Marijuana prohibition leads to police death and more And that's just part of the tragedy. Grits For Breakfast has the story and asks:
Truly, how many senseless victims will the drug war claim before we're no longer willing to pay the cost? The Travis County Jail can't find space for casual drug users, but trying to arrest a pot smoker literally cost this young woman her life.
Would simple decriminalization as proposed in Chicago have prevented this? Probably not, since police sometimes still try to make the big marijuana bust even in places where it has been decriminalized. As Vice Squad noted while analyzing the latest coverage on Chicago's decrim proposal:
Why would the officer bother searching if there's just a small fine for marijuana possession? To concatenate my presumptions, I'll suggest that what the officer was hoping for was to find a significant pile of some illegal drug, i.e., to make a "major drug bust." So here are a few folks driving home after dinner, who aren't actually doing anything wrong (the traffic stop was probably pretextual, undertaken solely to yield a search), who nevertheless end up having their automobile rifled through by an armed agent of the law. This scenario has become so common that no one in today's story even bothers to point out the irrationality of the entire episode.
11:28:52 PM | permalink |
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