Latest

Everyone's talking about this wild story from New York City, in which two men spent 5 days in jail for a bag of coconut candy. The driver consented to a search of his vehicle and both men were arrested after police discovered what they believed was crack cocaine. An officer told the passenger to "shut up" when he insisted it was candy, and the men had to wait in jail for almost a week before lab tests proved their innocence.

In addition to demonstrating the combined arrogance, incompetence, and contempt for innocent people that so often characterizes drug war policing, the story also provides another glaring example of how consenting to police searches can instantly make a bad situation much worse. Pete Guither explains:

Lesson #1: Never, ever, ever, ever, agree to a search. If you’re guilty, you’re helping them catch you. If you’re innocent, you’re wasting your time, you’re taking a chance since they aren’t required to fix anything they break, you’re leaving yourself open for being charged for something you didn’t know about that fell out of a friend’s pocket, and you’ve got the possibility that a couple of morons will think your coconut candy is crack and throw you in jail for a week.

Whether or not refusal prevents the search is beside the point here (although, yes, refusal often prevents the search). Such cases are less likely to be prosecuted, even after evidence is discovered, due to the fact that police and prosecutors do – believe it or not – sometimes recognize a constitutional violation and decline to proceed simply because they don’t want to bring a messy case into the courtroom. Finally, consider how much more impressive a civil suit would look in this case with an illegal search thrown into the mix along with the already-compelling story of spending days in jail over coconut candy.

We'll never know how things would have turned out if these guys had refused the search, but there's no question what happened when they agreed to it.

As the Nation's Capital moves quickly towards implementing our very long-awaited medical marijuana law, we suddenly find ourselves obsessing over the sorts of local regulations many of us have only observed from afar. As one might imagine, the D.C. City Council is less than thoroughly experienced when it comes to regulating the distribution of medical marijuana, resulting in proposed amendments like this one:

No person with a misdemeanor conviction for a drug-related offense or felony conviction shall own or work for a registered dispensary

Whoa, slow down there. Naturally, none of us want to see D.C.'s first dispensaries run by a bunch of thugged-out ex-cons, but let's all just stop and think about this for a second. Would you ban someone from working in the medical marijuana industry because they have an arrest on their record for…medical marijuana?

It just so happens that many people in the patient and caregiver community have been arrested, not because of their own character flaws, but because of long-standing character flaws in the criminal law itself that turn sick people into criminals. We've waited an unbelievable 11 years for Congress to step aside and allow this law to take effect. Certainly, anyone who's accumulated battle scars during that time shouldn't be sanctioned again now that their past actions will finally be protected under the law.  

If the people of the District of Columbia can agree, as they emphatically did back in 1998, that it's wrong to arrest patients for medical marijuana, then we really shouldn’t be closing new doors to those who've had the misfortune of being arrested for their medicine. This is by no means the most significant regulatory hurdle to be overcome in D.C., but I find it noteworthy for the ironic prejudice it exhibits towards the exact people this law is designed to protect.

In a scathing 93-page report released today, the international human rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Cambodian drug detention centers of torturing and raping detainees, imprisoning children and the mentally ill, and illegally detaining and imprisoning drug users. The centers are beyond reform and should be closed, the group said. "Individuals in these centers are not being treated or rehabilitated, they are being illegally detained and often tortured," said Joseph Amon, director of the Health and Human Rights division at HRW. "These centers do not need to be revamped or modified; they need to be shut down." The report cited detailed testimonies from detainees who were raped by center staff, beaten with electric cables, shocked with cattle prods, and forced to give blood. It also found that drug users were "cured" of their conditions by being forced to undergo rigorous military-style drills to sweat the drugs out of their systems. "[After arrest] the police search my body, they take my money, they also keep my drugs...They say, ‘If you don't have money, why don't you go for a walk with me?...[The police] drove me to a guest house.... How can you refuse to give him sex? You must do it. There were two officers. [I had sex with] each one time. After that they let me go home," said Minea, a woman in her mid-20's who uses drugs, explaining how she was raped by two police officers "[A staff member] would use the cable to beat people...On each whip the person's skin would come off and stick on the cable," said M'noh, age 16, describing whippings he witnessed in the Social Affairs "Youth Rehabilitation Center" in Choam Chao. The title of the HRW report is "Skin on the Cable." More than 2,300 people were detained in Cambodia's 11 drug detention centers in 2008. That is 40% more than in 2007. "The government of Cambodia must stop the torture occurring in these centers" said Amon. "Drug dependency can be addressed through expanded voluntary, community-based, outpatient treatment that respects human rights and is consistent with international standards." Cambodian officials from the National Authority for Combatting Drugs, the Interior Ministry, the National Police, and the Social Welfare Ministry all declined to comment when queried by the Associated Press. But Cambodian Brig. Gen. Roth Srieng, commander of the military police in Banteay Meanchy province, denied torture at his center, while adding that some detainees were forced to stand in the sun or "walk like monkeys" as punishment for trying to escape. Children as young as 10, prostitutes, beggars, the homeless, and the mentally ill are frequently detained and taken to the drug detention centers, the report found. About one-quarter of those detained were minors. Most were not told why they were being detained. The report also said police sometimes demanded sexual favors or money for release and told some detainees they would not be beaten or could leave early if they donated blood. The report relied on testimony from 74 people, most of them drug users, who had been detained between February and July 2009.

I was at the drug store the other day,picking up my weekly legalized drugs and ran into an old friend I hadn't seen for a few years.We had been the friends of another friend and had never actually bee

Just a brief comment... The "war on drugs" baffles me in the exact same way and for a similar reason that the "war on terror" baffles me.