying that much money, they might confiscate it — imagine that!), and that a drug dog alerted to the car Gonzolez was driving (which, as dissenting judge Donald Lay noted, was a rental, likely driven by dozens of people before Gonzolez), was enough to “convict” the money of having drug ties, even if there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Gonzolez.

Read the rest of the post and Balko has the link to the opinion.

Yep, part and parcel of the immoral war on drugs which is itself plenty of reason to convict every participant of crimes against humanity.