Should medical marijuana be kept from minors at all costs?
We should also ask:
Should Sheriff Pat Hedges, the local deputies and the federal thugs who accompanied them on the raid of Charley Lynch’s medical marijuana dispensary be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity?
If the entrenched legislative bodies and criminal justice system will not properly deal with these perps then it is time to create a replacement system.
Via Winston Smith.
The Flint, Mich police are apparently a bit underworked so their interim chief has intitiated a war on saggy britches:
Dicks, who took over the department last month on an interim basis, announced that his officers would start arresting people wearing saggy pants that expose skivvies, boxer shorts or bare bottoms.
“Some people call it a fad,” Dicks told the Free Press this week while patrolling the streets of Flint. “But I believe it’s a national nuisance. It is indecent and thus it is indecent exposure, which has been on the books for years.”
It looks to me that it is more about copping a feel:
MarcinSzczepanski/DFP
Their focus seems to be on guys but, surely, the rules apply to the ladies as well. Imagine the possible outrage at the local swimming hole when all those thong bikinis are bared.
Will these arrests stand up in court? I suspect that this Dicks’ personal vendetta will be tossed out on its hind quarters somewhere up the judicial system.
Via The Agitator who has a nice graphic explaining the rules.
Do you really want to live in a surveillance state?
4:25 Minutes
Via Samizdata.net
…read Radley.
This is definitely a case where you should do what Megan says!
Read Radley!
NB: If you are not into it you may skip his American Idol posts.
In an essay in Time magazine 4 of the writers of The Wire commit:
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
One of the writers, Dennis Lehane, was interviewed today on NPR by Scott Simon. It is well worth the 4 minutes.
Here is one of the exchanges:
SS: Some of the most articulate and passionate proponents of drugs laws and, in fact, fierce and aggressive police action to enforce the drug laws are people who live in inner city communities…who say drugs have ravaged our neighborhood. They’ve taken almost half of an entire generation from us. We have to stamp this out.
DL: There is absolutely no way I can argue against that argument. I am not argueing for mass legalization of drugs. I’m argueing for a different, more common sense approach to the drug war, if you will. And, saying, I don’t believe that the drug war as it is being fought now is working is working.
Since Dennis won’t argue let me, in radio sound bite form, do it for him.
The drug war is the monster that has ravaged your neighborhoods. End it and you will be able to reclaim your neighborhoods. To end it you must hold accountable the stakeholders in the drug war: the politicians, the DEA, the police departments and prison industry whose livelihoods depend on ravaging your neighborhood. The blood is on their hands.
If the drugs had been available in the corner drug store like beer or the liquor store like Jack Daniels you would not have lost half of an entire generation. Yes, prohibition must end; there must be mass legalization.
Would folks still use and abuse drugs? Sure. Just like folks, including most of the drug war stakeholders, use and abuse alcohol.
What you would not have is drug war related brutality in your neighborhoods, 1 in 15 of your young men in penal institutions, or drug gang related mayhem throughout much of the world.
Take one small step to End it now! Vote to acquit when there is no violence involved.
On a related note see these posts on jury nullification by Radley Balko.
I’d certainly do this. If only I’d get called to jury duty. I’ve been around long enough that you’d think it would happen, but no. In the meantime Mrs Modulator has been called many times.
