Just to be clear, the police only found a small amount of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor, but prosecutors tacked on a charge of child endangerment just to be assholes. Of course, what isn’t child endangerment apparently, is having a SWAT team kick down a front door in the middle of the night and shoot a kid’s dogs in front of him.
This is crazy. Absolutely crazy. How can anybody defend a national drug policy that leads to this?
Fucking pigs. Who are they keeping safe? Playing fucking war games, and prosecuting for weed. And kill the family pet for a bonus. Gee, wonder if this kid will respect cops? I sure as hell wouldn’t.
I dunno. I was against the war on drugs until I started reading Puddy, MarkthaRedneck and Klynical’s drug-addled posts here at HA. Clearly, Crystal Meth and Crack have a detrimental affect on a person’s intellectual capabilities.
Those drugs may also lead to Sarah Palin’s TeaBagger inspired GOP nomination. So maybe drugs actually ARE bad for America!
Arguing whether or not marijuana should be illegal is not beside the point. It is what people say when you point out that the government is interfering with my personal health decisions I make for myself that are not interfering with anyone else’s.
The legal structures used against marijuana use are, by orders of magnitude, far more harmful and destructive to people than the substance itself. They serve no other purpose than to intimidate and oppress the poor, manipulate commerce and suppress possible dissenters to government policy.
It’s what people say when you point out that marijuana, being illegal, is far less dangerous to individuals health than alcohol, which is legal and has literally centuries of documented negative health effects and social problems associated with its use. It’s what people say when you point out that the overly broad application of interstate commerce clause is what gives the Federal and State Governments the power to prohibit people from growing a single plant inside their own home, even if said plant never leaves the confines of the property of the offender, or even the state, nor would be likely to.
It’s what people say when they don’t want to talk about legitimate medical patients with cancer being forced to deal with a black market full of possibly violent people because the law demands either they continue to suffer, or risk their lives acquiring and using the medicine they need.
It is the laziest, most disingenuous statement out there. That the validity, ethics and rationale of legislation is inherently separate from the enforcement of those laws, and ultimately serve a different purpose from the intent of the law or the actual need for social regulation.
Even now, with drug laws and numerous other laws, police, agents of the courts cannot discern the differences between the needs of a society and the necessity for behavioral regulation at the personal level. There is not, and cannot reasonably be, a separation between the ethics of law enforcement or a fundamental sense of justice. What results from such separation is authoritarianism and anarchy. The law no longer serves the purposes of Justice or public safety, but merely the will of an oppressive minority who only seem to desire control of a society and its individuals, whether or not they are moral, ethical or decent people themselves.
They’ll find a way to blame it on Mexicans.
Militarize the police and the public becomes the enemy.
Every police officer involved in that Missouri raid and the chief of police should all be fired and prosecuted.
The only “child endangerment” came from trigger-happy thugs who fired weapons inside a home without knowing how many adults or children were in the house. They shot a pit bull and a corgi. The first shot was fired within seconds after the POLICE BROKE INTO THE HOUSE.
None of the cops involved in this incident should be allowed to handle firearms of any type in any circumstance at any time ever again. They have ZERO judgment when it comes to proper use and safety of a lethal weapon.
Most police officers are honest, professional, dedicated, hard-working public servants who put their life on the line to try to make the rest of us safe. But it’s cowards like the ones in this video who rightfully deserve the name PIGS.
Thank you, Goldy…
Then I guess It’d be OK to shoot one of their dogs if it was threatening.
Gosh.
Wait til the tea baggers find out about this. Talk about misuse of tax payer dollars and loss of personal liberty.
Now I understand why they fear their government so much.
I’m sure the protests will be tremendous.
@8
Police shoot dogs as a matter or routine on raids like this. It is Standard Operating Procedure. Look at how threatening this dog was.
Cops are cowards. People become police officers specifically because the business allows them to do things like this, and much worse. People who are attracted to violence, and have the desire to inflict it on others are actively recruited by police departments in every city. If someone demonstrates a reluctance to use violence they are screened out in training.
There are about 150 such raids every single day in this country.
@9
Teabaggers WANT this. This is the type of “law and order” they would like to see applied to a lot of things. This is perfectly acceptable to the John Birch Society folks who comprise the vast majority of the Teabagger movement.
Thanks for posting this Goldy. Just jarring. Hopefully this video gets the wide audience it needs to make more people aware of how dangerous this practice of night-time drug raiding has become.
A similar thing happened to my nieces family in Portland a couple of years ago. She was eight months pregnant, with a history of miscarriages, when they put her on the floor, on her stomach, after they burst into her house.
It ends up her husband gave a coworker a ride home. Keep in mind this wasn’t a friend, just a casual coworker. Anyway the police grabbed him and interrogated him, probably because he had a history of drug use. He ratted out my nieces husband, which was a total lie, saying he had marijuana.
So they launched a raid and this is how they justified going into the house: they “smelled” marijuana outside the house. Gees, real nice evidence. I wonder if they can bag up this “smell” and present it in court. To make it worse, there was no drugs in the house. Occasionally, just like many people, they enjoy cannabis as a casual user, but they didn’t have any other connection to drug dealing.
Thank god my niece didn’t lose her baby because of this brutality.
I have a real problem with cops using odors or smells as evidence. That is crap. It can never be proved one way or the other, plus smells don’t necessarily point directly to the item that smells.
Bullshit! Bullshit!
This reminds me of the guy whose dogs were killed when some smugglers had marijuana mailed to his house. There plan was to pick it up after UPS left the package. The guy was home and took the package inside. He got raided and two dogs killed. And he has zero connection to the pot. Sick crap! Obama should talk about this.
@10 – remember in A Clockwork Orange, two of the nasty thugs became cops at the end of the movie! It isn’t just the police, the military also attracts this type of element. There is a small percentage of people who thrill at the thought of committing violence on people. And to get paid for it, and for it to be completely legal, that is icing on the cake.
The real issue here ought not to be how the police behaved .. after all we do not know all the facts.
The real issue is the MJ law itself. There is no scientific support for the idea MJ is any sort of harmful, far out, addictive drug.
Believe me, things are much worse here in Pakistan. You can get raided and beheaded here! As for booze .. well we are a bit tolerant but don’t et the security forces find a bottle of Scotch when they raid your house for Taliban literature!
Even in the USA, a raid like this for acid or speed or ecstasy, or tea bags (the drug the righties use), might be justified.
As for the Corgi, well … “The most famous Welsh Corgis are perhaps those of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, who keeps at least four Corgis.” (wiki) Now, I will admit to a few forms of bigotry .. dislike for the Royals is one of them.
To call cannabis a “narcotic” really bothers me.
@14
I went to school with people who wanted to be cops when they grew up. They all went into the Army or Marines before they to the Police Academy. they took that military training to the streets and they use it. A few of them have combat experience, and they take that experience and awareness to the street. I personally know a cop who (off duty) shot a man outside a bar a few years ago, he shot the man because he wasn’t capable of defending himself without his weapon.
To the police, all civilians are just criminals who haven’t been caught yet. To the Police, everyone hates them, and wants to kill them, and they treat the citizens accordingly.
“Overload the police with victimless crimes and other minutiae and eventually only creeps and bullies remain cops.”
– Rick Gaber
But if that house had 71 bottles of vodka, 15 crates of Merlot from Napa, and 2 kegs of beer, that would be been legal.
What the F**K is wrong with this country. I’m tired of having laws based on superstition, magic and mystical nonsense…whether it’s drug policy, gay marriage or whatnot. It would be nice to have laws based on rational real facts…not “beliefs”.
Unfortunately, the belief system is not solely a property of the right.
The left does this too. As one example, while I signed the petition and believe MJ should be legal, as a scientist I also know that inhaled MJ is a bad idea.
Other examples include some of the utterly naive claims from the left that we can solve the energy problem by going green, the assertion that humans are “naturally”vegetarian, the insistence that intelligence does not have a genetic basis, that being gay is genetic (but not a “disease”), that there once was a country called “Palestine,” that schizophrenics should not be institutionalized against their will, etc.
Of course in an era of Reaganus Magnus, Glenn Beck the historian, global Warming denial, creationism as science, … the liberal side looks almost rational!
@19
Spoken like a true sociopath.
Lawrence Taylor was just arrested for allegedly raping & beating a 15-year old in his Hotel Room. He started his lengthy Drug Career with Pot and has had numerous 2nd chances. Lee, you seem to be minimizing the impact of pot as an entry drug that often leads to more….with serious consequences.
Not as simple as you & your HeadBrothers talking points.
@21). Good thing Alcohol isn’t an “entry drug”. Who ever heard of anyone using alcohol then moving on to illegal drugs.
@20 Deathfrog Spoken like a true sociopath.
Hunhhh??
Sounds exactly like the Columbia, Missouri that I lived in 45 years ago. Nothing has changed, or ever will change, in that stinking armpit of a southern college town. A century ago, the writer Thorsten Veblen called Columbia, Missouri “the woodpecker hole in a rotten stump called Missouri.” He got that right!
In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the University of Missouri Law School to admit blacks. So they did — exactly one per class. In 1965, the third-year black student was a guy named Jimmy Rollins. Several weeks before the end of the school year, he was busted by the Columbia cops for allegedly possessing marijuana. Nothing happened immediately, but the evening before final exams, the dean of the law school called Rollins at home and told him he would not be allowed to take exams because of the arrest. At that point, Rollins had not been charged, much less convicted. Most of the students on the 30,000-student campus thought it was a racist setup, and there was a public outcry. The university provost reversed the dean’s decision, but his decision in turn was reversed by the university president, who was bowing to community pressure from what was then a very racist Missour citizenry. The case went to the federal courts, but as I recall, Rollins was never reinstated or allowed to take the final exams, and never became a lawyer. The fact he had been a civil rights activist while a law student was a real thorn in the side of the university officials and the good citizens of Missouri, and everyone on that campus knew Rollins was a marked man, including him. Well, they got him, and the way they got him was typical of how things were (and apparently still are) done in Columbia, Missouri.
http://whmc.umsystem.edu/invent/desc-afedu.html
(Scroll down the alphabetical list to Rollins, James H.)
Oh yeah, another thing I remember about Columbia is some students started publishing an underground newspaper. When they published an article mildly critical of the local phone monopoly, the police swooped, arrested the editor and street vendors, and charged them with a crime for hawking their paper on public sidewalks without a city vendor’s license.
The day I left that reeking outhouse of a third-world shithole town was the happiest day of my life.
I know personally of someone’s home in Seattle being subject to a kick-the-door-in drug raid because they were testing a stage-lighting system and City Light alerted the police to the increase in power consumption. This was apparently sufficient for a warrant to be issued on suspicion of an indoor “grow” operation.
With this in mind, two years ago we made very certain City Light was notified of when we installed a new heat pump to take over from our oil furnace.
Oh yeah, another thing I remember about Columbia is some students started publishing an underground newspaper. When they published an article mildly critical of the local phone monopoly, the police swooped, arrested the editor and street vendors, and charged them with a crime for hawking their paper on public sidewalks without a city vendor’s license. There was no such thing as free speech or academic freedom there.
21 Cyn, this is a new low, even for you. You might as well attempt to draw a correlation between rape and appearing on Dancing With The Stars.
Rape is a crime of violence. Marijuana users generally become less agressive from use of the drug. This was in fact used by one judge to toss out the defense’s case in one pot trial–he stated that the tendency of cannibis to reduce an individual’s “competitive drive” was “incompatible with American ideals”.
@21
Maybe the dumbest comment in the history of this blog.
After LBJ committed U.S. troops to Vietnam, the anti-war protests in Columbia, Missouri were started by a small local group of Quakers. These pacifists formed a silent picket line around the federal courthouse between 1 PM and 3 PM every Friday afternoon. Their demonstrations were entirely peaceful; they simply walked on the sidewalk with signs, didn’t chant, didn’t obstruct the entry, etc. One day a bunch of farmboys parked their pickups down the street and attacked the peaceful demonstrators with axe handles. Many of the Quakers were severely injured and had to be hospitalized. A couple of them were in comas for several days. When the injured demonstrators were released from the hospital, the police met them outside, arrested them, and carted them off to jail. They were prosecuted for “disturbing the peace.” Nothing happened to the thugs who nearly killed them. This is typical of what Columbia, Missouri was like in the 1960s. The town had three colleges — the state university and two private girls’ colleges — and two-thirds of the population were college students. The local business community raped the students economically. The mayor and police department existed solely to support the ATM withdrawal machine that local business vultures had set up for themselves.
Another thing the city did to the students there was they set the “Walk” signs on the pedestrian crosswalks across the main business boulevard to 4 seconds. Even a college sprinter couldn’t make it across before the “Don’t Walk” sign started flashing. The city would position a cop on the far side to write jaywalking tickets to the students. They did this only to the college students, they didn’t ticket the local residents, and it was legalized banditry, pure and simple.
What a suck-ass town Columbia was. The State Department should issue travelers’ warnings about that constipated rectum of a town.
@21 I’ve noticed that money lust has the same effects on people like you.
We live in a crazy country, where drinking to get drunk is perfectly legal and expected behavior (which I rarely do), while smoking a joint once a week is considered awful and anti-social behavior (which I do).
@21 Your point is simply bullshit. Marijuana is not a gateway drug for someone to become a rapist or for any other violent behavior. If anything, alcohol would be considered the worst gateway drug leading to bad behavior. But that of course that is also bullshit, since most people can control themselves.
The fact is that every human being’s body is different and reacts differently to chemicals and other substances.
I know law abiding responsible people who smoke pot everyday. And I know people who freak out with a few puffs of marijuana just like I know folks who freak out after drinking one beer.
It’s all relative and it would be nice to have laws that reflect science unlike what we have now.
Some legal drugs have very negative side effects in many people, but they should not be illegal because of that.
And some illegal drugs are found to have very positive side effects in people with illnesses. Marijuana of course. Also, there are studies showing that MDMA (pure ecstasy) can be used in a clinical setting to treat PTSD. Currently, there are studies involving MDMA with Iraq War veterans and rape victims.
I’ve been around lots of people on drugs. I have seen people freak out on all sorts of things but that is rare. By far, from my experiences, the worst drug is alcohol. I’ve seen a lot of stupid behavior and many fist-fights due to alcohol.
I have never seen anyone get in a fight merely because of marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, 2CB or MDMA.
It would be nice to have laws that reflect the reality of drug use. People should be taught about each drug and its potential negative and positive side effects. People who have drug abuse problems should be able to get treatment without stigma. And people who use drugs responsibly, in their home or in the woods or at a party, should be able to do so legally. What you put in your own body should only be your own business, as long as you do not harm anyone else.
@10 “Police shoot dogs as a matter or routine on raids like this. It is Standard Operating Procedure.”
That’s why we have Animal Rights attorneys now.
http://www.wsba.org/lawyers/gr.....efault.htm
Deep-pocketed government defendants. Heart-rending videos to show juries. Emotional distress damages. It’s perfect — for my tort lawyer buddies.
By the way, here is a great resource if you want to learn about drugs, both the positive and negative side effects of each one:
http://www.erowid.org/
@28 “Maybe the dumbest comment in the history of this blog.”
Just consider that the dumbfuck KLOWN admires his friend righton’s, um, superior intellect.
In support of Mr. C at 21.
Do not be so mean to the guy. After all, look at what happened to GW Bush. A ilttle booze, some coke and pretty soon he effd up as President of the US!
I do think we should consider this issue of what effect “drugs” have on hoe people behave later.
Consider, Pope Benedict, Osama ben Laden and Billy Graham .. all of these grew up in drug free, very religious homes .. how did this effect them?
As for MJ, I have a great dela of sympathy for Cyn’s POV. How many highly successful people do I know who have never used MJ? I think the number is clkose to zero. This suggest to me that mj may be an imprtant risk factor for success.
Given Darryl’s penchant for statistical analysis, I will ask him if he too can support Mr. C.
“What a suck-ass town Columbia was.”
Wingers call that ‘freedom’.
SJ,
“How many highly successful people do I know who have never used MJ? I think the number is clkose to zero. This suggest to me that mj may be an imprtant risk factor for success.”
I haven’t used MJ. So that makes one person.
“Given Darryl’s penchant for statistical analysis, I will ask him if he too can support Mr. C.”
That would take some data-gathering. Instead, I offer myself as an anecdote, but I’m not sure whose side that supports….
The whole prohibition on MJ is going to become a thing of the past starting this fall.
California has a legalization of MJ on the ballot this fall and 56% of the voters there think it’s time to legalize it.
When California legalizes it, it’s only a matter of 5 years or less before the federal government finds better things to do with our tax dollars then to continue Reagans failed policy of War on Drugs.
Just Say YES!!
@28 “Maybe the dumbest comment in the history of this blog.”
Cynny must be so proud of himself. Just when you thought the bar couldn’t be lowered any farther, he’s done gone and done it. Congrats, Cynny.
@39 He’s likely the dumbest fucking fucktard on the entire fucking planet. Witness his admiration for the smarts of righton and Puddy. Goldy should just ban the KLOWN’s dumbass self. I would not for one second miss the ignorance and hate that he spews here.
40
He sure doesn’t bring anything to the potluck, does he? I don’t know if he’s the dumbest, though. Your post names some pretty stiff competition, and we have some other contenders. I would say he wins the Most Haughty Award. His confidence in himself, no matter how misplaced, appears unlimited.
@21
Stanley Alpert, an Assistant US Attorney, wrote a book, The Birthday Party, telling how he was kidnapped in NY and held for several days. The bad guys passed the time smoking marijuana, and Alpert was sooooo glad they were doing just that instead of smoking crack or even just plain ol’ drinking. He figures maybe that’s what saved his life.
Well, I still think that anybody who admires righton for his intellectual prowess has got to be the dumbest fucktard on the planet.
But sensing your reluctance to agree, I offer this as further proof:
Case closed.
43
Damn, that is hard to top. Sadly, for Cynny, that constitutes sophisticated political discourse.
I haven’t touched MJ myself for over 20 years and probably never should have.
Some substances just don’t agree with people and MJ was that way with me. Another substance is Pseudoephedrine. I used to handle it just fine. Now I’m oversensitized to it. I’d collapse in a heap if I ingested the amount in a typical cold relief dose.
I’ve known people who just can’t stomach wine and beer. It makes them physically ill. I’m actually that way with hard liquor. Don’t like it. It tastes like poison to me and it really doesn’t do anything for me once I’ve imbibed it. But beer and wine is ok – for me.
In sum, intoxicants aren’t for everyone and especially not for kids and teenagers. I’m pretty staunch about that. After they’re 18 or 21 you can’t do anything about it but any substance that messes with with the stuff between your ears I generally counsel only the most careful experimentation. If it’s done carefully and intelligently and it works for you then fine. If not – stay clear away and don’t give it a second thought. The other road leads to insanity, doing the same thing expecting different results…
And of course – the ultimate stupidity is prohibition. It’s never worked and look what’s it’s done to this country.
Yep like we see in that video – insanity.
Just as bad if not worse is exporting this “war” to other countries which only breeds resentment, more criminality and in the worst cases, manufactures terrorists.
We can do better.
How’s this:
Family history has it that LT was breast fed. So apparently he started his lengthy drug career with mother’s milk.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do, ” Alice hastily replied; “at least I mean what I say, that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see!”
Maybe we should just legalize drugs like mexico so we can have brtual drug gangs who murder thousands of HUMANS instead.
This is what Liberals want.
See, I told you marijuana kills dogs.
Bazinga!