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REMEMBER KIDS: IF YOU DO DRUGS, WE'LL SHOOT YR DOG
This has been making the rounds on the blogs and the Facebooks (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thelastaerie gets credit for hipping me to it first), so you may have seen it, but it’s worth passing on:
Reason.com’s Radley Balko has posted newly released video of a drug raid incident he wrote about a few months ago in which a SWAT team in Missouri kicked in the door, shot the family dogs in front of a seven-year-old kid and arrested his parents for “child endangerment” because they were in possession of a “small amount” of marijuana.
Jesus. Where’s the Tea Party when you need it? I ask you.
Personally I can’t bring myself to watch the video (or even embed it), but Balko says:
Which is why I’m posting this.
It’s no secret anymore that the War On Drugs™ is a pointless failure. The irony is that (I suspect) most people know this, but refuse to admit it because they’re afraid of the alternative: legalizing it. (Because if it was legal, everyone would do it and we’d become a nation of stereotypical stoner slackers on the couch and then North Korea could just walk right in like they owned the place and ZOMG!)
Fear will do that. And fear is what this is all about. This is what a zero-tolerance policy will get you.
And I would say that it’s up to you to decide whether paramilitary raids like this are a small price to pay for lowering the chances of yr kids doing drugs (so long as raids like this don’t happen to you or anyone you know) ... except that it probably doesn’t matter what you think anymore.
Tell yr friends anyway.
Get down,
This is dF
thelastaerie gets credit for hipping me to it first), so you may have seen it, but it’s worth passing on:Reason.com’s Radley Balko has posted newly released video of a drug raid incident he wrote about a few months ago in which a SWAT team in Missouri kicked in the door, shot the family dogs in front of a seven-year-old kid and arrested his parents for “child endangerment” because they were in possession of a “small amount” of marijuana.
Jesus. Where’s the Tea Party when you need it? I ask you.
Personally I can’t bring myself to watch the video (or even embed it), but Balko says:
It's horrifying, but I'd urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.
Which is why I’m posting this.
It’s no secret anymore that the War On Drugs™ is a pointless failure. The irony is that (I suspect) most people know this, but refuse to admit it because they’re afraid of the alternative: legalizing it. (Because if it was legal, everyone would do it and we’d become a nation of stereotypical stoner slackers on the couch and then North Korea could just walk right in like they owned the place and ZOMG!)
Fear will do that. And fear is what this is all about. This is what a zero-tolerance policy will get you.
And I would say that it’s up to you to decide whether paramilitary raids like this are a small price to pay for lowering the chances of yr kids doing drugs (so long as raids like this don’t happen to you or anyone you know) ... except that it probably doesn’t matter what you think anymore.
Tell yr friends anyway.
Get down,
This is dF