The subject of police militarization has come up with increasing frequency over the past few years, and the troubling trend of police officers who act more like an occupying army than law enforcement continues.

Radley Balko has devoted a large part of his career to pointing out how the use of federal dollars to beef up paramilitary police units nationwide has led to a long list of deaths, innocent people under arrest, and worse.  His essay “Overkill” is an excellent synopsis of the current state of the use of SWAT teams in ways that seem to run counter to the idea of police being a part of the solution.

In the latest installment of his podcast, Common Sense, Dan Carlin does an excellent job of laying out the problem, how we got to where we are, and its roots in the war on drugs.  I suggest you give it a listen.

Blackfive brings up the subject of Marine units that are expressly trained and organized to supplement and train civilian police.  This troubles me because, as he points out, all it would take is the stroke of a pen to put them on the streets of America in a way that doesn’t violate Posse Comitatus.

Heck, even podcasts of just a bunch of friends getting together to shoot the breeze for a few hours have discussed the subject.

One thing that hasn’t been brought up in all these discussions recently occurred to me.  All of these discussions talk about SWAT raids to arrest drug suspects or deliver no-knock warrants to look for evidence, but no-one talks about the judges who take part in the process that makes them possible.  Would it make sense to make efforts to convince the judges that authorize no-knock search warrants that their use is detrimental to our society and system of justice?  There have to be professional organizations for those who sit on the bench.  Could outreach to these organizations be a good step in finding a way to cut down on the overuse of paramilitary tactics and equipment to go after non-violent offenders?  A lot of the judges in this country are elected, and advertisements during an election cycle that bring to light the judges’ involvement in the death of citizens when police use overly aggressive tactics or make mistakes that lead to tragedy might get them to re-evaluate their cooperation when the police come asking for a no-knock warrant.

What do y’all think?

Got into a heated discussion about medical marijuana with someone today.  Their stance was that most people who get access to medical marijuana are just looking to get high, while my position was that he was probably right, but that there are many people who benefit from it.

We ended the discussion agreeing to disagree and each admitting that the other had a point.  Afterwards, I continued to think about the issue, and I had an idea.

The main objection I’ve seen to medical marijuana was what my friend said:  A lot of people abuse the possibly legitimate utilization of marijuana as medicine for a discreet set of medical conditions because they want to get high.  It’s a running joke among people I know in California that going to a doctor and claiming that sometimes life stresses you out is a one way ticket to a prescription for Northern California Bliss.  There also seems to be the feeling that these systems of legalized use of marijuana are the camel’s nose under the tent flap towards normalization and legalization of other drugs such as cocaine and heroine.  If you can use weed to get rid of migraines, can’t you use Bolivian marching powder to lose weight or smack to get through those really tough periods in life?

My take on it is that a method of using cannabis to alleviate the suffering of truly sick people needs to be found.  Cancer patients, AIDS sufferers, and others can benefit from THC.  But I do agree that many people utilize medical marijuana dispensaries as their connection to a good buzz and nothing more.

So to those of you who don’t agree with the idea of medical marijuana, would you be OK with pharmacies dispensing THC in some pharmaceutical form such as pills, lozenges, or skin patches?  These are already used to dispense opiates to patients for pain control, so why not have them available, with a prescription, for those who currently utilize marijuana for medical conditions.  Heck, we gave prescription caffeine and nicotine to Little Bear when he was an infant to keep his heartrate up.  Ah, the joys of raising an extremely premature child.  People who would scream if we were to give an infant a dip of chewing tobacco and a Mountain Dew didn’t bat an eye as we mixed the evil stuff into his morning formula.

My point is that if cannabis has therapeutic uses, then we should exploit them.  If the current model of a dispensary selling weed, cookies, and lollipops is distasteful to most people, who not let pharmaceutical companies separate out the active ingredients, find a way to deliver it to patients that is as effective as smoking or eating it, and deliver it through existing pharmacy channels?

I’m not going to debate the legalization of marijuana from a libertarian standpoint.  I object to the government telling me I can’t do something to my own body so long as I don’t harm others while doing it, even if it’s something I wouldn’t do even if it was legal. I’m looking at the middle ground where a drug like THC could be legally used by those who could be helped by it in a way that doesn’t make people have visions of Haight-Ashbury.

Please let me know what y’all think in comments.

On December 11, 2006, the Mexican Drug War began when Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent in federal troops to quell drug violence.

Since then over 45,000 people, including police, civilians, and drug gang members, have been killed*.  Our own government has admitted that it has allowed guns and money to flow across our southern border, ostensibly in order to find, fix, and finish drug cartels.  Violence in Mexico has bled across the border into our southwestern states, including the death of our own citizens on multiple occasions.

And why is this all necessary?

From where I sit, all of this is happening because our government can’t stand to let adults destroy their own lives.  This is prohibition on steroids, PCP, and Viagra with all of the smuggling, murder, corruption, and human suffering that goes along with it.  In order to save us from our own bad choices, the United States government is willing to criminalize the voluntary use of intoxicants by adults.

I am still very negative on the recreational use of drugs, and if they were legalized tomorrow, I would  not use them myself and would stomp a mudhole in anyone who tried to give them to my children.  I’m not going to play the old canard that heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine are no deadlier than alcohol or nicotine.  They’re not, and anyone who tells you different is being less than truthful.  I’m also not convinced that using cannabis is as safe as smoking tobacco or having a drink.  But I’ve come to believe that the potential social ills that legal use of these drugs could bring would pale in comparison to the social ills that prohibition has brought to us in the past 40 years.

Yes, there will be addicts who get high and hurt others.  There will be those who neglect their children because they’re too baked to care.  There will be overdoses and diseases that will have to be treated.  But we already have those things, and we will have them no matter how much blood, sweat, and treasure we pour into programs to keep them from getting their personal drug of choice.  We are also dealing with a shooting war on our southern border, a huge government bureaucracy that arbitrarily decides what is a legal intoxicant, what is medicine, and what is forbidden for any use whatsoever, and other government agencies that justify further and further encroachments into our rights in the name of keeping us sober.

If nothing changes, either by drastically reducing the demand for the drugs smuggled into our country through Mexico or by taking away the profit motive of the cartels by legalizing their product, then in five years we will be marking the 10 year mark of a civil war in Mexico, with probably over 100,000 people dead, and violence splashing well into our own territory.  Prohibition didn’t work in the 1920’s, and it’s been a disaster this time.  I just hope we wake up to that fact before we do ever more serious damage to our republic because we can’t stand to let adults make mistakes.

*I’m not going to shed too many tears over the death of criminals, but I do know that when soldiers and gang members shoot at each other or gang members start murdering each other, a lot of people who just want to live their life end up dead along with the gang bangers.