Call Off the Global Drug War

[patric]

Family of Tessa Majors rips police union for linking student's murder to marijuana

The family of a Barnard College freshman fatally stabbed in a New York City park joined Mayor Bill di Blasio on Monday in blasting "irresponsible" comments made by an NYPD union leader linking marijuana to Tessa Majors' death.

On Sunday, Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins raises the marijuana issue while accusing di Blasio's administration of adopting a "hands off" policing policy that Mullins suggested was crippling police efforts to combat crime.

"An 18-year-old college student at one of the most prestigious universities is murdered in a park, and what I'm understanding, she was in the park to buy marijuana," Mullins said on John Catsimatidis' Sunday morning radio show. "We have a common denominator of marijuana."

The family described Mullins' remarks as "deeply inappropriate, as they intentionally or unintentionally direct blame onto Tess, a young woman, for her own murder."

"The NYPD is weaponizing Tessa Major's murder to attack reductions in marijuana enforcement & the prospect of legalization. Never fails," Hechinger tweeted. "They use every tragedy to push their cynical agenda of more criminalization & greater harshness."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/12/16/tessa-majors-murder-nypd-mayor-union-chief-clash-over-pot-claim/2662138001/

[patric]

Pepsi, no Coke.

DEA's most corrupt agent: Parties, sex amid 'unwinnable war'
All this revelry was rooted ... in a crushing realization among DEA agents around the world that there's nothing they can do to make a dent in the drug war anyway.
"You can't win an unwinnable war. DEA knows this and the agents know this," Irizarry said. "We know we're not making a difference."
"The drug war is a game. ... It was a very fun game that we were playing."

https://apnews.com/article/soccer-sports-la-liga-money-laundering-puerto-rico-38aed2da8cd0ac237aca28aa39321105

[patric]

Congress Accidentally Legalized Weed Six Years Ago.
When lawmakers voted to allow hemp production in 2018, they quietly opened the door to legal THC in all 50 states.
"For 25 years, we wore shirts that said rope not dope," Jody McGinness, the executive director of the Hemp Industries Association, told me last year. "But out of left field, these products emerged, because the market is a force of nature."

Industries this large can be corralled by regulation, but they're tough to destroy. By the time Florida's anti-delta-8 bill came across DeSantis's desk, he had probably noticed the billboards begging him not to eliminate 100,000 jobs in the state. The high-on-hemp business, in other words, may already be too big to ban.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/hemp-marijuana-legal-thc/678988/

[patric]

In time for the Holidays...

The Justice Department has ordered the Drug Enforcement Administration to suspend its longstanding practice of searching passengers at airports — and seizing their cash — after the department's internal watchdog raised concerns that it was fueling widespread civil rights violations and potential racial profiling.

The inspector general found that the program "creates substantial risks that DEA Special Agents and Task Force Officers will conduct these activities improperly; impose unwarranted burdens on, and violate the legal rights of, innocent travelers." It also found that the searches "waste law enforcement resources on ineffective interdiction actions."

The inspector general found that DEA agents and their local police partners have been stopping passengers at airports solely because they bought a last-minute ticket — and demanding, without a warrant, to search their bags.

The searches are supposed to be voluntary, but the report found that the timing of the operations created a de facto threat in that refusing to agree to a search could cause passengers to miss their flights. If the agents found cash, they seized it through civil forfeiture — a legal process that places the onus on the passenger to prove it was not connected to drugs in order to get it back.

A passenger, who was in the Cincinnati airport and flying to New York, recorded himself telling a DEA agent that he did not consent to a search of his bags. "You don't have to consent," the agent was recorded saying. "When you buy a last-minute ticket, we get alerts. ... We have a lot of money and drugs going out of every airport to New York."

The IG found that the search was based on a tip by an airline employee who passed on the names of passengers who had purchased flights 48 hours before departure.

That employee was being paid by the DEA a percentage of the cash seized, the IG found, and had received tens of thousands of dollars over several years. That arrangement is problematic, investigators concluded.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/dea-passenger-searches-halted-watchdog-finds-signs-civil-rights-violat-rcna181262