Another victim of prohibition
The problem with the “99% of cops are good” line is that the 1% go out of their way to make up the average. From Radley Balko, more collateral damage in the war on drugs:
Earlier this year, police in Tallahassee, Florida raided the home of college student Rachel Hoffman, who friends say was a bit of a hippie-ish free spirit, and concede that she shared and sold small amounts of marijuana and MDMA within her social circle. Hoffman was at the time undergoing state-forced drug treatment after police found 20+ grams of marijuana in her car during a traffic stop. The raid turned up another five ounces of marijuana, plus six ecstasy pills and assorted pot-related paraphernalia.
From this, Tallahassee police apparently threatened Hoffman with prison time, then agreed to let her off easy if she’d become a police informant, and set up a deal with her supplier. They never informed Hoffman’s attorney or the state prosecutor of the arrangement. They wired Hoffman, and asked her to arrange to purchase 1,500 ecstasy pills, cocaine, and a gun—a deal that would have run well over ten thousand dollars. Hoffman’s friends and family have told me that all three purchases would also have been drastically out of character for her. Which means the dealers she was buying from were almost surely on to her.
Tallahassee police found Hoffman’s body last week.
The reason the police put a gun in the list of things to buy is that it increases the sentence after trial. A 23-year-old “hippie chick” probably wouldn’t realize that adding a firearm to a drug purchase when you don’t need to marks you as a police informant. The police who set up the buy had to know. I can understand the feelings of the commenter who said:
I would much rather live in a world populated by non-violent hippie chicks, elderly black ladies, and doting fathers than gun toting cowards… any day.
- Rachel Hoffman: More Collateral Damage
- “Tallahassee police apparently threatened Hoffman with prison time, then agreed to let her off easy if she’d become a police informant. They never informed Hoffman’s attorney or the state prosecutor. They wired Hoffman, and asked her to arrange to purchase 1,500 ecstasy pills, cocaine, and a gun—a deal that would have run well over ten thousand dollars. Hoffman’s friends and family have told me that all three purchases would also have been drastically out of character for her. Which means the dealers she was buying from were almost surely on to her. Tallahassee police found Hoffman’s body last week.”
- Tracy Ingle: Another Drug War Outrage
- “Police found no illegal drugs in Ingle’s home. They did find a scale, which Ingle’s sister used in her jewelry-making hobby. They also found a bunch of small plastic bags. Again, Ingle’s sister says these were part of her business. ‘I was leaving the country for a while, and I stored a lot of my stuff at his house. The scale and bags were mine, and are both common things to have for anyone who makes jewelry.’ Police also found the broken gun and a broken police scanner. From those items, the police charged Ingle with running a drug enterprise.”
- The Worst in Atlanta
- “We now know that Kathryn Johnston fired only a single bullet, through the door as police were trying to break in. They responded with a storm of bullets, which apparently both wounded Johnston and the officers themselves. When they realized their fatal error, they planted cocaine and marijuana in the woman’s home. They then pressured an uninvolved informant to testify to having made controlled buys at Johnston’s home to cover their tracks.”
- The Case of Cory Maye
- “The most obvious argument in Maye’s defense involves the simplest interpretation of events. A man with no criminal record is awakened by the sounds of someone breaking into his home. While he is lying in the dark with his daughter, the door to the bedroom flies open and someone jumps inside. Fearing for his life, the man fires in self-defense and kills the intruder.”
- Back to Chesapeake
- “Looks like the informant mistook Frederick’s gardening hobby for an elaborate marijuana growing operation, and Japanese maple trees for marijuana plants.”
More prohibition
- Learning from alcohol prohibition
- If the people against ending drug prohibition had been around in the thirties, we would never have ended the prohibition of beer and cocktails, because of the dangers of pure alcohol and bathtub gin. One of the lessons of the alcohol prohibition era is that we don’t have to go from banning everything to allowing everything. There is a middle ground.
- Progressives ruin a different kind of race in New Jersey
- As a potential triple-crown winner prepares for the third race of the Triple Crown, it’s almost impossible to place a bet in Atlantic City, NJ.
- U.S. homicide rate compared to gun control measures
- Extrano’s Alley lists the U.S. homicide rate from 1885 to 1940, and somebody else puts it into a chart.
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition
- Herbert Asbury’s book has to rank as one of the greatest arguments ever written against the drug war; this book about alcohol prohibition chronicles and forecasts all of the problems with modern prohibition that we see today.
- Cannabis Britannica
- Subtitled “Empire, Trade, and Prohibition”, this is an in-depth history of how prohibition came about in Britain, and ends up describing how marijuana prohibition came to the forefront of international attempts to ban opium.
- 26 more pages with the topic prohibition, and other related pages