The Blog of Walker

Cops Behaving Badly, January 26th.

2012-01-26T16:54:00.000-08:00

A few more items while I catch up.

The Barton County, Kansas Sheriff's Dept. Charming fellows.
The gullibility of Nassau County and New York City law enforcement officials.
An eighth-grader in Brownsville, Texas, was shot to death by police officers after brandishing a pellet gun in a hallway in his school.
The latest in the War on Cameras.
An Alabama minister has sued the Shelby County, Tennessee, Drug Enforcement Task Force after having a warrant mistakenly issued for his arrest on a drug charge, along with his photo being posted on a sheriff's most wanted list.
A high-ranking RCMP officer in Merritt, BC, is facing theft charges for ( allegedly ) stealing seized cocaine on more than one occasion.
A Virginia state trooper essentially performs highway robbery...and seems to get away with it.
More on that drug raid gone wrong in Ogden, Utah.
According to a federal court filing, more than 500 people have been wrongly imprisoned in Denver, Colorado over the past seven years.
More on the story of Tina Funderburk, who was caught up in legal limbo for over eight years in Hinds County, Mississippi: in jail on murder charges, but not likely to see the inside of a courtroom because of criminal insanity. A judge has finally transferred Ms. Funderburk's case out of a criminal court, which means that she can now be committed to a mental hospital.
The latest in the War on Canines.
The many crimes of former Memphis, Tennessee MPD officer Norman Benjamin.
Ian Birk, a former Seattle police officer who resigned after shooting and killing Vancouver Island, BC resident John T. Williams while still on duty in August of 2010, will not face civil rights charges.

Progress for BC's liquor laws?

2012-01-26T16:24:00.000-08:00

BC's Solicitor General and Minister of Public Safety, Shirley Bond, announced the other day that the province is considering changes to its laws governing the sale of liquor in movie theatres. Cases like this one show why changing these laws would be a good idea.

Meanwhile, Okanagan-Coquihalla MP Dan Albas' private member's bill to amend the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act, which currently makes it illegal to transport liquor across provincial lines without the consent of each province's liquor board, still doesn't seem to have moved past the Standing Committee of Finance. BC NDP leader Adrian Dix has shown support for Albas' bill.

On drugs

2012-01-26T16:13:00.000-08:00

A couple of items that caught my attention this month.

First, there appears to be an shortage of the attention-deficit medication Adderall in the States, mostly because of quotas imposed on manufacturers by the DEA. The DEA, naturally, refuses to take the blame for getting in the way of much-needed medication for a lot of people by saying that drug companies simply want to sell more brand-name drugs instead of cheaper generics: “Any shortage of these products is therefore a result of decisions made by industry regarding manufacturing or distribution." This might well be true - why sell a generic when you can sell a brand-name drug instead? - but still misses the point, and the direct harm the DEA is causing because of an arbitrary desire to regulate the chemicals that people are willing to put into their own bodies, with or without a note from their doctor.

Second, four Columbia University scientists have published an important review in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology that calls into question the amount of damage that meth use can inflict on the human brain. In the short term, they found, meth use can actually improve, among other things, attention and visual and spatial perception. More importantly, long-term users don't seem to show the kind of cognitive damage that has been assumed so far, which means that rehab treatments might be more effective against meth addiction than previously thought. This research could drastically change the way that we approach meth consumption and addiction, which unfortunately means it will probably be largely ignored by policy-makers.

Andrew Phillips: The Iron Curtain

2012-01-26T15:47:00.000-08:00

Occasional correspondent Andrew Phillips writes:

Social Housing may go Smoke Free - CFRA

Dear God you smoked, and have, for decades. Jerzy have the decency to die so the Smoke Nazis have another I told you so example they can use. A living smoker is of no use to them your worth more to them as a dead statistic. Which gives you a pretty good idea of the real value they place on human life and civil liberties; none. - my quote on Facebook to an American friend today.

Recently in Holland the largest party in the Dutch Parliament, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy which, as its name implies, is anathema to the public health establishment. Relaxed the Dutch smoking ban after a grass-roots campaign led by small bar owners. Bringing about an angst filled letter about "leaving smokers to their fate". So what's the problem with being left alone and not vilified and segregated by governments, drug companies, and taxpayer funded special interest groups being bought by big Pharmaceutcial companies I wonder?

As early as July of this year a majority of Dutch bars brought out the ashtrays as you can see some of this can, in part, be attributed to the free market and both the owners AND the consumers being allowed to make a free choice in the matter. In Carson City Nevada a bill was passed back in June that will allow taverns and bars to - once again - operate their privately owned establishments in their own best interests and that of their paying customers. In Germany they want the "Health Mafia" to butt out this is Germany so using the word Nazis is touchy even though it is very accurate.

In America, in Michigan, law makers have been banned from bars and restaurants as they have started a campaign to defend their property rights. Where, "Bars will be posting signs on their entrances, and providing workers photographs of lawmakers to identify them should they, the lawmakers, choose to ignore the ban. Owners have indicated they will have lawmakers charged with trespassing". The bans are being flouted and ignored in Spain, in France , and in Texas a proposed ban was snuffed out by state lawmakers. In England an English MP want to reverse the ban as it is killing the English Pub industry . Although this is a step in the right direction it falls short of the real goal of property rights. Which is putting a legal wall between the citizen and government coersion.

In Spain they have just opened up the first smokers club an action a friend of mine tried to do here in Canada. As the man said who tried to get my friend and his case heard in the Supreme Court of Canada for private establishments, even as the health issue seems to end at the front door of a casino, stated, "What is the definition of a public place?" asks Mason. "The distinction between private and public, in my opinion, was not addressed properly by (the Ontario Court of Appeals.) "As it reads in the appeals court decision, I think an argument could be made that your home is now a public place".

Martin W. Mason was, he has since passed away, one of the most respected lawyers in Ottawa. He was a partner with Gowlings. Had served on the national and Ontario council of the Canadian Bar Association. Is past chair of the bar association's council on constitutional and human rights law. Taught constitutional law at the University of Ottawa. By the way Mr Mason and Gowling thought it was so important an issue they did the work pro bono (for free).

Meanwhile the media in Canada continues to ignore the mounting reports of the suicides and murder suicides from Champix (Chantix) a smoking cessation drug made by Pfizer which is facing massive lawsuits which you can read abouthere and here . Even as ads are appearing on TV in Canada for that very product. Ads that don't even carry the health risk warnings that - by law - are mandatory in the United States. But corporate media ownership in Canada appears to have been given the okay to run US style drug ads by the CRTC . Giving them a huge financial incentive from potential drug cartel advertising revenue to push both the drug ads and block the above information. Winston Churchill once called this, or something quite like it, the Iron Curtain.

Great economists like F.A. Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises have pointed out that when free markets disappear fascism is the end result and as this article about the very subject points out key to restoring freedom in this country is toeliminate the special interest groups in everything. What is under attack are fundamental freedoms predating our nation and its very beginning such as free choice, property rights, freedom of association, and the rule of constitutional law and the protection it accords us all from the state.

The young lady below was shot dead because the property rights of bars and restaurants in Canada are continuing to be violated. A death, along with the reason for it, that was, for the most part ignored by the Iron Curtain. It has never been about health; never. It certainly didn't help hers.

On Liberals and Libertarianism

2012-01-25T17:23:00.000-08:00

As a follow-up to this, a guest-post by Will Wilkinson at Bleeding Heart Libertarians that I think pretty much sums up my own position on what it means to be a libertarian. Or a liberal. Or a liberaltarian. Whatever.

I’m not interested in identifying which among the many kinds of bleeding-heart libertarian I am because I’m not interested in identifying myself a libertarian. Ideological labels are mutable, but at any given time they publicly connote a certain syndrome of convictions. What “libertarian” tends to mean to most people, including most people who self-identify as libertarian, is flatly at odds with some of what I believe. So I guess I’m just a liberal; the bleeding heart goes without saying.

Here are some not-standardly-libertarian things I believe: Non-coercion fails to capture all, maybe even most, of what it means to be free. Taxation is often necessary and legitimate. The modern nation-state has been, on the whole, good for humanity. (See Steven Pinker’s new book.) Democracy is about as good as it gets. The institutions of modern capitalism are contingent arrangements that cannot be justified by an appeal to the value of liberty construed as non-interference. The specification of the legal rights that structure real-world markets have profound distributive consequences, and those are far from irrelevant to the justification of those rights. I could go on.

Given the prevailing public understanding of “libertarianism,” this ain’t it and I’m no libertarian. And it’s not at all clear to me what is to be gained by trying to get people to retrofit the label to fit my idiosyncratic politics. At any rate, that’s not a project I’m interested in. I am interested in what it means to be free, and the role of freedom in flourishing or meaningful or valuable lives.

[...]

Anyway, I would encourage other decreasingly standard-libertarian libertarian-ish types to hasten their passage through the liminal “bleeding heart” stage and just come out as liberals. Or, better yet, to come out as inscrutably idiosyncratic. You are not alone. Well, if you’re inscrutably idiosyncratic, you are. But the similarly inscrutably idiosyncratic can be alone together. I’ve heard some good things about individualism. Maybe some of us should try it.

Cops Behaving Badly, January 25th

2012-01-25T17:17:00.000-08:00

A quick round-up while I catch up on a back-log of links and stories that I've been meaning to blog about during my hiatus.

A few things:

In Hinds County, Mississippi, a schizophrenic, criminally insane woman was left to rot in a detention center for years in a legal limbo: unlikely to be tried, but still charged with murder.
In Charlton, Massachusetts, a police sergeant who was sent to collect overdue library books.
In Utica, New York, a drunk, off-duty state trooper allegedly kicked his way into someone's home and assaulted them. Nobody seems to know why.
The ongoing fight against Chicago's wiretapping laws.
In Seattle, Washington, the City of Seattle sued attorney James Egan over his requests for police dash-cam footage.
In Ogden, Utah, police got into a massive firefight with an army veteran named Matthew David Stewart while serving a routine drug-related search warrant. One police officer, Jared Francom, was killed. This isn't so much cops behaving badly as a tragedy resulting from the increasingly-militarized war on drugs, but I thought it bore mention.
In Chicago, Illinois, officer Chris Collins apparently used a motor-vehicle database to track down a woman he'd given a speeding ticket to in order to ask her out. She subsequently sued him for violating her privacy.
The latest in the War on Cameras.

My latest for the Victoria Politics Examiner

2012-01-25T00:22:00.000-08:00

I'm back blogging after a long ( for me ) hiatus, and my first come-back post at the Victoria Politics Examiner takes a look at a new third party in BC: the Individual Rights Party of British Columbia. I hope to have more about the party's founders and how it came to be organized at a later date, if possible.

On libertarianism

2012-01-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

A friend pointed me toward this column by George Monbiot in The Guardian's Comment Is Free section a little while back, and I thought I'd share my reaction to Monbiot's thoughts on Libertarianism here. Please excuse any rambling incoherence on my part: I should really get that checked by a doctor.

Monbiot's thoughts, to wit:

Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

That's Monbiot's first paragraph, and he's already pissed me off for using such a cheap opener. So we're off to a great start. Later on:

Put briefly and crudely, negative freedom is the freedom to be or to act without interference from other people. Positive freedom is freedom from inhibition: it's the power gained by transcending social or psychological constraints. [ Isaiah ] Berlin explained how positive freedom had been abused by tyrannies, particularly by the Soviet Union. It portrayed its brutal governance as the empowerment of the people, who could achieve a higher freedom by subordinating themselves to a collective single will.

Rightwing libertarians claim that greens and social justice campaigners are closet communists trying to resurrect Soviet conceptions of positive freedom. In reality, the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms.

As Berlin noted: "No man's activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. 'Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows'." So, he argued, some people's freedom must sometimes be curtailed "to secure the freedom of others". In other words, your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy movement, exist to defend.

[...]

But rightwing libertarians do not recognise this conflict. They speak, like Clare's landlord, as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way. They assert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even – among the gun nuts – to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights. They characterise any attempt to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow.

These acts are fundamental human rights. All human action is a fundamental right. That's the whole point of having rights: that your actions and your person are your own. Our actions only stop becoming rights when they start hurting other people, at which point a sort of sanctioned tyranny - the rule of law - is need to rein them in. That's the whole point of society: it's a constant give-and-take of freedoms, where your freedom and my freedom butt up against one another, and through mutual agreement we decide not to rape and kill each other and to impose this agreement on the other members of our society in order to keep peace. And as a result, business is better and I don't have to sleep with a shotgun under my bed. In order for society to function, people need to realize that their complete ability to do things - especially bad things - goes out the door. Libertarians just disagree with the definition of bad things, in a lot of cases.

According to Monbiot, this is negative freedom. It's not affirming, and it doesn't give a damn about anybody else. And as long as I'm able to do business and sleep without having a shotgun under my bed, why should it?

This is where we come to my fundamental disagreement with Monbiot's argument: Government isn't there to lift us up, because as an entity the government doesn't give a damn about anybody else either. Your boss or your landlord might be a jerk, but you can always find another boss or another landlord. Another government only comes once in a very long while - sometimes never - and so to keep the worst impulses of large groups of people with large amounts of power over our lives in check, it's best to limit what say the government has in your life - and by extension, your boss's and your landlord's lives too. This isn't because folks like me love landlords and hate tenants, or hate the working man and the poor, or the environment. It's simply an extension of the social contract, something that means that all of us, collectively, are a little safer, even if that means that some things aren't as good as we'd like them to be. And contrary to popular belief, libertarians actually do care about people who have fallen on hard times, and about the world around them. They just don't think that other people should be forced into action as a result.

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned "freedom" into an instrument of oppression.

Banks, corporations and the rich make us less free in some ways, that's true. But businesses fail. Corporate stocks can be shorted. And the rich have always had it better, and no amount of government intrusion is going to fix that.

Many "libertarians" are exactly what Monbiot is accusing them off: autocrats who only talk about freedom without actually caring about it. And those people deserve whatever abuse one might feel like heaping upon them. But modern Libertarianism as a whole is a far more principled thing than Monbiot makes it out to be, and shame on him for not making that distinction.

RIP, Siobhan Reynolds

2012-01-06T22:52:00.000-08:00

Pain patient advocate Siobhan Reynolds died in a plane crash last month. Reynolds was a tireless worker for those who suffered from needless pain as a result of not being able to get a-hold of the appropriate pain-killing medications - largely as a result of government policy, in some fashion or other - and for those who found themselves on the wrong side of the law for prescribing painkillers to their patients. She was the founder of the Pain Relief Network, which went under after Reynolds and her group tangled with the wrong prosecutor.

At The Agitator, Radley Balko writes a lengthy send-off, which should be read:

There aren’t very many people who can claim that they personally changed the public debate about an issue. Reynolds could. Before her crusade, no one was really talking about the under-treatment of pain. The media was still wrapped up in scare stories about “accidental addiction” to prescription painkillers and telling dramatic (and sometimes false) tales about patients whose lazy doctors got them hooked on Oxycontin. Reynolds toured the country to point out that, in fact, the real problem is that pain patients are suffering, particularly chronic pain patients. And because of the government’s harassment, there are increasingly fewer doctors willing to treat them. After Reynolds, the major newsweeklies, the New York Times, and a number of other national media outlets began asking if the DEA’s war on pain doctors had gone too far.

Reynolds’ passion stemmed from watching her ex-husband agonize, and later her belief that his death was due to his inability to get treatment. She feared her son would contract the same condition, and face the same obstacles. What infuriated her was that this was never a problem of not knowing what relieves chronic pain. This wasn’t about the need for more research. Her husband had found relief in high-dose opioid therapy. The problem was that in its ceaseless efforts to stop people from getting high, the government had blocked that relief, imprisoned the doctor who administered it, and thus condemned her husband to suffer. (Watch The Chilling Effect, the movie Reynolds produced about her ex-husband’s fight here.)

Also see David Borden and Robert Higgs.

Let's hope someone else is there to take up the mantle.

BC and liquor: a bad mix.

2012-01-05T07:21:00.000-08:00

Sarah Berman had a very interesting article in The Tyee last month on some of BC's more wacky liquor laws. I would encourage you all to read it, if only to get a taste of what happens when governments get in the habit of regulating our chemical input.

Alberta can be forgiven for its lack of wine country. But as visitors, British Columbians might be tempted to bring over a bottle or two from Canada's oldest wine region.

However, thanks to the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act, doing so is a federal offense. No liquor is allowed to cross provincial borders without express consent from each province's liquor board.

"It's not right that someone from the United States has an easier time shipping wine home," says Okanagan-Coquihalla MP Dan Albas, who has spearheaded a private members' bill to amend the 83-year-old law. Albas says the legislation hurts his constituents' family-run wineries and the region's tourism industry.

"I don't think they normally bother people like you and me," Campbell says of the limits on cross-provincial imbibing. Liquor boards in Alberta and Ontario have both issued statements that give allowance for personal use. "But it certainly doesn't encourage inter-provincial trade."

By the way: Dan Albas' private member's motion to amend the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act, Bill C-311, can be read here, if you're interested. It's managed to get past first and second reading in the house, and is currently sitting before the Standing Committee on Finance. Let's hope it gets past that stage and fixes such an arcane piece of legislation.

Schumer to the rescue

2012-01-04T08:09:00.000-08:00

Down South, New York senator Chuck Schumer had a fit of hysterics in December over the latest thing that poses not only a threat to the general population, but to the children as well: breathable caffeine.

Democrat Charles Schumer wrote Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg today asking her to review the safety and legality of the AeroShot Pure Energy caffeine inhaler, a yellow and gray canister of caffeine powder and B vitamins resembling a tube of lipstick. The inhaler is set to hit store shelves in New York and Boston next month.

AeroShot will be sold over the counter with no age restrictions and is touted for its convenience and zero calories. If taken with alcohol, the mixture may have effects similar to caffeinated alcohol drinks tied to hospitalizations in the past, Schumer said. Doctors say it may carry neurological and cardiovascular risks.

“The product is nothing more than a club drug designed to give users the ability to drink until they drop,” Schumer said.

As someone who very much enjoys the benefits that both alcohol and caffeine have to offer, I'm not quite sure why designing something that allows people to have more fun for longer is a bad thing, exactly. It probably is, though. Which means that it shouldn't be allowed to exist. Thanks Chuck Schumer.

Connie Fournier talks Human Rights Commissions on the Michael Coren Show

2012-01-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

H/t to Blazing Cat Fur, who has this clip of my friend Connie Fournier on the Michael Coren Show last month:

On Ken White

2012-01-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

Ken at Popehat - Ken White, we now know - has finally put an end to what little anonymity he had left. Good on him. SHG at Simple Justice explains why Ken White is a pretty cool guy - and also goes into detail about Ken's big, shiny brass balls for those who are interested. Further examples of Ken White's awesomeness, if needed, can be seen here, here, and here. He also wrote an article about prosecutorial misconduct for Reason Magazine's July issue which you should probably read.

H/t Balko.

Chronicling the War on Drugs, one day at a time.

2012-01-02T07:43:00.000-08:00

A couple of things.

1) Medicines to cope with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder are apparently in short supply in the States. The FDA blames the DEA. The DEA blames the drug companies for not supplying enough generics. People with real problems get screwed. Sounds about right.

2) Meanwhile, a new, even-scarier drug-related threat emerges. Jacob Sullum at Reason's Hit & Run reports.

3) Ron Paul's theory that the CIA had ties to drug trafficking during the Iran-Contra Scandal is probably correct. Also, he's right that the war on drugs is racist.

4) Tony D'Souza in Mother Jones on the faces of marijuana trafficking, which are surprisingly white-bread.

Cops behaving badly

2012-01-01T23:50:00.000-08:00

What better way to break a dry spell than a link round-up?

A few items of interest.

Too smart to be a cop in Connecticut. H/t my uncle.
An update on the beating of Jordan Miles in Pittsburgh. Apparently he should have known better than to run away from the people that were threatening him, who later turned out to be plainclothes officers.
A good cop, with flaws.
The latest in the war on canines.
A bad cop, with flaws.
Whoops.
SHG at Simple Justice on searches and drug-sniffing dogs.
More in the war on cameras.
The latest in professional behavior.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Dept. has apparently jailed hundreds of the wrong people in its jails over the years because of simple ID errors.
In Lee County, Florida, 62-year-old Nick Christie was apparently strapped naked to a chair for hours, with his head covered, and doused in pepper spray by officers until he died. Over two-and-a-half years later, no charges have been filed against the officers involved.

Meanwhile, prosecutors behaving badly - plus a good attorney.

Carrier IQ, Lawful Access, and assorted acronyms

2011-12-24T11:22:00.000-08:00

I realize I'm coming to these respective parties quite late, but I still thought they were worth mentioning.

First, Xanthippa takes a good, hard look at Carrier IQ and what it's doing with peoples' smartphone data.

Second, Michael Geist explains the goverment's lawful access deception.

Also, don't forget about INDECT. Seriously, what with SOPA, PROTECT IP, and God knows what else, we seem to be looking forward to an increasingly acronymized world.

How many kids are being arrested these days, anyway?

2011-12-24T09:13:00.000-08:00

Radley Balko writes in the Huffington Post on student arrests in the United States. It's more interesting than you might think:

A headline-generating study, published in the journalPediatrics this week, suggests that approximately one in three Americans is arrested before age 23. That's up from about one in five in 1965, the last time a similar study was conducted. The study used data from surveys given to the 7,335 people who enrolled in the federal government's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1996.

This study, a recent joint initiative between the Departments of Justice and Education and a spate of anecdotal stories in the news all suggest a surge in the arrests of minors, and particularly in arrests that originate in schools. But the federal government is both fighting the "school-to-prison" pipeline while continuing to fund the same programs that critics say are causing it. Moreover, because the government hasn't been collecting data on school-based arrests, and the little available data shows overall arrests of juveniles are down, it's difficult to determine if a problem exists, much less whether federal initiatives are solving it -- or contributing to it.

Balko explains some of the background to his piece here:

But while researching the piece, I looked up juvenile arrest data for the U.S. It turns out, juvenile arrests are down over the last 20 years, and pretty significantly. That didn’t make sense. So I went back and looked at those school-to-prison pipeline articles. Yep. Lots of anecdotes, but most all of them lack hard data about school arrests. National statistics for school-based arrests just don’t exist, though there have been some localized studies that suggest there could be a problem.

Regular readers might have noticed that I link to Radley Balko's work - and the links that he recommends on his own site - quite a lot. The fact that he would put out a piece like this one, with the methodology that he used, is exactly why I do.

Why the BC Liberals should be very unhappy right now

2011-12-23T10:06:00.000-08:00

My latest piece for Examiner.com ( alright, so my break there was shorter than I thought it would be ) talks about some interesting poll results that have the BC Liberals tied for second place among the province's top three parties. Granted, it's a long time until our next election, but it's fun to speculate.

When giving people more freedom and choice in life puts them "in danger."

2011-12-23T09:06:00.000-08:00

As part of this, Terri Theodore reports in the Globe and Mail on the BC government's rather lame defense for its unconstitutional drunk driving laws: we need to breach peoples' constitutional rights because not doing so places them "in danger."

The public will be in danger if a B.C. Supreme Court judge doesn’t suspend a ruling that struck down the province’s drunk driving law, a government lawyer said.

George Copley told Mr. Justice Jon Sigurdson on Monday that the regulation that allowed automatic roadside suspensions has saved dozens of lives and more than halved injuries since it was implemented over a year ago.

The public would be safer if nobody was allowed to drive, period. Taking away everybody's vehicle would make things far simpler for everybody involved in enforcing public safety on our roads, from police officers to prosecutors to judges to lawmakers. But anybody who proposed such a thing would look like an idiot, and even if they weren't immediately laughed out of whatever room they happened to be in, constitutional rights tend to pour cold water over such ideas. Indeed, that's sort of the point, and it's a consideration one always has to keep in mind if one is placed in charge of trying to keep us from killing each other: how safe can we make people vs. how many freedoms can we take away?

For obvious reasons, driving drunk and killing someone in the process is not a freedom that should be celebrated - that's why it isn't - but a draconian punishment for drivers who have done nothing more than blow over .08, with no due process or ability to appeal is a ridiculous extension of this concept, and deserves our contempt.

Just in case the time-tested "it's for your safety" argument doesn't work, the government's lawyer in this case tried another classic: the ol' "we're out of money" shtick.

Mr. Copley also warned of “financial chaos” for the provincial government if the judge ruled that it had to pay back the thousands caught up in the scheme.

In other words, violating peoples' constitutional rights and causing them real harm should be a cost-free venture as long as the government is doing it. After all, you or I certainly wouldn't be expected to financially compensate someone for damages ( such as loss of car, and subsequent loss of job and/or home ), would we?

Just take it

2011-12-22T20:48:00.000-08:00

That's the lesson coming out of this story, courtesy of some great work by Radley Balko at The Agitator:

Apropos of the post below, here’s a ruling from the D.C. Court of Appeals demonstrating just how powerless citizens are when accosted by police officers—even when the cops themselves are clearly in the wrong. What’s most troubling about the ruling is its mundanity. The law is established here. There’s really nothing to debate. It’s just a matter of the government rattling off the appropriate precedents.

The appellant is Terrance Crossland, who is asking the court to overturn his conviction on two counts of assaulting a police officer. Last April, Crossland and his cousin were approached by two D.C. Metro officers on patrol “to gather information about a rash of recent shootings and drug sales in the area.” Crossland was mowing his grass while smoking a cigarette. The police acknowledge that neither Crossland nor is cousin were doing anything unlawful. The two men were told to turn around, put their hands against a fence, and submit to a search. By both accounts, Crossland initially complied, then said, “Fuck this shit. I’m tired of this.”

Police say Crossland then elbowed one officer in the head, at which point he was punched, taken to the ground, kicked several times, and pepper sprayed. Both the trial court, the appeals court, and even the prosecution acknowledge that because Crossland was doing nothing wrong before the incident, it was illegal for the police to stop, detain, and search him. Nevertheless . . .

. . . as the trial court recognized, the APO statute “prohibits forceful resistance even if the officer’s conduct is unlawful.” Dolson v. United States, 948 A.2d 1193, 1202 (D.C. 2008) (explaining that the rationale for this rule is to “deescalate the potential for violence which exists whenever a police officer encounters an individual in the line of duty”) . . .

So even if the police illegally stop you, detain you, and beat you, you aren’t permitted to resist. Just roll over and take it. Submit.

More from Brian Doherty at Reason's Hit & Run.

Cops behaving badly

2011-12-22T20:42:00.000-08:00

A few items:

Young, black, and frisked by the NYPD. H/t Balko.
More evidence that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is an asshole.
Cops benefit from more video records too.
Why Gibson Guitars had it coming.
The latest in the war on canines.
The Daily Beast and the Centre for Investigative Journalism on the increase in American police militarization. H/t Balko.
Whoops.
Some good news in the war on cameras.
Dean Scoville writes in Police Magazine on cops who lose their jobs for expressing the wrong opinions in front of the wrong people.

Also, prison guards behaving badly.

Canada's medical marijuana laws: headed in the wrong direction

2011-12-20T07:23:00.000-08:00

Thandi Fletcher reports, via The Province:

OTTAWA — Canada's medical marijuana licensing system is vulnerable to abuse and needs to be tightened up, says the health minister after data emerged this week revealing a surge in possibly fraudulent applications.

"We're aware that there are opportunities and risks of the system being abused, which is why we are working to tighten up the system," said Steve Outhouse, a spokesman for Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, on Friday.

Outhouse was speaking in response to the Ottawa Citizen's recent series looking at medical marijuana licensing and use in Canada. The series was based on electronic data the Citizen obtained from Health Canada through the Access to Information Act.

The figures showed, for example, that between 2008 and 2010 applications to Health Canada for medical marijuana based on severe arthritis claims jumped 2,400 per cent.

There are two main changes Aglukkaq has proposed to prevent exploitation of the government's Marihuana Medical Access Regulations, said Outhouse.

They include better educating doctors on how to prescribe medical marijuana and eliminating the right of patients to be granted a licence to grow in their homes, he said.

"We want to be able to get more information out to doctors . . . because often doctors don't have all the information they need to make an informed decision as to whether or not to prescribe," said Outhouse.

"The other thing . . . we're proposing is that people wouldn't grow in homes. That it would be available through a centralized location, whatever company would grow it, to treat it as much as any other drug."

Also, this:

Outhouse said the health minister is concerned about the safety risks involved with allowing people to grow marijuana plants in their home.

What safety risks would those be, exactly? Most of the dangers involved in growing pot seem to be related to the fact that it's a crime to do so - which is largely a result of government policy. As long as your operation is up to code and doesn't pose a fire hazard, I can't see a risk to growing your own licensed medical marijuana any greater than a Cheeto overdose.

The nation's largest doctors' group — the Canadian Medical Association — has said the proposals would put even greater pressure on doctors to control access to a largely untested and unregulated substance, a drug that hasn't gone through the normal regulatory review process. Their licensing bodies have told doctors that they are under no obligation to complete a medical declaration under the current regulations and that anyone who chooses to do so should "proceed with caution."

I'm sorry, but I just don't see the point to these changes. Putting doctors in murky legal waters and making it harder for people in pain to seek alternative treatment vs. more people using marijuana by gaming the medical marijuana system, in a country where, in British Columbia, pot is a billion-dollar industry: why is this even a contest?

Regulation that literally kills

2011-12-19T11:00:00.000-08:00

Jacob Sullum at Reason's Hit & Run has the story:

A new Institute of Medicine report unintentionally highlights the fatal folly of censoring truthful information about cigarette alternatives until their manufacturers can generate the sort of costly, time-consuming studies that federal regulators demand before approving new drugs. Under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, a "modified risk tobacco product," which is any tobacco product identified as safer than cigarettes, can be legally sold only after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certifies that it will "benefit the health of the population as a whole, taking into account both users of tobacco products and persons who do not currently use tobacco products." In making that determination, the FDA is supposed to consider "scientific evidence." The IOM report, which was mandated by the law, suggests what sort of scientific evidence will be necessary. The short answer: the sort of scientific evidence that no one is likely to collect.

[...]

The IOM report's authors worry that "little is currently known about the products' health effects and whether they pose less risk than traditional tobacco products." Enough is known to say that smokeless products such as snus, e-cigarettes, and lozenges, because using them does not involve lighting tobacco on fire and inhaling the toxins and carcinogens thereby generated, are much safer than conventional cigarettes. Yet companies selling them are barred from saying so until they perform prohibitively expensive studies that would take years to complete. If the goal is to reduce smoking-related disease and death, that demand makes no sense, since cigarettes are already on the market and are indisputably much more dangerous than the alternatives. Smokers can dramatically reduce their health risks by switching to smokeless products. Suppressing the information that might encourage them to do so needlessly endangers their health. Godshall argues that the IOM approach "is terrible for public health because it urges the FDA to protect deadly cigarettes from market competition by far less hazardous smokefree alternatives."

Does this make sense to you? Me neither.

All you'll ever need to know about Newt Gingrich

2011-12-19T07:56:00.000-08:00

I don't tend to comment much on American politics, unless it's about drug policy. I certainly don't intend to comment on the race for GOP candidate in the next election. However, since Newt Gingrich could conceivably become the Republican Party's candidate for president in 2012, and could therefore become the next US president ( in theory at least ), I thought my thoughts on drug policy and my thoughts on American politics should form an unholy union just this one time.

Basically, it all comes down to this: all that you will ever need to know about Newt Gingrich can be distilled down to his actions in 1995, when he did the following:

Speaker Newt Gingrich said on Friday that he would ask Congress to enact legislation imposing the death penalty on drug smugglers, and he suggested that mass executions of people convicted under such a law might prove an effective deterrent.

Mr. Gingrich, speaking to about 400 people at a money-raising event here for Representative Charlie Norwood, Republican of Georgia, said, "The first time we execute 27 or 30 or 35 people at one time, and they go around Colombia and France and Thailand and Mexico, and they say, 'Hi, would you like to carry some drugs into the U.S.?' the price of carrying drugs will have gone up dramatically."

Mr. Gingrich said his proposal, which he said he would make in a bill to be filed next month, would impose a mandatory death penalty on people convicted of bringing illegal drugs into the United States.

"If you import a commercial quantity of illegal drugs," he said, "it is because you have made the personal decision that you are prepared to get rich by destroying our children. I have made the decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you if you do this."

( H/t to Balko and TalkLeft ) This wasn't just empty rhetoric. Gingrich went on to introduce the Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996 to the House of Representatives ( scroll down a bit at the link ).

If I have to explain why this is a disgusting, evil thing, and why somebody who would be willing to "kill you" for importing chemical substances - all in the name of "our children" - is unqualified to lead a nation other than Singapore ( where similar policies, as well as being reprehensible, don't seem to have worked ), then I honestly feel sorry for you.

Plus, Gingrich says stuff like this.

Jacob Sullum makes a more comprehensive case against Newt Gingrich for Reason Magazine. So does Mark Steyn, with an old column re-posted on his site.

On a related note: Glenn Beck has taken some heat for saying that he would vote for a third-party Ron Paul over a Republican Newt Gingrich. In the words of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker:

Folks, there is nothing stopping you -- stopping us -- stopping the nation -- from electing a third party candidate to any office. House, Senate, even The White House. A candidate, or group of candidates, that promise above all else to honor the fact that you -- and not anyone else -- own yourself.

This means respect for the Rule of Law, because the only legitimate purpose of Law is to extend punishment for those who violate the rights of others within a framework of justice rather than vigilantism.

This means respect for personal autonomy, choice and freedom -- life, liberty and pursuit (but not a guarantee) of happiness.

There is nothing, my friends, that prevents actual political change and the correction of what is destroying our nation, save one thing: Recognition of who it is that actually owns you, and a refusal to vote for any candidate, in any race, irrespective of party affiliation, that either has a history of denying this basic fact or, if they have no legislative history, will not swear on their sacred honor (and upon pain of losing their job) that they will uphold the most-fundamental of all rights.

As far as I know, Denninger wasn't specifically talking about Gingrich vs. Paul, but I think what he said applies. Gingrich has shown in the past that he is clearly willing to disregard personal autonomy and fundamental rights ( like the right to not be killed by your own government ) for the sake of an arbitrary aversion to certain chemical substances. That, if nothing else, should mark him as the last candidate that any liberal-minded person ( in the classic sense of that term ) would want to vote for.

Update: Supervillain or Newt?

My latest for The Propagandist

2011-12-18T10:24:00.000-08:00

As promised in August - alright, so my predictions were a little off - here is my appearance on The Propagandist podcast. I'm talking about Geert Wilders, right-wing politics in Europe, and the like. Feel free to make fun of the dumb things I say and the dumb ways I say them.