I hate how easy it is to find new and insane stories of drug war villainy each and every day. Today's episode comes to us by way of Detroit, where a couple young drug cops have become known as the "Booty Boys" due to their thorough approach when searching drug suspects:

Two Detroit cops dogged by accusations of illegal body cavity searches during various traffic stops in 2006 are finally getting their day in court.
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A civil trial is under way in which Terence Hopkins of Highland Park says he was groped by the officers known on the streets of southwest Detroit as the "Booty Boys."
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Two other men who sued the cops on similar allegations, Elvis Ware and Marcus Wrack, are expected to testify on Hopkins’ behalf. Both men received small settlements from the city.

The officers have been the focus of eight lawsuits claiming such searches filed by 10 men in U.S. District and Wayne County Circuit courts in Detroit.

Two men, Byron Ogletree and Marjjo Clyburn, with similar allegations against the officers, received payouts from the city two years ago of $349,000 each without filing a lawsuit. [Detroit Free Press]

The officers claim it's all just a conspiracy, but it sure sounds like a lot of different people have the same beef with them. I don't know these cops, but I know the drug war, which makes me a sympathetic audience for claims of excessive anal cavity searches.

This is what happens when you tell police their top priority is to catch people in possession of tiny objects. It's bad enough that our stupid drug laws would ever lead people to hide drugs in their butt. But when police actually begin operating under that assumption, that's just a nightmare for everybody.

Now that the cops' faces are in the paper, I wonder how many more victims will come forward. Moreover, I wonder how many more headlines like this it will take to convince the American public that modern drug enforcement is inherently abusive and disgusting. We've created a monster and there's just no limit whatsoever to the perversion that it unleashes on our streets every hour of the day. As long as these laws exist, as long as police are incentivized to do these unbelievable things, no one will be safe.

I like this post from Pete Guither about a small group of Californians plotting to fight back against the medical marijuana movement. The odds are stacked against them in that the public opposes them, they keep losing in court and they don’t have any money to fund their advocacy efforts.

I can't help but think that this is how drug policy reformers must have felt during the Reagan years. It's amazing that we've come so far now, our opponents are the ones bunkered down trying to figure out a way to stop the momentum of marijuana reform.

Marc Emery is no longer a free man. Canada's Prince of Pot was taken into custody today. He turned himself in at the BC Supreme Court in Vancouver, and is now jailed in Vancouver awaiting imminent extradition to the US, where he is set to plead guilty to one count of marijuana distribution for selling pot seeds over the Internet. Emery is expected to be sentenced to five years in federal prison in the US for his seed sales. He sold millions of seeds in the decade prior to his 2005 arrest and became a leading hemispheric advocate for marijuana legalization, using the profits from his seed sales to fund reformers across the continent. He also called out then drug czar John Walters for lying about marijuana and interfering in Canadian domestic politics, leading then DEA head Karen Tandy to issue this press release lauding his arrest as a blow to the legalization movement:

Today's DEA arrest of Marc Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture Magazine, and the founder of a marijuana legalization group -- is a signficant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement. His marijuana trade and propagandist marijuana magazine have generated nearly $5 million a year in profits that bolstered his trafficking efforts, but those have gone up in smoke today. Emery and his organization had been designated as one of the Attorney General's most wanted international drug trafficking organizational targets -- one of only 46 in the world and the only one from Canada. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery's illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canda. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.

Can you say politically motivated? I knew you could. One American attorney familiar with his case told me this weekend that Emery could have fought the prosecution and sought to have shown that it was unlawfully politically motivated, but that Emery and his Canadian legal team didn't want to take that risk. That's understandable, given that Emery was looking at decades or even life in prison if he lost. Now, America's legions of unknown marijuana martyrs are being joined by one very big name. Let's hope that Emery's unjust imprisonment turns a spotlight on the hideousness of a US federal legal system that turns a blind eye to torture but cages a man for selling pot seeds. The Vancouver Sun's Ian Mulgrew sums it up nicely in an op-ed piece entitled Marc Emery's Sentence Reeks of Injustice and Mocks Our Sovreignty:

After two decades as Canada's Prince of Pot, Marc Emery will surrender himself today in B.C. Supreme Court and become the country's first Marijuana Martyr. Emery will begin serving what could be as long as five years behind bars as Uncle Sam's prisoner for a crime that in Canada would have earned him at most a month in the local hoosegow. It is a legal tragedy that in my opinion marks the capitulation of our sovereignty and underscores the hypocrisy around cannabis. Emery hasn't even visited America but he was arrested in July 2005 at the request of a Republican administration that abhorred his politics. He is being handed over to a foreign government for an activity we are loath to prosecute because we don't think selling seeds is a major problem. There are at least a score of seed-sellers downtown and many, many more such retail outlets across the country. In the days ahead, once the federal justice minister signs the extradition papers, Emery will be frog-marched south to Seattle where his plea bargain will be rubber-stamped and he will be sent to a U.S. penitentiary. For comparison, consider that the B.C. Court of Appeal last year said a one-month jail sentence plus probation was appropriate punishment for drug and money-laundering offences of this ilk. The last time Emery was convicted in Canada of selling pot seeds, back in 1998, he was given a $2,000 fine.

There's more at the link above, but you get the gist. Mulgrew, of course, is right on the money. The Canadian government has shamefully failed to protect one of its citizens from the crazed drug war machine south of the border, and the US government is shamelessly imprisoning yet another non-violent pot person--this time mainly to shut him up. We should demand that Marc Emery and all other marijuana prisoners be immediately released. Short of that, we should, as Emery requests, demand that he be allowed to serve his time at home in a Canadian prison.