No investigation when suspected drugs found at home of official
I agree with Radley Balko on this one…
On the one hand, my default position would be that no one should lose her job, her reputation, or her freedom over marijuana. I’d also imagine most people would be sympathetic to someone who recently lost a spouse in a car accident. It would also appear that in this case, the police found the pot after entering this particular woman’s home illegally.
On the other hand . . . according to the source in the story, if this had happened to your average resident of Tennessee, they at the very least would be subject to a criminal investigation.
But there was no investigation. Which is likely because this woman was—and still is—the director of the Tennessee state agency “whose mission is to eradicate marijuana.â€
Speaking of Balko, his latest piece is out at Huffington Post: The New Panic Over Prescription Painkillers
War against drugs has failed on many fronts, Chicago police chief and Cook County executive agree
Drug enforcement measures in place for decades have filled jails with poor and minority offenders, marred police officers’ credibility in the neighborhoods they patrol and fractured communities, Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle agreed at a forum Wednesday night.
Chipping away…
Tea Party Warrior: Report Medical Marijuana Clubs to the IRS and Get Rich
The “Tea Party” aspect seems a bit irrelevant to this story, but the key thing is that drug warrior Paul Chabot seems willing to do just about anything to sink further into the slime of the drug war. Fortunately, his treachery is blunted by his idiocy.
Fun with headlines:
Headline: Fire at Santa Rosa marijuana grow operation kills six pets
Implication: Grow op causes fire that kills pets
Truth:
“The fire literally destroyed every room in the living area,†Basque said. “The living room, kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms — it was all destroyed.â€
Firefighters found 75 to 100 marijuana plants growing in an attached garage. The residents had a license to grow the plants, Basque said.
Though the cause of the fire is still under investigation, Basque said it did not start in the garage.
I guess “Fire in house kills six pets” wasn’t interesting enough.
Breaking News: Medicinal Cannabis Laws Have No Discernable Adverse Impact On Adolescents’ Pot Use
Again, no surprise here.
Getting gramdma to try pot (fun video)
That’s the Tuna! The silver tour is getting some great publicity right now, thanks, Pete! I have to tell you, if I had spent thirty years in prison for pot, I don’t know if I’d be up to throw the rest of my life and my money into legalization efforts. And another thing, Bob is a very charming and persuasive fellow…there isn’t another spokesman anywhere who has his ability to flat out charm people. You meet the Tuna and you automatically think “gee, what a nice guy”.
Support the Silver tour, on a national front this sort of thing could be really effective. Support your local Tuna.
I’d be forced to become a sniper. .. I’m truly amazed we’re not seeing this phenomenon yet.
OT: An article on what may be happening vis-a-vis the Feds attacking dispensaries at a time when Big Pharma’s cannabis based meds are about to make their debut:
Sativex: The Trojan Horse to Permanent Cannabis Prohibition
That is why in every article I could find about Sativex I made sure to inform them it is the same medicine sold now in states that allow it and the same type of medicine used by healers and medicine men for 5000years,,and people can grow it in their yards.
some of us have been saying that for a long time. and around these parts, saying that kind of stuff has traditionally been met with howls of fury.
It used to be that any news headline about legalization or medical marijuana was turned into a joke also but the howls are sounding a lot like whimpers now.
First they will laugh at you,,,,,,
I love Robotech!!
“Difference-in-differences estimates suggested that passing MMLs (medical marijuana laws) decreased past-month use among adolescents … and had no discernible effect on the perceived riskiness of monthly use. … [These] estimates suggest that reported adolescent marijuana use may actually decrease following the passing of medical marijuana laws.â€
Somebody should come up with a name for this phenomenon…
.. Francis’ Law?
I like it! 😉
What kills me about Chabot is how he can spout nonsense and be taken seriously (at least enough that people listen).
Look at the beating English takes in this sentence:
“By simply reporting a pot store to the IRS, average citizens who are fed up with these domestic marijuana cartels can now fill out a very simple form,” Chabot wrote.
Gosh, I didn’t realize I could reach my goal of filling out a very simple form, and all I have to do to make it happen is simply report a pot store!
A critical item that Chabot and the article’s writer, Chris Roberts, neglect to mention is that under the new tax laws reporting someone to the IRS is no longer anonymous. It’s been the case for several years that the target of a complaint to the IRS is legally entitled to know the name of the person filing the charge.
If the filing is erroneous and appears motivated by fraud, like trying to get the IRS to extort money from a business on one’s behalf, or if the filing results in a third-party interference in a contract between the dispensary and another entity, there can be nasty legal ramifications for someone who does what Chabot recommends.
” It’s been the case for several years that the target of a complaint to the IRS is legally entitled to know the name of the person filing the charge.”
That is interesting. Notice that when SWAT raids your house and shoots your dog because of some “complaint”, the police never have to expose who it was that made the “complaint”.
Because it was the police that made it up.
In summary, even the heinous IRS is more fair to citizens than the police.
Shhhh! Don’t tell them. Let the IRS police take the snitches away in chains!
that could be why “author” chabot had to pay to have his sorry book published rather than being paid himself
A Bowling Green State University criminal justice team is developing the first national profile of police integrity through an analysis of police crime committed by sworn law enforcement officers. A National Institute of Justice (NIJ) grant in excess of $260,000 will fund the work of criminal justice faculty members Dr. Philip Stinson, principal investigator for the project, and co-investigators Drs. John Liederbach and Steven Lab. NIJ is a branch of the Office of Justice Programs at the U.S. Department of Justice. ..
.. According to Stinson, the research is important because “there are no comprehensive statistics available on problems with police integrity, and no government entity collects data on criminal arrests of police officers in the U.S.â€
“The lack of statistics on police crime should be troubling to police executives, researchers, policymakers and the general public,†Stinson added. ..
.. The BGSU investigators are gathering information using improved methodologies compared to previous studies. They will look at archived news articles and records concerning several thousand arrests of police officers in the U.S. from 2005 to 2011. Additionally, they will utilize federal court records to investigate the connection between police crime and other forms of police misconduct.
Police Integrity Lost
http://www.injusticeeverywhere.com/ Has been doing this for years.
Here we go again:
Marijuana users twice as likely to cause car crash
http://www.philly.com/philly/health/20120209_Marijuana_users_twice_as_likely_to_cause_car_crash.html?c=0.6244960817803245&posted=y&viewAll=y#comments
My comments:
The drug czar is pushing propaganda to scare states into passing per se drugged driving laws and no doubt in my mind he is involved in this.
Former DEA admin Karen Tandy is now a lobbyist for Motorola Corp whose subsidiary is Phillips. Phillips has developed a machine that tests saliva for marijuana and it is expensive,,in order for an effective coverage of city/state will be billions of dollars and in order to persuade congress spend that money he first must work up his prohibition supporters to get the legislators to support spending the money,,just another persecution tool for law enforcement.
Every study done using marijuana and a simulator has shown little to no impairment from marijuana use,,death rates from auto accidents have declined steadily since 1995 according to NHTSB and marijuana use has increased.
And I want to know how they determined that a fatal accident was caused by the use of marijuana or how they knew the dead person had used it in the last 3 hours before driving,,every time I ask a dead person anything they don’t answer and since they do not have a limit set anywhere on the amount of marijuana it takes to induce impairment,,I call this article propaganda and fear mongering.
If I understood the discussion correctly, relative risk of crash whilst under the acute influence of cannabis is 1.92 whilst the relative risk of crash with a blood alcohol content of 0.8 g/100 mL (the legal limit in many places) is 2.69.
http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e536
The relative risk of casualty crash traveling 5km/h over the speed limit (in a 60km/h zone) is 2.00 (see reference).
That’s how much crash risk acute cannabis intoxication adds; slightly less than traveling at 5km/h over the speed limit.
http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/roads/safety/publications/1997/pdf/Speed_Risk_1.pdf
Here’s a link to a 2000 NHTSA study that looked at the relative risk of crash by age and sex as a function of BAC.
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They removed the comments,,,can’t have us damn hippies messing up a good? piece of propaganda.
They also removed the article and my reply from my facebook page,,,hmmmm,,do I smell federal censorship?
It’s all there Clay. Along with your comments.
Not showing any comments when I click the link in original post here and share on facebook page is missing when I click on it,,perhaps I have been edited or restricted from seeing them..don’t know.
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I figured out why I wasn’t seeing some comments sections or allowed to sign on sites that use “Mlive” style software. It was because my recently re-installed Adblock Plus had decided that those things were annoying advertisements. I’m only mentioning it because maybe you’ve got something similar going on clay?
edit: I’m not seeing comments on that page either. Firefox and Safari both.
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So I noticed the mumbo jumbo quoted below in the study. Does this mean they weren’t bothering to differentiate between “at fault” or not drivers? Were they even limiting the study to drivers, or were passengers possibly included? IIRC ~1/3 of the pedestrians that suffer fatality on the US highways and byways are over the 0.08 BAC “limit” and are at fault in their own deaths. Did you know that these incidents are still listed as drunken driving fatalities? If a drunken driver runs over and kills a drunken pedestrian do they list both as at fault? I seem to recall somewhere that drunken drivers are found culpable in only about 90% of traffic collisions in which they’re involved. It does make sense to me. Just because someone’s drunk when driving down the road doesn’t mean that he’s not surrounded by idiots and incompetents. They’ve also got to collide with each other from time to time. Especially considering the uniform bar closing time in many jurisdictions. If all the bars in Georgetown close at 2 A.M. There’s going to be a spike in the number of drunken drivers on the roads around those bars starting at 2:15 A.M. or thereabouts.
Have you ever wondered why prohibitionists are always asking, “have you seen the latest research about the dangers of merrywanna?” It’s because their favorite studies have a very short shelf life before being discredited. The “latest” research is all that they have. As a result I pay little attention to the studies being published today but I am very interested in those 18-36 months of age, because that’s when the peers thumbs down start to show up. Just about any cannabis research out of Britain and Australia are discounted before I read the abstract. The Brits and Aussies have a worse case of reefer madness than the US. Our pay for results scientific hacks won’t even venture into the stupidity of cannabis as a causal factor of schizophrenia but the Aussies and Brits won’t let it go.
The driving study appears to be on every media outlet this morning. Par for the course though. The study generates headlines, the debunking of the study gets a squib under the obituaries. It’s why we still hear about the results of the monkey brain/pot causes brain damage study more than 3 decades later despite the fact that it was laughed out of the Bureau of Peer Review.
Try deleting your history and your cache, that ought to do the trick.
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I can’t clear my history. Too much junk saved. I don’t have a bank of hard drives storing every link to a story even marginally related to cannabis like DdC.
I decided to pretend like I’m a prohibitionist so I can fool the censor into posting my comment on HuffPo’s article:
Medical Marijuana Bills Introduced In Maryland House To Help Patients
Let’s see if it works!
Sarcasm that even I get…good job! Duncan, take fifteen minutes and bookmark your frequent pages, make a little file for them. That’s what I do, until my computer fails prematurely and catastrophically, as they all do.
I kinda miss DdC…he was good to have around as long as you could read stream of consiousness, and didn’t mind wolves in green jumpsuits.
….oh yeah, I found his pipe between the cusions of the couch too, and I’m still waiting to give it back.
as i remember it, the boston tea party was an anti-tax event. i don’t think the patriots of the day were likely to turn the “indians” that ruined the east india company’s merchandise in to the authorities. rather i think the sons of liberty held the tax man in contempt. tax collectors were burned in effigy, not sucked up to. so keep it up, chabot and sabet, you will not be forgotten, suckasses.
Real quick, A meta study is claiming that stoned drivers are 2x likely to be involved in accidents. However as I learned here, even in MMJ states there is no spike in driving fatalities or injuries. link to the story: http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/new-analysis-stoners-almost-twice-lik#comments
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