Posted on 05/30/2014 2:55:23 PM PDT by bamahead
After Georgia’s Mountain Narcotics Criminal Investigation & Suppression Team burned a toddler with a flashbang grenade during a drug raid on Wednesday, Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell told Access North Georgia:
“The person I blame in this whole thing is the person selling the drugs,”
Of course, Terrell’s task force didn’t even know there was a child in the home. So it’s hard to argue they “cared” much either, at least not enough to let the kid’s safety trump the safety of the officers...
But this same task force has a history:
In September 2009, the young pastor Ayers was ministering to a young woman whom a Georgia drug task force was investigating on drug charges.
The task force followed Ayers to a convenience store, where he went in to get money from an ATM. They pulled up behind him in an unmarked black SUV. Armed agents dressed in street clothes rushed Ayers’s car...In the process, he nicked one agent. Another then opened fire, killing him. Ayers told hospital staff was that he thought he was being robbed.
Ayers had no drugs in his car or in his system, and there was no evidence he was using or distributing anything illegal.
District Attorney Brian Rickman already cleared the task force of any wrongdoing....Rickman also cleared the cops in the Ayers case.
--SNIP--
As it turns out, Officer Billy Shane Harrison, the cop who shot Ayers, hadn’t taken the series of firearms training classes required for his certification as a police officer. It turns out that Harrison also had received zero training in the use of lethal force.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Oh lord...poor baby.
How that must hurt.
:(
He’s in a medically induced coma at the moment. I wonder if he will ever see or hear again.
Oh, my.
:’(
Prayers up for that poor little guy.
According to what I read, he has lacerations on his chest as well, and a collapsed lung. So, it’s pretty bad.
Nobody deserves to go to prison for possessing (or transferring to another adult) any plant, medicine, or recreational chemical. Including meth. Nobody.
If, pursuant to the use of any such substances (whether legal or not) a person violates the rights of others by being negligent or committing actual criminal acts, then (and only then) does criminal (or civil) liability attach. Anything else is Tyranny.
Alcohol is, by an exceedingly wide margin, the worst drug on the face of the earth. Its aggregate negative effects far surpass those of all other drugs combined, whether legal or illegal:
The Drug War, with the necessarily draconian enforcement strategies and tactics needed to wage it, will continue to result in destruction of both lives and Freedom, while solving nothing, and simultaneously populating our prison system with non-criminals.
Contraband law is inherently Tyrannical, and in America, such "solutions" are antithetical to any reasonable concept of Liberty. To embrace such law is to embrace Tyranny incarnate.
Trying to address certain societal ills with Tyrannical law will never succeed, and will never be justifiable, regardless of the twisted authoritarian nanny-state logic which is employed, and regardless of how well-meaning its misguided advocates may be.
There's only one thing worse than drug legalization, and that is drug prohibition, and the hysterical Tyrannical mindset which clamors to justify it:
It's ironic how both self-righteous Drug War zealots and organized crime are content that drugs remain illegal. Strange bedfellows indeed.
Flame away.
One or both of the cops involved in killing the pastor lost their professional immunity and will have to pay some of that settlement out of their pockets.
http://www.habershamsheriff.com/investigations.htm
Scroll down and there is the smiling face of Chance Oxner, still a proud member of the Habersham County Sheriff’s Department.
I am arguing from a strictly constitutional standpoint. You have every right to take the position you do, and work within your state to have all drugs legalized.
You do not have the right to claim that proper interpretation of the Constitution would prevent states from prohibiting drugs, or alcohol, or anything else the people of that state choose to prohibit.
The Constitution limits federal power. States are much less constrained.
BTW, the fact that alcohol causes more total damage to society than any other drug, because it is so widely used, is not a particularly good argument for legalizing other drugs.
Haven’t looked up the stats, but prior to doing so I would bet a large sum that meth causes much more severe problems for those who use it than alcohol. Which is good argument for keeping that use limited to a small percentage of the population, not expanding it as widely as possible.
That drugs are misclassified for political reasons does not mean the classifications should all be thrown overboard.
It means they should be properly classified, and then we can have a political discussion about how we want to deal with them legally.
At what cost? I notice you didn't address any of the harms of drug criminalization that sargon noted.
not expanding it as widely as possible.
"as widely as possible"?! I can easily think of a number of policies that would expand meth use far more than simply legalizing it - and I'll bet you can too.
And how far would legalization really expand its use? Is the illegality of meth YOUR main reason for not using it?
All very much beside the point. I am addressing primarily the constitutional issues.
While the Constitution put strict limits on the powers of the federal government, restrictions sadly mostly ignored today, they put very few restrictions indeed on what states could do within their own borders.
Indeed, until the passage of 14A the Bill of Rights were not normally considered to apply to the states, and indeed they are still not fully applied.
You pretty obviously believe the right to sell and consume any product anyone wishes is a fundamental right. So you need to get busy and pass an amendment to that effect. Until then, states have every constitutional right to prohibit drugs or anything else they decide to.
Whether I would support such a ban in my state depends on the specifics. What drugs and what penalties for violation of the law? I think prohibition of pot is stupid, but what restrictions on other drugs are appropriate depends on the drug. The most idiotic part of the laws in this regard has always been their classification of drugs that have nothing in common together.
Your text that I reposted and replied to was not about constitutional issues.
states have every constitutional right to prohibit drugs or anything else they decide to.
Agreed.
End the war on drugs. Leave drug control to the states.
The bible already warned us 2000 years ago that human restrictions do nothing to stop people from harming their bodies.
The “drug war” is really a big, mostly failing fig leaf for a situation of God abandonment.
It is reasonably obvious to any intelligent person that ending the war on drugs by making all drugs legal would have two primary effects.
A. Drug use would go up a bunch. With all the side effects on individuals, families and societies as a whole.
B. The present negative side effects of the WOD would largely go away.
The argument in favor of ending the WOD consists largely of an assumption that the positive effects of B would vastly outweigh the negative impact of A. More accurately, most of the arguments I’ve seen assume that A would generate no or few side effects, an argument I think wildly optimistic.
That B might outweigh A is IMO a perfectly legitimate argument, but I strongly suspect A would be a lot more dramatically negative than proponents of legalization believe.
Some people who were sousing on alcohol would go to drugs.
Others already on drugs would keep it up.
Interdiction catches something like 10% of all pot... this is pitiful.
The answer lies in a different dimension. It lies in the direction of inviting and allowing God back into our lives. The reason far fewer people wanted to habitually poison themselves with non medically needed drugs in olden days, is because they welcomed the idea with all the relish of welcoming a visit from Satan. Now the attitude is more like “Cool! Satan!” And nobody is going to be able to do anything about that other than God, and God won’t until God is invited.
That recreational drugs have become much more common than in the past is indisputable.
I suspect part of the reason is that many, notably meth, just weren't available. Of course, they weren't available largely because there was little demand.
Ran across an interesting statistic the other day. At the time of the Revolution, Americans consumed about 2.5x the alcohol we do today. Today that would make us the heaviest consumer of booze in the world by a considerable distance. Higher than Belarus or Russia.
Possibly some of the recreational use of drugs was displaced back then by higher use of alcohol.
“That drugs are misclassified for political reasons does not mean the classifications should all be thrown overboard. It means they should be properly classified, and then we can have a political discussion about how we want to deal with them legally.”
You must also think we can have “Good” Big Government.
Drugs will ALWAYS be misclassified and enforcement will ALWAYS be selective due to the incredible profits that will ALWAYS result from drug prohibition.
There is enough money in illegal drugs to buy every government on the face of the Earth and I believe we are there already. Legalization will destroy profits and they will never allow it.
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