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Beneath their flak jackets and blast shields, the super-tough drug soldiers at the DEA are just like everybody else. They have feelings too, and when someone says not-so-nice things about them, it can really hurt:

A group of retired federal drug enforcement agents sued NBC Universal on Wednesday, saying the movie "American Gangster" falsely portrayed them as villains in the story of a Harlem heroin trafficker.

The suit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, claims that the movie defamed hundreds of DEA agents and New York City police officers by claiming at the end that Frank Lucas' collaboration with prosecutors "led to the convictions of three-quarters of New York City's Drug Enforcement Agency."
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According to the lawsuit, no DEA agents or New York City police officers were ever convicted as a result of tips provided by Lucas.

"This is absolutely off the wall," said Dominic Amorosa, a prosecutor in the federal case against Lucas in 1975 who now represents the DEA agents. "I don't know what these people were thinking, but they are going to pay for it."

A Universal Pictures spokesman, Michael Moses, said in a written statement that the lawsuit is "entirely without merit." [AP]

I have no knowledge of the specific legal issues involved here, but it's a little creepy to see drug warriors turning to civil court in an effort to suppress the well-known fact that police corruption is commonplace in the war on drugs. Will they now sue us for running our "This Week's Corrupt Cops Story" feature each week?

If you ask me, the DEA impugns its own reputation each and every day as its agents continue to target sick people for using medical marijuana and doctors for prescribing pain relievers to patients in chronic pain.

If DEA agents or police in general are concerned about negative public perceptions, they can begin by rejecting the war on drugs and its infinitely corrupting influence. They can abandon the "Blue Wall of Silence" and endeavor to purge misconduct from the ranks. And on that glorious day when all the crooks, liars, and cowboys have been stripped of their uniforms, then perhaps it will be possible to sue Hollywood for misrepresenting the profession without provoking amusement.

The article in the paper was so small I almost missed it. I guess no-one's particularly proud of this one. Mr. Emery not only got to serve his time in Canada, he managed to get his co-accused off the hook as well.

I wrote yesterday about an absurd report in The Philadelphia Inquirer which valued marijuana at over $100 per joint. As I pointed out, boastful law-enforcement sources frequently collaborate with slothful reporters to produce wildly inaccurate news coverage of the drug war.

Obviously, it is just unacceptable to have major news sources reporting frivolous and false information. The laugh-out-loud craziness of implying that a joint costs $100 just shouldn’t have made it to print, and we can all gaze at this spectacle and shake our heads as we recognize that the incompetence which made this report possible is perfectly typical. It explains volumes about the media's neglectful role in permitting drug war indoctrination to permeate our collective consciousness each day. It is 2007, and we shouldn't even be reading celebratory drug bust stories anymore, because each new one is a mere exhibit of the failure of those that came before it.

But, beyond all of that, it stands to reason that such coverage has a remarkable potential to entice individuals to enter the drug trade in the first place. The theoretical deterrent value of reporting on major drug busts and the fate of the perpetrators is surely undermined when profit margins are overstated so dramatically.

If one believes The Philadelphia Inquirer that 16 pounds of high-grade marijuana can be sold for $812,000, and one subsequently stumbles across an opportunity to acquire that amount for the (more likely) price of $50,000-80,000, they might be intrigued. By routinely exaggerating the street value of illegal drugs, the press renders itself an inadvertent advertising campaign for the lucrative business of black market drug distribution.

I've heard, but cannot confirm, that the Canadian press has sought to scale back this exact behavior after a revelation that constantly reporting on multi-million dollar marijuana seizures was having the effect of convincing people that it's easy to make a million dollars growing pot. I have no idea whether this is accurate, but it's certainly amusing to consider the possibility that all of this reckless drug war reporting is simply emboldening prospective marijuana entrepreneurs.

One wonders, therefore, how many more of these drug bust press conferences our intrepid journalists are willing to snooze their way through before becoming overcome with déjà vu and finding themselves compelled by the distant call of journalistic integrity to do anything other than cut and paste the predictable pontifications of the proud pot police into the morning paper.