Dank

While recreational weed has been legalized in two adjoining states (Illinois and Michigan) and a third, Ohio, has medical marijuana and decriminalized possession, Indiana is still not down with the jazz cabbage.

While I've had very little in the way of buyer's remorse with our current term-limited governor, he has been foursquare against the legalization of wacky tobaccy, and it's unlike our state legislature would send him a bill anyway.

Nevertheless, just walking through the parking lot of the local big-box store has had me wondering if I'd be able to pass a whiz quiz by the time I get to the front door. I'm told this ain't the Oaxacan ditch weed of my youth. When the stuff is so dank you can smell it from multiple car lengths back at interstate speeds, this is a whole different strain of the chronic.

Alas, 5th Circuit decision or no, my line of work keeps me from finding out until we legalize the stuff federally.

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Wo(S)D

In my personal opinion? A lot of TTPs originally designed to mitigate the threat to hostages from an armed, barricaded suspect are now being used to mitigate the threat to a bag of dope from a toilet.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 28, 2020

The Hunt for Red Coke-tober

I swear to heaven I thought he was saying "Halt-o Chewbacca!" for a second there.

I'm not sure how willing I'd be to pilot a semisubmersible in the open sea like that. And I wonder what the range is? Does that thing have the legs to make it to Florida from wherever, or do they get launched from a tender over the horizon someplace?
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Bipartisan Do-Goodership

Driving to Kinko's, or FedEx/Kinko's, or FedEx Office, or whatever they're calling themselves this week, I was listening to 1A on the local NPR station. During the first half (about the impact of flooding in the Midwest), they played a blurb pimping the second half of the show, which was going to be about the impact of legalized sports gambling.

They played a sound bite from one of the show's guests, saying "If you legalize it, you might as well legalize cocaine or methamphetamine," causing me to yell "or cigarettes, or alcohol, or video games!" at the radio.

Seemingly this is something that the Puritan Right and the Uplifter Left can agree on. However, just because something can be addictive is not sufficient reason to arrest people for doing it.
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Photography is not a crime...

...except when it is.

One such case would be if you are a foreign student found wandering around snapping pictures of the antenna farms of an interagency intelligence facility located on a Naval Air Station. Especially if you'd walked past a bunch of fences and "KEEP OUT: THIS MEANS YOU" signs to get there.

That's the sort of behavior that tends to get teh feds a little bit spun up.

Obligatory "Reefer Madness"-grade video about the facility's main gig, supporting the War on (Some) Drugs, below. Presumably they're also making sure those tricksy Cubans aren't fixin' to invade or anything.


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Hope and Change!

Drug warriors gonna drug war. #PumpMoreSwampIn

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 5, 2018

MRAPs for Mayberry is go again.

Jeff Sessions should be happy down to his wrinkly little drug warrior toes today with the announcement he gets to make at the FOP conference in Nashville:

President Donald Trump will sign a new executive order Monday morning rescinding Obama's directive and Attorney General Jeff Sessions will address the policy change during a speech at the annual conference of the Fraternal Order of Police in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday.

The new executive order was first reported by USA Today.

Congress originally launched the so-called "1033 program" in 1990 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which allowed the Defense Department to transfer surplus hardware and equipment to state and local law enforcement for use in "counter-drug activities."

Personally, I have no real beef with the po-po having armored trucks. There are plenty of legit uses for those.

For most departments, though, MRAPs are kind of a mess because of their unique servicing requirements. A Lenco BearCat, built on a heavy-duty Ford chassis, can be serviced at the county road maintenance yard, but Uncle Sam isn't handing those out on a free indefinite loan basis.

From what I can tell, a serious number of MRAPs loaned out to the constabulary wind up deadlined for lack of maintenance, and are therefore unavailable on a moments notice should we suddenly decide we need them back to go change a regime someplace.
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Vintage Swamp Water

Like a dog returning to its sick, Jeff Sessions is returning to those favorite themes from the Nineties: "Pot Is Bad" and "Asset Forfeiture Is Cool".

In a letter to Congress, Sessions asked for a ban on using federal funds to go after medical marijuana distributors in states that have legalized medical weed to be overturned. Quoth the Jeff:

"I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime."

So people in Huntington, WV and Columbus, OH are overdosing on imported Chinese Fentanyl and the way to nip it in the bud is to go after medical Mary Jane outfits in Portland, OR. That makes sense, I guess...or at least it does if you think Reefer Madness was a hard-hitting, serious documentary.

He couldn't be any more out of touch if he were to rant about "we need to ban that marijuana because it makes decent white girls want to take up with colored jazz musicians" although, given his bio, that might not be such a stretch for Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. This is, after all, a guy who once joked that he thought the Klan was "OK, until [he] found out they smoked pot."

Appointing Sessions was the opposite of "draining the swamp"; it was basically pumping in a whole bunch of vintage swamp water.
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A money-saving proposal!

So, with a good chunk of my adopted home state lying athwart the area of the country known as "The Rust Belt", it's probably no surprise that Indiana punches slightly above its weight in drug overdose deaths.

From 2011 to 2013, Indiana had the fifteenth highest rate of deaths from drug overdoses among U.S. states, at sixteen per hundred thousand Hoosiers. We're only the seventeenth most populous state, and hardly a hotbed of hedonism and other assorted whoop-te-do, but the nation's overdose center of gravity seems to have shifted.

The most statistically common place to go on a final nod these days is not a trendy loft in Soho, but rather in a split-level midwestern ranch a few blocks down from the shuttered wheel bearing factory, or a single-wide in the mobile home park across the tracks from the defunct curtain rod plant.

Anyway, Indiana has decided to open five more Opioid Addiction Treatment Centers in various small cities around the state.

One of these small cities is Lafayette, which is a city I'd think was doing pretty good, economically speaking. They've got the Subaru plant, Caterpillar, TRW, and others, as well as being right across the river from the sprawling Purdue University campus.

Another reason I'd think they were doing pretty good is that they apparently want to build a new $16M dollar home for their Lafayette Aviators, a Prospect League team.

Funding for this new pine tar cathedral is supposed to come from the local Economic Development Income Tax. I think this shows a lack of imagination. Why not glom onto some of that sweet state payola for the Opioid Addiction Treatment Center and build a dual-purpose facility? You could employ the inpatient addicts to hawk peanuts and take tickets during game times, and as groundskeepers between games, as long as nobody tried to snort the third base line.

The junkies could learn a trade and the ball park gets cheap labor. You could bunk them down in the press box or the visiting team's clubhouse.

Multi-use developments are all the rage these days, anyway.
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Whoah...

I knew that the overdose situation was getting dire, but according to a spot I just caught on Today, Ohio is apparently on pace for ten thousand overdose deaths this year.

Ten thousand.

Bear in mind that Michael Bloomberg and all his concerned Mommy minions go completely off their nut at thirty-something thousand firearm deaths nationwide, and a good chunk of those are suicides who meant to die. Meanwhile ten thousand people in just one state inadvertently offed themselves trying to catch a buzz.

If you want to read some $#!+ that will turn you white, there's a thread in the Law Enforcement subforum at pistol-forum.com where cops, EMTs, ER docs, coroners, and one guy in Huntington, WV talk about their experiences with the huge upsurge in heroin and Fentanyl overdoses.

I don't pretend to have a solution. We're still warring on drugs as hard as ever, and the bodies keep piling up. It's almost as much hassle to buy a packet of cold medicine now as it is to buy an AR-15, and that doesn't keep the Montgomery County coroner from giving interviews in a walk-in fridge full of Fenatanyled corpsicles.

At this point I'm half tempted to suggest we take all the money we spend on the War on (Some) Drugs and use it to buy narcotics. Pile the dope in every intersection in America, declare a one-week business holiday, and let America get all its fatal overdoses out of its system all at once.
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"No, really..."

Any cop you know can tell you the story about the time that he or one of his buddies at work was conducting a pat-down of a suspect and found a bundle of dope in the dude's trousers, only to be told with a straight face "These aren't my pants!" Which is such a lame excuse that it's a wonder anyone would try and tell such a whopper...

Well, apparently there's an exception that proves the rule.

Now, personally, I think that The War on The Fourth Ame...er, Drugs needs to go away and quit trying to burn the village to save it, but at the same time, given the current climate in the narcotics trade, dealing cocaine out your master bedroom closet in a sketchy neighborhood while raising a kid in the house is showing a cavalier indifference toward that kid's well-being.

One of the hardest parts about writing my "Good Guys Win" column for S.W.A.T. Magazine is trying to ensure that any reported home invasions are not actually Bad Guy-on-Bad Guy incidents, and I'll bet I only bat about .750. The vast majority of home invasions are either on dope dealers or at least think they're invading a dope dealer's home.
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Not to belabor a point...

Hey, Sheriff! You know what's never burned an infant horribly? A doorbell.
— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 3, 2014

(Reference.)
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Photographic proof.

Things have been pretty sporty on the homicide front so far this year here in Naptown, with stiffs turning up in almost Chicago-esque numbers.

Most recently was a flurry of murders that had the newspeople decorating their cupcakes like something out of a Don Henley lyric when the police reported eight murders in a twelve-hour period, a clip that would entirely depopulate the city in just over 140 years if left unchecked.

I would like to note an interesting factoid: Police already happened to have mug shots of seven out of the eight corpses on file. Apparently none of the deceased heeded my advice.

It'd be interesting to know what having a mugshot on file with the po-po does to your chances of getting iced, statistically speaking.
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Poor, white, undereducated? Don't know what's good for you?

Relax, 'cause this guy does!

A lot of young people in the early 'Aughties called themselves "Libertarians" because they knew Ron Paul was against the Iraq War and in favor of pot legalization and the Democrat party was full of squares like Mom and Dad.

It doesn't mean they didn't want to "help the little guy" with your money, though, and when they found out what a big pack of heartless meanies libertarians were, they shed the label like a high school class ring.

Our most disastrous war...

It's a war that, in retrospect, we never should have started. Oh, sure, we had the best of intentions going in; there was a perceived threat to our society, plus the do-gooder angle of people who needed saving to make us feel better about ourselves. Sure, we might have to curtail a few civil liberties for the duration, but that's the price of security in time of war, right?

Forty years later, we are still an occupying army, people's rights are still getting trampled, and you have a harder time buying good cold medicine than you would the meth they're afraid you'll make with it. They would rather an innocent person writhe in pain than risk somebody getting high.

Seriously, the War on (Some) Drugs has done more damage to the fabric of American liberty and the Bill of Rights than any other single factor, shows no sign of letting up, and yet bring this fact up to any Law 'n' Order Republican and they just snort and dismiss the issue with "Libertarians just want to smoke pot."

Thank you, John Locke, for that penetrating insight; you've figured me right out. Yes, the reason I want to roll back the ridiculous regulations that have built up around cold medicine is because I want to smoke pot... you knob. No, Eliot Ness, I don't particularly want to smoke pot, but I do want to stop the ongoing judicial death-by-torture of the Fourth Amendment.

America, land of the piss test and the no-knock; the militarized southern border; a Drug Enforcement Agency that is not only twice the size of the Estonian army, but which probably outguns it, too; where moderately bright dogs are treated as constitutional scholars on Fourth Amendment issues, eager to please their handlers by giving them an excuse to tear your car apart on the roadside; where state and local police agencies are the recipient of DoD hand-me-down armored cars and machine guns and attack helicopters as though they were banana republics, although with less oversight as to how the gear will be used.

And you bring this stuff up and it gets hand-waved away with "you just want to smoke pot."

"Oh, Tam, the scourge of drugs is..." No scourge is worth this, okay? This whole "burn the village to save it" thing has got to stop.

People complain about the loss of freedoms in the War on Terror? It was all built on a scaffold of dope laws. How did they legally justify the .mil assistance at Waco? They claimed there was a dope lab on the premises. How do they go after your scary-looking AKs and ARs? By claiming that they're the preferred weapon of dope dealers. (That's right: 922r is a direct result of the War on Drugs, via paleoconservative Republican Bill Bennett. You can look it up.) Next time somebody complains about the "parts count" provisions on their SKS, I'm going to snark right back at 'em with "You just want to smoke pot."


EDIT: Heh. I must've subconsciously been picking up the vibes of an ongoing discussion elsewhere on the internets. I heard that news story about the proposed prescription drug regulation changes this morning and the above rant just happened.

The Bill Whittle Skittles vid...

I think ToddG had the right of it here.

It's too bad Mr. Whittle couldn't have made a video expressing simply the facts without all the sermonizing about the MSM and Reverends Sharpton and Jackson.

If he'd done that, then I could have linked people on the other side of the opinion fence to it and said "Look, here's an unbiased recitation of some cold facts you may not have heard." As it is, it would look like I was saying "Hey, don't believe that Left Wing propaganda you're being fed! Try this Right Wing propaganda instead!"

Unfortunately, the fish who are nominally on my side of the tank often don't seem to notice the water they're swimming in, either.


*As a side note, the whole Skittles and tea thing is a red herring, anyway. You don't need any of that crap to chug a bottle of Robo; a couple squirts of Chloroseptic will deaden your gag reflex enough for that. Uh, or so I was told during my misspent youth, anyway. 

Conservatives always sound like squares when they talk about catching a buzz; about as convincing as that Reefer Madness flick. Except Limbaugh. He has doper cred.

Anyway, like I said, that's all a side show: the jury didn't need any of this to reach a verdict on the case, Zimmerman couldn't have known it anyway, and the facts don't require it.

Totally misread this...

Reportage on the current Hoosier legislative session included this nugget:

The bill would require all applicants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to complete a written screening test for possible drug abuse problems. Those later failing a drug test would have to seek treatment to continue receiving benefit payments.

I initially misread that as saying the bill would require welfare recipients to take a written drug screening.

Are you doing drugs? Circle one: Y N

It says a great deal about the current state of our nation that I did not find this notion implausible.

This is one of those laws that throws me into a quandary. While I think the War on (Some) Drugs is doing grievous damage to our Second, Fourth, Fifth... heck, about the only thing they haven't done is force you to let dope cops sleep in your guest bedroom, so your Third Amendment rights are still good... I also think that the rise of the welfare state has bred a dependent class, a perpetual underclass that votes for a living and works the urban suffrage plantations for the ultimate benefit of political masters, and has turned poor urban neighborhoods into human zoos.

So, yeah, I guess if you take the king's shilling, you can't bitch if he makes you pee in a cup.

Beat me harder!

A drooling moron in Marko's comments section referred to the killing of Kathryn Johnston as a "botched police raid", which is like saying the guy at the Clackamas Town Center mall had a "botched range trip".

Meanwhile, the expectation of privacy apparently doesn't exist on public transportation. (But think of all the dopers we'll catch!) Also, now my state wants to make it harder to buy cold medicine than it is to score actual methamphetamine.

The buggering people are willing to take in the name of fighting the War on (Some) Drugs never fails to astound me. Just because you have dreams of being tied up, yelled at, and slapped around a bit by someone in a black leather trenchcoat and shiny boots doesn't mean you need to drag the rest of us into your little fantasies.

BONUS!: You're probably not paranoid enough.
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QotD: ...And Then You Win Edition

Sebastian's trying his hand at a wine-making project using Welch's white grape juice concentrate as a starter. The irony comes, of course, from the fact that Dr. Welch was an ardent Prohibitionist.

What the body politic did to prohibitionists is a wonderful lesson for our cause. To the extent there even are prohibitionists these days, they are viewed as out of the mainstream and quacky. We almost have the opponents of gun rights there, provided we keep pushing. I’ll drink a toast to Dr. Welch, and his company, and hope in our current struggle, our opponents suffer the same political fate.

Sadly, the urge to Uplift will always be with us and sour-faced crusading busybodies seem to be part of our political DNA. Cut one head off the Prohibitionist hydra and two more spring up; they ban because they can.

The problem is never about objects: it's about actions. Specifically, the actions of ill-mannered louts with poor impulse control and nothing you could describe as a moral or an ethic. But it is impolite to say so, and so we allow ourselves to believe that if we outlaw _______, we will Uplift the whole human race into some blissful future utopian paradise, when we know damn well that there are those among us who would push other kids into the rivers of milk and honey, eat the lamb, and set the lion's mane on fire.

First principles.

In comments at Marko's asset forfeiture post, somehow things have drifted into the known unreliability of drug dogs. They are vulnerable to alerting on their handler's suspicions instead of what they smell; they can be deliberately caused to alert; they don't speak a word of English and so people's lives and fortunes hang by how well a guy claims he can tell the difference between "Yup, that's cocaine, boss," and "I'm bored, can I have a biscuit? Squirrel!"

Suppose the handler was pure as the driven snow, had a Dolittle-like ability to talk with the animals, and Rover's senses performed exactly as advertised: It is still a statistical impossibility for $12,000 in American paper money to not contain traces of dope. Dope-residue-as-probable-cause is just a license to confiscate.

Forget the dog. The dog is a Red Herringhound.

Suppose instead of the dog, they’d used one of dozens of chemical dye tests and found dope residue on the money. Does taking Fluffy the Crotch-Sniffing Four-Legged Fourth Amendment expert out of the picture make it any more right?

(HINT: No.)