By John Cheese
Off the top of your head, how many of your friends can you think of make less than $11,000 a year? Maybe they work some mind-numbing part-time job, taking cover charges and stamping hands at a strip club. Or if you're a bit older, how many families do you know of who have one person working, bringing in less than $23,000 to support a spouse and a couple of kids? There's nothing wrong with either of those things ... but those numbers are the poverty threshold in the U.S., and in my area of the country, it encompasses a fudging poopload of people (sorry, I'm trying to cut down on my cursing).
Poverty is a hot topic for politicians, but it seems like every time they open their mouths about the subject, stupid falls out. There's a huge part of me that wants to grab them by their orphan skin lapels and scream reason into their preciously oblivious brains, but the logical side of me knows it won't matter. There are some things they will just never understand. Things like ...
#4. Poor Does Not Equal Unemployed
Not long ago, Newt Gingrich had his famous "janitor" idea, where he proposed that we pay impoverished students to clean up vomit and strewn feces part time at their schools. It sprung up a lot of debate, which I had little to no interest in beyond this key phrase: "Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. [...] They have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash,' unless it's illegal." Not to be out-douched, Mitt Romney's now famous video hit the 'net, showing him calling 47 percent of the country "entitled" and saying that they believe they're victims and they want the government to hand them everything:
I realize these are both republicans, but that's actually not my point here. This isn't about philosophy, it's about pure numbers: A big ol' chunk of people living below the poverty line actually work. About 10.5 million of them, in fact, or a third of the people living in poverty. Of the households below the poverty line, 84 percent have somebody in the house who is working. So that whole bit about how these kids have no concept of what work is? That's a bunch of, uh, horse pucky. Two-thirds of poor children are in working households.
That's a far mother-frumpled cry from Gingrich's pretty broad statement. It's such a dramatic misunderstanding of what "poor" actually is, and it's dangerous because it paints a grossly inaccurate picture of people laying around their house, watching Family Guy and enjoying their "free money." Yes, those people do exist -- I've met them in person. I've drank their beer and dodged their roaches in their living rooms. At one point, my parents were those people.
This is how I remember my mom through most of my adolescence.
But of all the poor people I've known over the years -- and I have known a lot -- I have come across very few able-bodied, able-minded people who didn't do something to bring in some money. Even the ones who didn't have so much as a part-time job still managed to at least find temporary seasonal work mowing lawns, shoveling snow, or standing on street corners and playing the guitar with their penis.
So if the issue is that these people are watching reruns and collecting government checks, guess what: 91 percent of government benefits go to the disabled, elderly, or working households. Not a typo -- 91 percent. You're free to speculate that some of those people could try harder or are faking their disability or whatever, but there's no way the reality lines up with this politician fantasy of the lazy masses who just greedily rub their hands together while leeching their unfathomable riches from the always generous American populace.
"Here's all the crap I hate. Now don't bother me for another year."
Oh, while we're on that subject ...
#3. Poor People Are Not Mindless Leeches
Let me give you a quote from then-Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer of South Carolina that will make you step away from your computer so you can have adequate room to perform a full-on Hadoken at your monitor:
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."
"Look at it. All it does is eat, sleep, and crap. Same with that dog."
Oh, Andre. You crazy piece of sh- ... work. Honestly, I was going to give you some major crap about that, but why bother? You're just one guy spouting off some insane piece of extremist drivel. It's not like you compared poor people to raccoons eating beetles out of the carcasses of dead rats. Wait, Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning actually did that?
Yep. He was telling a story about a road project being disrupted by biologists who placed buckets of dead rats on the side of the highway to collect an endangered species of beetle, because sometimes science is weird. But at night, raccoons would come up and eat the beetles out of the rats. Then he went on to say, "They're not stupid. They're going to do the easy way, if we make it easy for them, just like welfare recipients all across America. If we don't incent them to work, they're going to take the easy route."
Right, the "easy route." Like spending money you don't have in order to attend college for four years, and then flail around, grasping for any job whatsoever in order to enjoy the frills and luxury of basic survival. Or does he mean taking "the easy route" by accepting government assistance and living the next year straddling the line between homelessness and malnutrition? The major problem I have with this isn't so much the ignorance as it is the insinuation that the poor are blithering genital heads (seriously, how does Prince do it?), who are constantly on the search for loopholes, allowing them to do as little as possible in life.
"I have a master's in 'Bring me a beer.'"
In reality, 47 percent of the impoverished 18 to 26 age group have actually been to college. Now, that doesn't mean they all graduated, but that's not the point. I don't know many people who had the motivation and presence of mind to enter into college and didn't also have a desire to do something special with their lives. Most people don't go to college because they were bored, though I will concede that it's why many people teach at colleges. OHHHHH, eat it, teachers!
See, it's not about intelligence, it's about trying. Politicians can't get past the idea that the only possible way to fail in America is if you sit back and do nothing. The idea that someone can put out the effort, yet not gain ground is inconceivable to them. Again, that doesn't mean that human leeches don't exist. I grew up doggone poor, myself. I've seen, firsthand, people who were content to cash their government check and then go back to sleep. But I know overwhelmingly more people who didn't want to be on assistance and busted their lovely lady lumps to escape. Some succeeded and some did not, but it sure as pickles wasn't for lack of trying.
"I am exhausted. But I'm exhausted with awesome shoes."
But, hey, if we don't let up on the poor, how are we going to flush all of the moochers and drug addicts from the system? Wait, did I just say "drug addicts"? That reminds me ...
#2. Poor People Aren't Rampant Drug Addicts
"If you have enough money to be able to buy drugs, then you don't need the public assistance. I don't want tax dollars spent on drugs." -Jerry Sonnenberg
Amen, brother! Now, that's something I can get behind. And it looks like Kasha Kelley of Kansas agrees with us. So what do you propose we do about it? Oooh, poopydoodles, I just remembered that you're both huge advocates for mandatory drug testing for all welfare recipients.
"Yep, looks good. Here's your poor people money."
This is another hot debate in political circles because quite a few states have already adopted it, and several more are considering it. Why not? Yes, it was declared unconstitutional on grounds that it violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches, but other than that, it seems like a good idea. Drugs are a huge problem with the poor, and I most definitely don't want to be handing my tax dollars to someone who's just going to blow it on ... well, blow.
That's what all of these states thought, and some of them still think that. Then they did the testing and found out that, actually, the poor are pretty much as clean as the rest of us. In Arizona, out of 87,000 people they subjected to the test, exactly one monster-forkin' person tested positive. One. And Florida had just as embarrassing results: 21 people tested positive out of 51,000. That was right before a federal judge showed up and put a boot in their ... leg-hat, by blocking the law. Of course, that didn't hurt their feelings much since the program not only didn't save the state any money, but it actually put them almost $46,000 in the hole (must ... resist), even when you factor in the money they saved by denying applicants.
What really troubles me with this one isn't the occasional crackhead being booted from the system. It's the 6 year old that isn't being provided for, regardless of what illegal horsepoop their parents are putting into their bodies. As in all of these points, yes, those people do exist -- I'll never deny that. And yes, I think it's a dagnabbit falootin' shame that some of our money is going to crack instead of ... well, literally anything else. But that child is along for the ride, regardless, and pushing him deeper into poverty is unacceptable on pretty much every level.
Except that kid. That one's a piece of crap.
It's a total lack of sympathy on the parts of the people who are supposed to have the best interests of- oh, "sympathy." That's a good one. Let's remind politicians of that real quick before we forget.
#1. You Don't Have Real Sympathy for the Poor if You've Never Lived It
OK, let's be calm here. Let's just take a deep breath and talk about this like the rational, well mannered, non-cursing people that we are. Here is an infographic that ran in the Wall Street Journal talking about how the new tax code would be "highly painful" for Americans. The graphic covers every possible scenario the Wall Street Journal can conceive of, from the single mom only making $260,000 a year to the retired couple trying to get by on a fixed income of $180,000: 
Reading that dumb fucking mind turd of an image is like wiping my ass with my eyes. If you can look at that steaming pile of shit and not see what's wrong with it, you live in a different goddamn universe than the rest of us.
No, that didn't come from a politician, but this sure as hell does. That's Linda Sanchez, who is desperately trying to tug at our heartstrings by saying that she lives paycheck to paycheck. On her $174,000 salary. To pay for her multiple homes. Now, I understand that if you live a certain lifestyle and you're a limp dick at finances, it would be pretty easy to burn through that much in a year, but does that make us any more sympathetic? Fuck no, it doesn't. Even as one of the least wealthy members of Congress, she still earns three-and-a-half times more money than the average American household. And 16 times more than those at the very top of the poverty line.
So the question is, how can she possibly think of herself as poor? Because $174,000 a year is poor -- for a member of congress. They have no concept whatsoever of what life is like for someone getting by on what most working people make, let alone somebody subsisting on government aid. Although they can comprehend our income as a number, they cannot comprehend the lifestyle because they haven't lived it and they likely never will. You're not going to find these politicians hanging out in the poor section of town, scrounging change for weed (well, maybe Bill Clinton) -- they spend most of their time around other wealthy people -- other members of Congress (about half of which are millionaires), rich donors, high-powered business types, celebrities, etc. So their idea of "poor" or even "brokeass" is the pitiful bastard at the bottom of the chain who is living off of that measly $174,000 base salary because he or she doesn't have any other income on the side. Linda Sanchez is their version of poverty.
It's not even their fault -- you and I can be told about the horrors of living in the impoverished parts of Africa, where, for instance, any able-bodied person has to be pulled from work and school so that they can spend several hours of their day hauling a 70-pound jug of muddy, parasite-infested water several miles back to their home. But no matter how good the narrative and no matter how persistent the activist, we in no way have any idea what their lives are actually like. We can't know it because we will never live it. At best, we can feel sympathy for them and even donate some money to a charity to help them out.
"Just wanted to show you how much you would have gotten this week if not for me putting it back in my pocket right now."
But we hopefully wouldn't be stupid enough to think we can know what it was like to grow up there and to live under a completely different set of rules and expectations. And for the love of fuck, we shouldn't be so goddamned shit-ignorant as to somehow think they're putting one over on us when they get food aid ("Oh, please, I wish I could have afforded an AK-47 when I was 8.") But then I turn around and hear dumb fucking cockholes like John Fleming claim that after investing back into his businesses, his $6.3 million earnings only leaves him with $600,000. And when he continues flapping his stupid richlips and says that by the time he's fed his family, he only has $400k left, my eyes roll so hard up into my head I can visually inspect my own soul. And then I set all of my possessions on fire to prevent myself from doing it to his.
Though it still doesn't change the fact that he could replace everything I own with two hours of work.
And I realize that shoving all of the numbers we've cited right into their faces would do nothing -- all of this data is available to them, at any time. All of it would bounce right off their skulls because of that one time they heard about a guy on welfare who had an iPhone and a big-screen TV, and one time they read an email forward about a guy who gave money to a beggar only to see that beggar later driving a Cadillac. And dammit, they think, that has to be the way it is, because otherwise it means that well-meaning people can bust their fucking asses every day and still fall through the cracks. And that can't be possible, can it? "Quick! Find me a picture of a poor person buying lobster with food stamps so I can reassure myself the system works!" Oh, fuck you.
Well, I got through most of it without cursing. So lick my asshole.
20131025
4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People
Spartanburg Soup Kitchen turns away atheist volunteers
By Dustin Wyatt
A group of Upstate atheists plans to hand out care packages downtown this weekend after the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen wouldn't let them volunteer.
On Saturday, about 10 people are expected to gather across from the soup kitchen and hand out care packages to the homeless. The 300 packages contain socks, gloves, toothpaste, toothbrushes, combs, soap, rain ponchos, snacks, shaving razors, antiseptic wipes, deodorants, tissues and gum.
"I hope we can provide a package for everyone who needs one," said Eve Brannon, president of Upstate Atheists, a group started in 2011 that includes about 200 members. "Whatever we have left, we will donate to a homeless shelter in the Upstate."
Brannon, 25, said they decided to hand out care packages to the homeless after being told they could not volunteer at the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen.
"I told them we wouldn't wear our T-shirts. We wouldn't tell anyone who we are with. We just want to help out," Brannon said. "And they told us that we were not allowed."
According to the Soup Kitchen's website, the organization is dependent upon volunteers, having more than 600 community volunteers with a mission to serve the hungry in Spartanburg.
Lou Landrum, executive director of the Soup Kitchen, told the Herald-Journal she would resign from her job before she let atheists volunteer and be a "disservice to this community."
"This is a ministry to serve God" she said. "We stand on the principles of God. Do they (atheists) think that our guests are so ignorant that they don't know what an atheist is? Why are they targeting us? They don't give any money. I wouldn't want their money."
Brannon said the group has worked with Christian nonprofits, such as Habitat for Humanity, in the past.
"We can all work together to achieve something positive regardless of religion or lack thereof," she said. "We've raised money for March of Dimes, worked with the Generous Garden Project, done community park clean ups, adopted a highway, and sponsored local foster children for Christmas."
She said the group is used to its share of animosity within the community, but the exchange with the Soup Kitchen was unlike anything she had experienced.
"They are the only group that denied us the opportunity to volunteer," Brannon said.
Landrum said she does not have a problem with the group setting up across the street.
"They can set up across the street from the Soup Kitchen. They can have the devil there with them, but they better not come across the street," Landrum said.
The Upstate Atheists will be handing out care packages between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. or until all of the packages are gone.
As The Drug War Escalates, SWAT Teams Become 'Bullies With Badges And Guns'
OGDEN, Utah -- Former Sheriff William "Dub" Lawrence has watched with dismay as America's war on drugs has escalated, and SWAT teams have become more aggressive, more militarized, and less focused on resolving disputes peacefully.
"SWAT teams have been infiltrated by bullies with badges and guns who foster a mentality that killing criminals reduces recidivism," he says. "We're on the wrong track. I look at what's happened to law enforcement today, and I'm ashamed and heartbroken by what I see. We've lost sight of what's important. We've lost sight of what the job should be about, which is protecting the constitutional rights of the people."
In 1975, Lawrence started what would become the Davis County, Utah, SWAT team. The elite tactical units were coming into vogue across the country at the time, after they were introduced in Los Angeles in the 1960s, following the Watts riots and a number of mass shooting incidents.
"We saw what was happening in Los Angeles at the time," says Lawrence, 69. "We thought we needed something similar if we ever had to face down a shooter, or someone who had taken hostages."
Lawrence was choosy about who he put on the SWAT team. "You have to pick guys who have the right mentality, the right temperament, and who show good judgment," he says. "I finally found four guys I could trust, and we went about training them."
In September 2008, however, he watched helplessly as the same SWAT team he helped create over 30 years earlier shot and killed Brian Wood, his 36-year-old son-in-law.
Wood had a history of psychological problems, and he had barricaded himself in his truck with a gun following a domestic dispute. After a 12-hour standoff with police, the SWAT team moved in and shot Wood eight times with a stun gun before finally shooting him as he lay on the ground, an outcome Lawrence criticizes as an overreaction.
"I told my family, I said, 'These guys are well-trained. You can trust them to talk him down,'" Lawrence recalls. "I then had to explain to my daughter why this team I helped create -- had just told her to trust -- had just killed her husband."
Since then, Lawrence has become a leader of Utah's growing police reform movement. He's served as a consultant to the victims of a number of police incidents in the state, including the family of Matthew David Stewart, who was arrested in a botched raid on his house in 2011 after being suspected of growing marijuana in his basement. The raid claimed the life of a police officer, and Stewart, an Army veteran, later hanged himself in jail.
Lawrence is also crafting legislation, together with activists Jesse Fruhwirth and Connor Boyack, restricting the use of SWAT teams, and he's working to reach out to police groups and sell reform to the public.
"What you see in all of these cases -- the common denominator -- is that the police describe the incidents in the precise language they've been taught to use so that the shootings will hold up in court, and to indemnify them and their departments from any liability," Lawrence says. "They've been trained to use force, they've been trained to cover up their mistakes, but there's just no training on how to avoid force and violence."
Lawrence got his start in policing in 1971. He'd just served two years in the Marines, had recently married, and was attending Brigham Young University, when a neighbor -- who also happened to be the police chief in the town of Bountiful -- told him about an opening in his department and encouraged him to apply. Lawrence did, got the job, and switched his focus from business classes to justice administration.
In 1974, he was hired to perform executive security for the Mormon Church. Shortly thereafter, he saw that the Republican sheriff of Davis County was running unopposed. Despite having logged just three and a half years as a cop, Lawrence filed papers to run as a Democrat in 1976. He surprised everyone when he won.
Lawrence says his tenure as sheriff didn't win him many friends. In addition to the SWAT team, he established a paramedic unit within the police department, which didn't sit well with the fire department. Lawrence also disbanded the police department's anti-narcotics unit, which he says took up too many resources and placed too high a priority on drug enforcement.
"The drug unit was also allowed to break the law in order to enforce it [by buying drugs undercover, or with informants]. I didn't like that. I thought it gave guys the wrong impression -- that they were above the law," he says.
He also made a number of high-profile arrests of public officials (including the superintendent of the highway patrol at the time, who was arrested on a DWI charge) and refused to let them off.
Lawrence says that his philosophy -- that the law applies equally to everyone -- is the reason he only served for one term. Ultimately, he says, he had made too many enemies, and he lost his bid for reelection in 1978.
Since then, Lawrence has continued to dabble in politics, winning a campaign for county commissioner in 1988 and even running for Congress and the U.S. Senate. Today he is officially retired, but policing remains his passion.
"I think my relatively short tenure as a cop before running for sheriff was a blessing," he says, looking back. "I hadn't yet become entrenched in the culture. So when I took office, I could see the things that needed fixing." * * * * *
The Weber-Morgan County Narcotics Strike Force began in Utah in 1988 with a grant from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Program, a federal program named for a New York City police officer killed by a drug dealer. Over the last 25 years, hundreds of similar units have sprung up all over the country as America's war on drugs has escalated.
These task forces have been involved in a multitude of scandals involving mistaken raids, shootings, corruption and abuse of force. Just four months before raiding Matthew David Stewart's home in Ogden, Utah, the Weber-Morgan team shot and killed 45-year-old Todd Blair during a drug raid in the town of Roy.
Blair was a meth user, but the police were actually investigating his roommate for distribution. As the strike force broke in, Blair emerged from his bedroom wielding a golf club, and an officer shot him dead. As with the Stewart raid, the officers were cleared of any wrongdoing.
Critics say that because task forces span jurisdictions, and can be mostly or entirely funded through federal grants and asset forfeiture, there isn't enough local supervision and accountability.
In 2009, the Justice Department attempted to conduct a nationwide study of the Edward Byrne program's effectiveness. "Not only were data insufficient to estimate what task forces accomplished,” the report stated, “data were inadequate to even tell what the task forces did for routine work."
The George W. Bush administration had begun phasing out the program. But in 2009, the Barack Obama administration refunded it at record levels. Today, across most of the country, the task forces are as busy as ever.
The Weber-Morgan County Strike Force is no exception. According to an investigation by the Standard-Examiner, the unit served 120 search warrants in 2012, double the number it served in 2007.
The task force program is just one initiative leading to the increasing militarization of today's police forces. In Utah, for example, between task forces, sheriff's departments, police departments, state police and federal agencies, many residents are covered by a half dozen or more separate SWAT teams. In Ogden alone, in addition to the Weber-Morgan County Strike Force, the Ogden Police Department also has a separate SWAT team, as does the Weber County Sheriff's Department.
Other towns in the area have their own SWAT teams as well, even when such tactical units would seem to be largely unnecessary. Logan, a city of 50,000 about 50 miles north of Ogden, has had a SWAT team since the 1980s. As of 2011, however, Logan hadn't seen a murder in five years. Morgan Quitno, the publisher that measures and ranks cities on crime, living standards and other criteria, has named it the "safest city in America" twice, in 2005 and 2007.
Though police officials typically point to things like mass shootings and terrorist incidents to justify the existence of SWAT teams, Logan's police chief told the local Daily Herald in 2006, "We haven't really had a whole lot of barricaded subjects, and certainly we haven't had an active shooter."
Instead, he said, the SWAT team has been used mostly to serve search warrants on people suspected of drug-related crimes -- the primary use today of SWAT teams around the country.
"We've destroyed some doors over the years that maybe wouldn't have gotten destroyed if there wasn't a SWAT team," the police chief said, "but it's all in the name of trying to make a high-risk situation safer for everyone." * * * * *
Critics like Lawrence, however, say that SWAT team raids can actually trigger violence, rather than avoid it.
"I would question the notion that these raids are safer for police," Lawrence says. "But especially for the suspects, and any friends or family inside a house that gets raided, it would much safer to arrest someone as they're leaving or coming home than to break in at night with guns. There's no question about that."
Matthew David Stewart's sister-in-law argues that the raid on his house was unnecessary. "Why did they have to raid him at night with a battering ram in the first place?" Erna Stewart asks. "Why couldn't they have just arrested him as he was coming or going to work?"
The Stewart raid has inspired some national law-enforcement figures to question the pervasive use of home invasions to serve search warrants. In January 2012, Pat McCarthy, who trains and advises police agencies across the country, told USA Today, "It's time to change our thinking. Cops are exposing themselves to increasing danger many times over, and it's just not necessary. ... The days of knocking down doors in drug cases should be over. Given what's going on now, you have to consider other options." Like Lawrence, he suggested waiting for a suspect to leave the house -- or luring him out.
A Justice Department review found that of the 68 police officers killed by firearms in 2011, 10 were killed while serving search warrants.
But police and public officials in Ogden took decidedly different lessons away from the incident. Utah-based DEA Special Agent in Charge Frank Smith told a local news station that police should get more aggressive with drug suspects.
"It’s a public safety issue," Smith said. "If someone is willing to shoot it out with police … what’s to say he’s not willing to walk out [of] his house and start shooting his neighbors?”
Weber County officials likewise concluded that the moral of the Stewart story was not to use less force against drug suspects, but more. "Police here are armoring up like never before," the Standard-Examiner reported in August, noting that police agencies across Weber County had united to form the Tactical Operations Group, a sort of standby SWAT team ready to act if the other SWAT teams serving the county weren't available.
Weber County Attorney Dee Smith enthusiastically endorsed what he called "breach" raids, "even for property crimes." Smith even trained with the Tactical Operations Group in order to show his support, kicking in doors and brandishing a firearm with plastic bullets.
Meanwhile, awards have poured in for the cops who raided Stewart's home, reinforcing the notion that there's no reason to question their tactics. In January, the commander of the task force, Darin Parke, was promoted to police chief for the town of South Ogden. In March, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund named Sgt. Nate Hutchinson, who was wounded during the raid, "Officer of the Month." Another law enforcement group selected the entire task force for its "Outstanding Law Enforcement Officer of the Year" Award. The task force was also honored as part of the U.S. Air Force Hometown Heroes program.
Lawrence's concerns about the direction policing is headed have been mounting for years, but he says his son-in-law's death turned him into an activist. Since the Stewart raid, he has come to believe that local policing is in a state of crisis.
"When the police are forced to shoot at someone over some pot plants -- when a cop is dead because of marijuana -- something has gone wrong," he says. "It's a failure of policy. It would help both law enforcement and the community for us to understand what factually occurred, and not just buy into the police account.
"We need to learn from these cases so we can make policy recommendations that will prevent them from happening again," he continues. "But there's no desire to do that. The objective is to clear the officers as quickly as possible, protect everyone from liability, and then move on to the next drug raid. And that terrifies me."
How A Drug Raid Gone Wrong Sparked A Call For Change In The Unlikeliest State In The Nation
OGDEN, Utah -- It's late summer, and the house at 3268 Jackson Ave. has been boarded up for months. The front door, riddled with bullet holes, is pasted over with police tape and a "No Trespassing" sign. As Erna Stewart pries open the door, shards of glass from the edges of its already shattered window fall to the ground.
The air inside is stale and hard to breathe. Belongings are strewn about. There's a dusty television, an answering machine, a computer printer still in its box, some video games stacked on bookshelves. The police have ripped up sections of floor that had been soaked with blood, leaving a scar in the bathroom and another in the kitchen.
More bullet holes call out from all sides: the walls, the doors, the ceiling, the floor, the windows, the molding, the kitchen cabinets. Two of the bullets hit the brick siding of a neighbor's house. One pierced a bedroom window. The trail of damage leads out to the pock-marked backyard and the shed where Erna's brother-in-law, Matthew, attempted to take refuge.
Between 130 and 250 bullets were fired in all, according to various accounts, an arsenal's worth. A cleaning service recently found a bullet while vacuuming.
Matthew David Stewart's home in Ogden, Utah.
In the basement, in a small room to the left of the stairs, there's a large pile of tubing and plastic containers. It's here that Matthew David Stewart, a 37-year-old Army veteran, committed the crime that precipitated the armed raid on his home -- an assault that left one police officer dead and five others wounded, and eventually led to Stewart's death as well. It's here that he grew marijuana.
Michael Stewart says his son, a former paratrooper, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, and may have been self-medicating. Others have suggested that he smoked pot to alleviate his shyness and social awkwardness. Perhaps the pot was simply for pleasure. There were 16 plants in all. But there is no evidence that he ever sold the drug, and there were no complaints from neighbors.
Still, on the night of Jan. 4, 2011, 12 members of the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force assembled in the parking lot of the church across the street from Stewart's house. At 8:30 p.m., according to a neighbor, they exchanged high-fives. Then they broke down Stewart's door with a battering ram.
The police claim to have knocked and announced themselves several times. But Stewart said he never heard them. He worked the graveyard shift at a local Walmart and was asleep at the time. Awaking to the sound of armed men storming into his house, he jumped out of bed, naked, threw on a bathrobe and grabbed his 9-millimeter Beretta.
Who shot first remains in dispute. But after exchanging fire with the officers for about 20 minutes, Stewart dove out a bedroom window and attempted to take shelter in the shed behind his house. The police opened fire on the shed, "lighting it up," as one officer later put it. Stewart, who had been shot in the arm and the hip, crawled out and surrendered.
One of the members of the strike force, Jared Francom, 30, had been shot seven times, and died at the scene. Stewart was arrested, taken to the hospital for his injuries, and charged with murder.
Weber County Attorney Dee Smith speaks during a news conference Friday, May 24, 2013, in Ogden, Utah.
Francum's death elicited a wave of "cop killer" outrage directed at Stewart. Eight days after the raid, Weber County Attorney Dee Smith announced that he'd be seeking the death penalty. As more details emerged, however, a growing chorus of critics began to question whether the aggressive police tactics had really been necessary, and whether the battle on Jackson Avenue could have been avoided entirely.
An editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune asked why the police decided to wage "a military-style attack on a small-time weed grower." The editors of Ogden's Standard-Examiner expressed similar concerns over "beefed-up police tactics" and called for a "re-evaluation of how local law enforcement handles its duties, particularly concerning raids and late-night police procedures."
"It’s very clear that middle-of-the-night arrest warrant servings by armed officers need to be reconsidered," the editors wrote.
In the months following the raid, a number of other controversial police actions hit the news. Police in Salt Lake City broke into the home of a 76-year-old woman during a mistaken drug raid. A SWAT team in Ogden went to the wrong address in search of a man who had gone AWOL from the Army and ended up pointing its guns at an innocent family of four. Two narcotics detectives shot and killed a young woman in a suburb of Salt Lake City as she sat in her car.
Together, these incidents have spawned a budding police reform movement in Utah. At the head of it, Stewart's family members have been joined by a political odd couple: Jesse Fruhwirth, a longtime progressive activist rabble-rouser, and Connor Boyack, a wonky libertarian with a background in Republican politics. And independently, in Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County, the police chief and lead prosecutor have already begun to adopt some unconventional, reform-minded approaches to crime and punishment.
That Utah, one of the most conservative states in the country, would become a hotbed for police reform, is surprising. But these reformers have carefully crafted their approach, honed a message that seems to be resonating with the community, and won over some early converts. As botched raids and excessive SWAT-style tactics have gained increasing notoriety around the country, other communities may soon be looking to Utah as a model for less aggressive but more effective approaches to public safety. * * * * *
The tip about the marijuana plants came from an ex-girlfriend of Stewart's named Stacy Wilson. They had dated for about a year and a half but broke up in the summer of 2010. Erna Stewart introduced them. "I still feel guilty about that," she says. "He caught her cheating on him, they broke up, and it ended really badly. She was angry with him. He was heartbroken. She tried to get him fired from his job. She really had it out for him."
Wilson reported Stewart to a tip line that the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force, a federally funded anti-drug task force that serves both counties, set up to collect information about illicit drugs.
An ad for the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force.
In a bus ad promoting the initiative, the strike force members pose in full SWAT attire: armor, face masks, camouflage and guns. The tip line number is at the top of the ad, along with a plea for citizens to report "drug abuse," a term more often associated with drug use than with distribution. Below the photo, the ad reads, "We've got your back!"
According to police documents, Wilson called the tip line in November 2010, two months before the raid, and spoke with Officer Jason Vanderwarf. Vanderwarf visited Stewart's house three times, but no one answered. After finding what he described as signs of a marijuana grow, however, he filed an affidavit to get the warrant.
That appears to be the extent of the investigation. The police never ran a background check on Wilson to assess her credibility. In fact, after their initial conversation, Vanderwarf said that he was "unable to contact her." He later told investigators that "She kinda fell off the face of the earth."
Neither Wilson nor officials from the Ogden Police Department and Weber County Sheriff's Department responded to requests for comment.
There was also no investigation of Stewart himself, and the warrant makes no mention of any evidence that Stewart had ever sold drugs. The Salt Lake Tribune later obtained a threat assessment document -- the criteria some police departments use to determine whether to send a SWAT team, or to ask a judge for a no-knock warrant. For Stewart's case, all of the criteria -- the presence of dogs, weapons, surveillance and "other" factors -- were listed as "unknown."
As a result, when the members of the strike force moved on Stewart's house, they weren't wearing bulletproof armor or carrying the ballistic shields and powerful rifles typically used in SWAT raids.
"I don't think they thought anyone was living there," Erna Stewart says. "They called it a 'low-level' raid."
A few months earlier, Stewart's brother Gabriel -- his roommate at the time -- and some friends had gotten into an altercation at a party. The other men had followed Gabriel Stewart back to the house, where the fracas continued. After someone called the police, the men left -- but they promised to come back to burn down the house.
Matthew David Stewart played no part in the altercation, and he was asleep when it happened. But Gabriel told him about the threat later. "I think it may have been in his head when he woke up the night he was raided," Erna Stewart says.
Statements by Matthew David Stewart's neighbors support his assertion that he didn't know police officers were in his house. They told Stewart's attorneys and the local media that they heard gunshots first, then lots of yelling, but never any police announcement.
Photos of the police taken after the raid show strike force members wearing dark, dingy clothes. Some are wearing black hoodies. One is wearing a Cheech & Chong t-shirt. The police say the raid team wore bulletproof vests that clearly identified them as police, and removed them after the raid, before the photos were taken. But there's evidence that at least some of the officers weren't. One police dashcam video, for example, shows several of them scrambling back to their cars to get their vests after the shooting begins.
What is clear, however, is that if instead of raiding the house, the police had simply arrested Stewart as he was leaving to go to work, or as he was coming home, or even at his job at Walmart, there would have been two fewer funerals in Ogden. * * * * *
Before the raid, Erna Stewart, 31, had considered becoming a cop. "I had done some ride alongs. I had bought my own gun, and I knew how to clean it. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and I thought I'd either be a police officer or a personal trainer."
She's now a personal trainer. "It wasn't even the raid itself that turned me off to cops," she says. "It was the way they treated my family after it happened. We got hate mail from cops and their families. I mean, the way we were treated in the community ... it just made me jaded. And angry."
It also motivated her. Soon after the raid, Erna quickly became the family's liaison to the press, and she's since become a leading advocate of reform.
In the days and weeks after the raid, the task force, the district attorney and other Weber County officials began to malign Matthew David Stewart in the media. A "source close to the investigation" first told the Ogden Standard-Examiner that police had found a picture of Stewart "dressed as a terrorist," and "posing in a suicide bomber's vest" in the house. The police reported that they had found a bomb in Stewart's closet and child pornography on his computer.
Matthew David Stewart during the third day of his preliminary trial at Second District Courthouse in Ogden on Nov. 2, 2012.
He was portrayed as a violent, anti-government extremist. Wilson, his ex-girlfriend, told investigators that Stewart had once told her that if the police ever came for his marijuana plants, he'd "go out in a blaze," and he'd "go out shooting." She claimed that he didn't believe the federal government had the authority to collect taxes, and that he had told her of plans to shoot up the IRS after he lost his job there working as a security guard.
Family members say that Stewart was a government skeptic who could sometimes indulge in conspiracy theories, but that Wilson and the police's portrayal of Matthew was an exaggeration.
"I know the drug war really bothered him," his father Michael says.
"He was passionate about the way the government was going. He didn't like it," Erna adds. "I remember he was really upset about what Obama was doing with indefinite detention. But he was never volatile about it. I think he just internalized it. It made him sad."
In one postcard he sent to his sister from jail, Stewart cautioned her against vaccinating her son, because, he explained, he didn't trust pharmaceutical companies. In another, he told her that despite his depression, he refused to take anti-depressants. He didn't trust them or the companies that made them.
Michael Stewart, a private investigator, says his son lost his security job for accessing IRS computers without authorization. "He worked the night shifts. He got bored. So he started surfing the web on the computers inside. He probably accessed some conspiracy websites," Stewart says. "That's what got him fired."
Sonja Stewart holds pictures of her son Matthew David Stewart.
"He would sometimes go on the Internet and read sites like Infowars. He'd start to question things like how 9/11 happened. I would get on him about it, because it always put him in a bad mood," Erna Stewart says. "But he never expressed any desire to hurt anyone."
The photo of Stewart dressed as a terrorist was actually him posing in an Osama bin Laden Halloween costume, his family says. Regarding the bomb that police allegedly found in a closet, an agent from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms later told the Salt Lake Tribune, "to characterize it as a bomb or device is not accurate."
"He and his brother were trying to build smoke flares once. Remember, they were in the Army," Erna Stewart says. "So he probably had some chemicals to make smoke flares. That's probably what it was."
"Matt was really shy. He was introverted. A little nerdy. You could tell he was a child of the 80s," she says. "He wore his jeans up high, he liked video games and fantasy novels. We'd give him a hard time about it. Socially, he didn't have a lot of friends. But once he felt comfortable, he was the sweetest guy."
Stewart didn't do well in jail. Judging by the letters he wrote to his family, his mood clearly darkened as the months wore on. The jail conditions, the way the public perceived him, and the isolation began to break him down. At one point, the extremely fit former paratrooper told one of his sisters that he had quit exercising.
"Everyone says I'm looking great in the newspaper pictures of me. I see a man that was betrayed by someone he thought he loved, who's [sic] world was destroyed, where everything he once cared about was stolen from him, everything he found holy was defiled," he wrote. "Now he is locked in a box away from those he loves, with the worst weight on his shoulders."
In May, a judge ruled that the search warrant for Stewart's home and the raid were both legal -- a huge setback for Stewart's argument that he was acting in self defense. A little over a week later, at 12:50 a.m. on a Friday morning, a guard found Stewart hanging in his jail cell. His was the third suicide at the Weber County Jail in seven months.
"Matthew had his problems. He had severe social anxiety," Erna Stewart says. "And things got worse after the breakup. But we were working on all of that. He was getting so much better. He was doing so fricking good until all of this happened. He was going to the gym with us. He was laughing a lot. He was just doing so well."
Erna Stewart.
At a public forum in August, where this reporter also spoke as part of a book tour, Stewart fought back tears while talking about her late brother-in-law. She then quickly collected herself to confidently tick off a list of changes wants to see from area police.
She wants an end to home-invasion raids to serve search warrants for non-violent crimes. She wants more transparency. She wants a civilian review board, so police accused of wrongdoing aren't investigated by their fellow cops. The audience bathed her with applause.
Stewart says her role as family spokesperson -- and later, as a voice in the broader reform movement in Utah -- came naturally. "I knew that no one in the family was fully operational after the raid," she says. "So I had to step up. I've always been outspoken, and not easily intimidated. And the more and more I got involved, the more I thought this is where I belong."
In August, Stewart received a phone call from the Ogden police. More than 19 months after the raid, they were calling to let her know that, despite their earlier allegations, they had never actually found any child pornography on her brother-in-law's computer.
"That's about par for the course," she says. "They told the world he was a pedophile, attacked him in the press. Now, months after he's dead, they quietly call to say they were wrong."
Why Can't You Leave Religion Alone?
The protests come every day from the religious, and they go something like this:
* "Why spend your time disproving God?"
* "Why not just let people believe what they want to believe?"
* "Why can't you leave religion alone?"
As one YouTube commenter said recently, "No one can explain to me why it is so important to convince theists to abandon their beliefs."
The answer is simple. Pages like this one exist because religion exists.
Religion permeates our culture, shows up on our doorsteps with literature, scriptures and threats of eternal damnation, influences our science books, contaminates our political systems, indoctrinates our children and postulates that its doctrine must be followed, lest we be destroyed in body, in soul, or both.
Non-believers are simply responding to the avalanche of religious messages that bears down upon us daily.
Religion gets carte blanche to be as vocal as it wants, to knock on our doors and accost us in our homes, in our places of work, in our personal and professional lives. Believers are charged with a life mission to preach, teach, disciple, shout it from the mountaintops and to "go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." Religion...is everywhere.
Ask yourself. When's the last time an atheist rang your doorbell with the Good News of Humanism? How often do you find Richard Dawkins books in the dresser drawers of your hotel rooms? When was the last atheist temple erected in your neighborhood? Have you ever attended an atheist revival? Has atheism demanded 10% of your household income? How many dedicated atheist television channels come through your satellite dish? How many atheist verses were you instructed to memorize as a child? When's the last time someone thanked a FARMER (or even the cook) at the dinner table instead of God?
On a more radical front, what's the name of the last atheist who sawed the head off of an "infidel?" Or sentenced a shrouded woman to death for displeasing an oppressive husband? Or strapped explosives to his belt in order to kill hundreds in a public square? Or publicly hung a gay person for his lifestyle?
It's everywhere. Religion is a pounding drum that has gone mostly unanswered for a long, long time. And religion is not satisfied with merely existing quietly in the homes and hearts of the faithful. Its very nature compels the believer to proselytize, preach, promote, convince, convert and prevail. If you play on the team of the religious, your game plan is to stay, always, on offense.
Throughout our history, those who raise a simple hand of protest against these advances have been portrayed as the real problem. Religion has attempted to marginalize and defeat legitimate questions and concerns by indignantly portraying any resistors as misguided, immoral, rudderless, angry, miserable, lost and alone.
And when skepticism challenges wildly improbable (or impossible) stories found in the bible, the Qur'an and other holy books, the religious wail, "Why can't you just leave us alone?"
The irony is thick.
And religion impedes curiosity and inhibits learning, as the much-maligned Creation Museum proves. It stymies critical thinking. It stretches us to believe the unbelievable. And it poisons the foundational teachings we are using to train up the generations of tomorrow.
Pages like mine exist as a response... a counter-argument to ensure that the cacophony of superstition does not go unchallenged. And if your belief system is so undeniable, so factual, so provable, so real and so true, certainly it can withstand the opposing viewpoints presented here and elsewhere. Certainly, it can survive the acid tests.
Just remember. Religion began the argument. It amplifies itself before the world. And it threatens all mankind with punishment upon its rejection.
We are atheists. We are moral. We are reasonable. We are thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate, happy, fulfilled and well-informed.
And as long as religion insists on fixing human beings who are not broken, we will respond with the evidence that we are not the problem.
-Seth
Va. mom charged after firing gun into air to scare off daughter’s attackers
By Meredith Somers
A Woodbridge woman was arrested after she shot a handgun into the air to scare off a group of boys who were attacking her daughter.
Lakisha Gaither, 35, said she fired a single round into the sky from her legally owned gun Saturday night after a boy punched her daughter in the face during a dispute near their home.
“I just wanted this group of guys to disperse,” Ms. Gaither said. “I didn’t know what they were going to do. I wanted him to stop hitting my child.”
The shooting occurred at 9:20 p.m. in the 13600 block of Cridercrest Place. After confronting a teenage girl and her mother in the neighborhood over a prior disagreement, Ms. Gaither and her 15-year-old daughter, Brianna Stewart, began walking home. A group of about 10 boys approached them in the parking lot of their apartment complex. One boy began to swear and insult Ms. Gaither and her daughter, who stood up to the boy.
“The two were face to face,” Ms. Gaither said. “He grabs her shirt, she goes to push him off her.”
Ms. Gaither said she realized she’d be putting the both of them at risk if she jumped into the fray.
“I stopped and turned to walk to the middle of the parking lot. I made sure no one was around me,” she said. “I unholstered my gun, pointed it straight in the air and fired just one shot to get him off my child.”
Ms. Gaither said she didn’t try to get away, and police eventually arrived.
“I didn’t feel like I was wrong,” she said. “I wanted to protect my child.”
But officers arrested her and charged her with reckless use of a weapon.
Prince William County police spokesman Officer Jonathan L. Perok said Ms. Gaither “should have called police instead of taking matters into her own hands.”
“You can’t fire into the air,” Officer Perok said. “Once something goes up, it comes down. There’s the possibility of causing property damage, injuring someone or killing someone. In an apartment complex, the odds of that bullet coming down and striking something are very high.”
No injuries or property damage were reported after the incident, but Officer Perok said police do not encourage confrontation and urge gun owners to use their weapons only in what they perceive to be life-threatening situations.
“The fact she stepped away from the crowd kind of shows she was not in an immediate danger type situation,” he said. “She may have been trying to break up the fight, but that’s not the proper course of action to take.”
Ms. Gaither said she didn’t immediately call police because she did not have her cellphone with her.
The misdemeanor charge is just one thing Ms. Gaither is dealing with in the aftermath of the weekend confrontation. As of Tuesday evening, Brianna was missing. The teen, who went to her grandmother’s house after Ms. Gaither was arrested, disappeared Sunday.
Ms. Gaither has been frantically attempting to locate her daughter, even as she prepares for an Oct. 30 arraignment on the gun-related charge.
Daniel L. Hawes, a Virginia Legal Defense attorney who defends clients for their use of firearms in self-defense, said that while Ms. Gaither should not have fired into the air, she was not wrong in wanting to defend Brianna or herself.
“A person has the right to defend themselves. A person doesn’t have to wait until they’re actually harmed,” he said. “Shooting into the air sort of changed things dramatically. She is creating a threat herself, to other people in area. She may not be guilty of a crime, but police were not wrong to charge her.”
Woman Calls 911 For Diabetic Fiance, Police Shoot And Kill Man Upon Arrival
Mikael Thalen
A Georgia man was shot and killed last Friday, when police, not paramedics, showed up to a medical emergency call made by the man’s fiance.
Alcia Herron called 911 for an ambulance shortly after her fiance, 43-year-old Jack Lamar Roberson, took diabetes medication that worried her.
According to Herron, police soon arrived on scene and opened fire on Roberson in front of the entire family, including Roberson’s 8-year-old daughter.
“They just came in and shot him. He didn’t say nothing, the police didn’t say nothing, anything, it was like a silent movie. You couldn’t hear anything, all you could hear were the gun shots go off and I seen them going into his body and he just fell down,” Alcia Herron told First Coast News.
According to the Waycross Police Department, officers received an attempted suicide call involving a combative man. Police Chief Tony Tanner alleges Roberson jumped towards his officers with two weapons after ignoring commands to drop them. Roberson’s mother and fiance dispute the officers’ claims.
“He didn’t have nothing in his hands at any time or period at all before they came, any time while they were here, anything,” said Heron.
Police have refused to comment on what weapons the man allegedly had but according to Roberson’s mother, police claim Roberson was holding two knives.
“If you’re any type of man you’ll come to me and you’ll tell me why you stood up there and told a lie. Two knives, we don’t own two decent knives,” Roberson’s mother said. “It’s pain, it’s a mother’s pain, her first born to be shot down in her face. My granddaughter’s got to have intense therapy.”
According to Tanner, officers involved have been placed on administrative leave while an investigation is ongoing. Results on an autopsy conducted Monday have yet to be released to the public.
Pit bull may need leg amputation after officer shot it 3 times in its driveway
"I heard three shots, but I thought it was a stun gun"
by Oz
MOORESVILLE, NC — Today a woman is nursing her wounded dog back to health. The full prognosis of the animal is not yet known, as the owners try to understand why a police officer shot their dog repeatedly in their driveway.
October 17th is a day that Melissa Daughtry Loper will not soon forget. At 1:00 p.m., a typical Thursday quickly became one of the worst days of her life. Daughtry Loper’s 7 year old pitbull, Pinch, was in their yard with their chihuahua. What happened next makes little sense. A Moroesville Police officer came to her home, knelt down and called the chihuahua to him. Moments later, Pinch was lying on the ground, shot three times, clinging to life.
According to the MPD Facebook page, on Thursday, October 17th, at 1:12 p.m., an officer with the Mooresville Police Department observed two dogs in the road in the 900 block of West Wilson Avenue. The officer got out of the car and tried to get the dogs out of the road. One dog became aggressive and the officer deployed a taser but did not hit the dog. The dogs ran to a nearby neighborhood. The officer called Iredell County Animal Control.
Another officer arrived on the scene and both officers entered the subdivision to locate the dogs. Officers were able to relocate the dogs in a cul-de-sac within the subdivision. Officers began to canvas the homes along the cul-de-sac in hopes of locating the owner.
Daughtry Loper recounts the events on her Facebook page, “An officer from The Mooresville Police Department came to my house bent down on his knee and called my chihuahua to come to him out of my yard. Well she started walking to him…and so did my pit bull. The officers backup started to pull out her taser but before she could the other officer that was on his knee managed to stand up and fire his 9mm gun at my pit bull.”
Daughtry Loper told North Carolina’s News 14, ”It was like boom, boom, boom.”
She was inside her home when she heard the gunshots last week.
“So I went outside the door and the male officer was standing there, with his hands up in the air saying he just shot my dog three times,” Melissa said.
She immediately ran to find her dog Pinch curled up by the back door and bleeding profusely.
“It’s almost like finding your child in that situation,” Melissa said. “It was horrible. It really was.”
Pinch was struck once in her shoulder. Once in a rear leg. And once in her front paw, which is now so badly damaged that it will be weeks before they know if it has to be amputated. One of the bullets also hit an SUV parked in the driveway, shattering the back window.
“I thought it was a stun gun. I heard three shots, but I thought it was a stun gun,” neighbor Shirley Simmons tells WCCB Charlotte. Having seen the incident unfold, Simmons says, “I’m surprised he used a gun.”
Pinch’s family maintains that she is not aggressive, and was not aggressive the day of the shooting.
“Her sister was being called, so she came too,” said John Loper. “That’s the way we look at it. I understand the officer didn’t know the dog or the dog’s mannerisms or anything like that. That’s why there needs to be other protocols than just pull out your gun and shoot.”
Daughtry Loper’s husband, John Loper, told WCCB that the MPD has offered to pay for damage to the SUV but what about the damage that was done to Pinch and her family? The Lopers are calling for more officer training to prevent such tragedies from happening again and the department to pay Pinch’s vet bills–which have so far totalled $3,000.
“If we can all learn from this and grow, that’s what we want as a family and for the community we live in and call home,” said John.
Melissa is shaken. “[The officer] shot my baby girl. Because he was scared. Keep in mind this was during the day in the middle of a subdivision. I’m still shaken up by it all. I’m just thankful my baby girl is gonna be ok.”
Court rejects disfigured Frenchwoman's plea to die
DIJON - A French court has rejected a request from a 52-year-old severely disfigured former schoolteacher for the right to die, in a case that has stirred much emotion in France.
The High Court in Dijon, eastern France, decided to side with the prosecution, which argued current legislation does not allow Chantal Sebire's doctor to prescribe lethal drugs.
In her appeal to the court, Ms Sebire said she did not want to endure further pain and subject herself to an irreversible worsening of her condition. She asked the court to allow her doctor to help her end her life.
A mother of three who lives in the Bourgogne region of eastern France, Ms Sebire drew an outpouring of sympathy when she appealed in a television interview last month for the right to "depart peacefully".
Before-and-after pictures of the woman, her face severely deformed, have featured in the media, and her account of frightened children who run away at the sight of her has drawn sympathy.
Ms Sebire learnt in 2002 that she had developed an esthesioneuroblastoma, an uncommon malignant tumour in the nasal cavity, which she said had led to "atrocious" suffering.
"In 2000, I lost the sense of smell and taste … and I lost my sight in October 2007," she said in the television interview.
"One would not allow an animal to go through what I have endured," she said before urging President Nicolas Sarkozy to intervene and grant her request.
Commenting on the case, Justice Minister Rachida Dati said last week that doctors were not there to prescribe lethal drugs.
Legislation adopted in 2005 allows families to request life-support equipment for a terminally ill patient be switched off but does not allow a doctor to act to end a patient's life.
Mr Sarkozy asked his chief adviser on health to contact Ms Sebire and seek a second opinion on her condition.
Ms Sebire has said she will not appeal against Monday's court decision but she intends to find life-terminating drugs through other means.
"I now know how to get my hands on what I need, and if I don't get it in France, I will get it elsewhere," she said. Only 200 cases of the disease have been recorded worldwide in two decades.
Dallas Cop Fired For Shooting Mentally Ill Man, Charged With Aggravated Assault
Ed Krayewski
Dallas PDBobby Bennett was shot by a cop in the middle of the day last week. Police claimed he was moving toward them aggressively with a knife when Officer Carden Spencer shot him, but surveillance video from a neighbor’s house contradicted that story.
Initially, Bennett, who survived the shooting, was charged with aggravated assault on a public servant. Now the tables have turned. Police have dropped the charges against Bennett, while Spencer has been fired and charged with aggravated assault himself. His partner, meanwhile, will be investigated by internal affairs.
Via CBS Dallas:
“What happened 10 days ago should have never have happened in the first place, and I want to make sure it never happens again,” said [family attorney George] Milner, who said Bennett was shot in “cold blood.”Last month, a cop in North Carolina who shot and killed an unarmed man that had crashed his car and was seeking assistance was charged with voluntary manslaughter the same day. Video also exists of that incident, via dashcam, but police in Charlotte have resisted calls to release it; the victim’s fiancée says the police chief had promised to release the video.
“Officers are not above the law,” Chief [David] Brown [of the Dallas police] said as he began his nearly hour-long statement to reporters. “We are not going to look the other way. We are not going to sweep officer misconduct under the rug.”
Chief Brown also offered an apology to Bennett and his family, and explained why it took ten days to complete the investigation before the Spenser was fired and charged.
“What I have found to be true is rushed investigations and employment actions is wrought with mistakes, knee-jerk reactions and perceptions of partiality,” said Brown. “Rushed decisions…under this circumstances have led to not guily verdicts and employment actions being overturned.”
20131016
It's not the morphine, it's the size of the cage: Rat Park experiment upturns conventional wisdom about addiction
But there's another model out there by researcher Bruce Alexander of Simon Fraser University called Rat Park. From that wikipedia page:
Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself. He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters. The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment." Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.And so rats that are born into extreme conditions in small cages are clearly more likely to self-medicate. Tom Stafford of the BBC writes:
The results are catastrophic for the simplistic idea that one use of a drug inevitably hooks the user by rewiring their brain. When Alexander's rats were given something better to do than sit in a bare cage they turned their noses up at morphine because they preferred playing with their friends and exploring their surroundings to getting high.
Further support for his emphasis on living conditions came from another set of tests his team carried out in which rats brought up in ordinary cages were forced to consume morphine for 57 days in a row. If anything should create the conditions for chemical rewiring of their brains, this should be it. But once these rats were moved to Rat Park they chose water over morphine when given the choice, although they did exhibit some minor withdrawal symptoms.
You can read more about Rat Park in the original scientific report. A good summary is in this comic by Stuart McMillen.So, if Rat Park is to be believed, drug addiction is a situation that arises from poor socioeconomic conditions. From literally being a rat in a cage. If you're a rat in a park, you'd rather hang out with your friends and explore the world around you.
Supporting Copyright Reform
Timothy Vollmer
Today Creative Commons released a policy statement expressing its support for copyright reform efforts around the world.
We are dedicated stewards of our licenses and tools, and we educate users, institutions, and policymakers about the positive benefits of adopting CC licenses. Our licenses will always provide voluntary options for creators who wish to share their material on more open terms than current copyright systems allow. But the CC vision—universal access to research and education and full participation in culture—will not be realized through licensing alone. Around the world, numerous national governments are reviewing or revising their copyright law. Some proposed revisions would broaden the scope of uses of copyrighted works permitted without the rightsholder’s permission. In response, it has been suggested that the very success of CC licenses means that copyright reform is unnecessary—that the licenses solve any problems for users that might otherwise exist. This is certainly not the case. CC licenses are a patch, not a fix, for the problems of the copyright system. They apply only to works whose creators make a conscious decision to affirmatively license the right for the public to exercise exclusive rights that the law automatically grants to them. The success of open licensing demonstrates the benefits that sharing and remixing can bring to individuals and society as a whole. However, CC operates within the frame of copyright law, and as a practical matter, only a small fraction of copyrighted works will ever be covered by our licenses.
Our experience has reinforced our belief that to ensure the maximum benefits to both culture and the economy in this digital age, the scope and shape of copyright law need to be reviewed. However well-crafted a public licensing model may be, it can never fully achieve what a change in the law would do, which means that law reform remains a pressing topic. The public would benefit from more extensive rights to use the full body of human culture and knowledge for the public benefit. CC licenses are not a substitute for users’ rights, and CC supports ongoing efforts to reform copyright law to strengthen users’ rights and expand the public domain.
From time to time, people in our community bring up the question of whether Creative Commons should be only a steward of the CC licenses, or also a steward of the broader participatory culture that the licenses are meant to promote.
Creative Commons affiliates, board, and staff have worked together over the past year to develop the policy statement above. The need for a statement like this became apparent at the 2012 Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest in Rio de Janeiro. Several CC affiliates attended, many who work on copyright reform initiatives alongside their CC outreach. In Rio, affiliates described the dual nature of their work, which they feel sometimes requires removing their “CC Affiliate hat” when involved with reform efforts. They argued that developing tools for sharing creative content and arguing that outdated copyright laws be changed to better support legal sharing were two different sides of the same coin. Affiliates asked for clarification of the organization’s policies on affiliates engaging directly in copyright law reform proposals.
Over the next several months, Creative Commons drafted a statement that re-emphasizes the many benefits that CC licenses bring to society. But it also acknowledges the limitations of CC and expresses the need for reform of the current copyright system. CC affiliates came together in Buenos Aires in August 2013 to discuss the position of Creative Commons in relation to copyright reform. Over 100 affiliates and supporters participated in a day-long pre-conference event. The policy position was drafted and reviewed by the board of directors, affiliates, and staff.
There are several reasons that we feel such a position is useful–and necessary. First, there have been several proposed laws (like SOPA/PIPA) and trade agreements (ACTA/TPP) that if enacted would be detrimental to user rights to access and use information. And, we’ve heard that in some policy discussions the success of CC as a voluntary licensing scheme is being used by incumbent interests as evidence that fundamental copyright reform is unnecessary. This is incorrect. As we wrote in March,
[The] existence of open copyright licenses shouldn’t be interpreted as a substitute for robust copyright reform. Quite the contrary. The decrease in transaction costs, increase in collaboration, and massive growth of the commons of legally reusable content spurred on by existence of public licenses should drastically reinforce the need for fundamental change, and not serve as a bandage for a broken copyright system.
The passage of increasingly harsh copyright regulations has the potential to render CC licenses and tools ineffective. The aim of these laws are counter to CC’s mission and vision. Second, it’s clear there are some areas of copyright where open licensing won’t solve the problem. One example is increasing access to copyrighted works for the visually impaired. Paul Keller explains this well:
Take the WIPO treaty for the visually impaired: There had to be a treaty because a voluntary or market driven solution to end the book famine for visually impaired people in the developing world did not emerge even though the problem had been known for a long time. Quite clearly the problem cannot not be solved by encouraging publishers to license their works openly and, instead, it required a tailored legislative approach that builds on new limitation and exemptions that address this specific issue.
Third, many CC affiliates are already deeply embedded in copyright reform activities as a part of their broader legal, policy, and digital rights advocacy work. It makes sense for those affiliates engaged in reform efforts to be able to speak and engage wearing their “CC Affiliate hat,” instead of trying to maintain the ambiguous and sometimes arbitrary separation between their “CC work” and the work they do supporting user rights and the public interest.
While we think this policy statement is noncontroversial, we must proceed with care. Historically, our organization has not been heavily involved in copyright reform efforts. Instead, we’ve been focused on the development and stewardship of the licenses and public domain tools. And this will certainly continue to be the case. Direct advocacy supporting more fundamental copyright reform has taken a backseat, for several reasons. First, we recognize and appreciate the value of neutrality, and acting as a responsible and impartial steward of our licenses, no matter who wishes to use them. Making our tools the best they can be and educating about how to use them are our core tasks. Second, as a U.S. based 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, we are constrained in our ability to engage in lobbying activities. Any lobbying conducted by CC headquarters staff will continue to be carefully tracked and reported. And lobbying by CC Affiliates will continue to be on behalf of the jurisdiction team in accordance with our MOU and established guidelines. Finally, there are groups that are well-positioned for advocacy activities, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Open Rights Group, Open Knowledge Foundation, and La Quadrature du Net. We support and promote the crucial, timely work of these and other groups.
We reaffirm that the mission of Creative Commons will sometimes call for our involvement in reform efforts. At the Creative Commons Global Summit in Buenos Aires, Lawrence Lessig gave a talk entitled, “Laws that Choke Creativity”. Lessig said he supports the fundamental freedom to remix. “We need to share more, and share more legally,” he said. “But in order to do so, the law must change.” He said that Creative Commons is not the complete solution. “We need real change in real law if these freedoms are to be secured.”
It's Time For The Supreme Court To Pull Us Back Into Reality
By Darpana Sheth
Before the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court hear oral argument today, Oct. 16, 2013, in Kaley v. United States, they might want to reread “Through the Looking Glass.” In Lewis Carroll’s fictional classic, Alice is befuddled when the White Queen explains that in her realm punishment comes first, the trial next, and a crime, maybe, last of all. To American readers, who cherish the presumption of innocence as a hallmark of their justice system, this is an amusing absurdity. But, as Kaley demonstrates, this absurdity has become reality, with prosecutors and police depriving Americans across the country of their property and livelihood before any crime is proved, or in some cases, even charged.
The culprits are forfeiture laws, which allow authorities to confiscate cash, cars, homes, or other property used for or obtained through criminal activity. While this sounds like a worthy goal, the forfeiture law challenged in Kaley allows the government—before trial—to freeze assets that may be subject to forfeiture if the defendant is convicted at trial. In other words, at a time when individuals are presumed innocent, they are prevented from using their assets not only to pay for counsel or bail, but to pay their rent, mortgage, car payments or other basic living expenses. It is no surprise that the Supreme Court has aptly characterized the pretrial restraint of assets as a “nuclear weapon.”
Making matters worse, prosecutors can freeze assets in secret—without affording defendants any prior notice or even a hearing. The question for the high court is whether the Constitution requires, at a minimum, an opportunity to contest the prosecutor’s use of this nuclear weapon before trial.
The answer to this question matters not just for criminal defendants, like husband and wife Brian and Kerri Kaley, who face criminal forfeiture as an aspect of their punishment if eventually convicted by a jury. It also affects ordinary Americans ensnared in the upside-down world of civil forfeiture, where they are never even charged with a crime.
Consider Terry and Sandy Dehko. For over thirty years, Terry has owned and operated a small grocery store outside of Detroit, which his daughter, Sandy, helps manage. In January, without any warning, federal authorities seized the store’s entire bank account containing more than $35,000, leaving the Dehkos struggling to pay their employees and vendors. The reason? The government does not approve of the way the Dehkos deposit their money.
Like most small business owners who regularly handle cash transactions, the Dehkos routinely deposit less than $10,000 at a time. Not only is it a bad idea to let too much money accumulate onsite, the Dehkos’ insurance policy only covers cash losses up to $10,000.
Making deposits of less than $10,000 is perfectly legal and the Dekhos had a good business reason for doing so. Nevertheless, without any evidence that the money was obtained unlawfully or used for nefarious purposes, federal authorities seized the Dekhos’ money on the grounds that they were illegally “structuring” their deposits to avoid reporting requirements that would kick in if they deposited more than $10,000 at a time.
To this day, the Dehkos have never been charged with any crime, and they are not guilty of any crime. Yet, ten months later, the Dehkos are still waiting for a hearing before a judge to contest the seizure.
Why is the government so adamant about holding on to the Dehkos’ money? For its part, the government argues, as it does in Kaley, that its seize-first-ask-questions-later policy ensures that the assets are preserved for forfeiture. What the government glosses over is its direct financial stake in the forfeited assets. Under federal law, the Justice Department keeps proceeds of forfeited property to pad its budget. That financial incentive has led to an explosion in the amount of property seized by federal law enforcement. Today, the Justice Department’s Assets Forfeiture Fund exceeds $4 billion.
But there is an even more fundamental reason why the government is holding on to the Dehkos’ money: It can. In another twist worthy of Lewis Carroll, under civil forfeiture laws, the Dehkos are considered guilty until they prove themselves innocent.
It is time for the Supreme Court to pull us out of Alice’s Wonderland and back into constitutional reality, where Americans are innocent until proven guilty and no one can be deprived of their property without being convicted of a crime. Kaley gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to clarify that, at the very least, the Constitution requires a meaningful opportunity to be heard before being deprived of property. For the sake of the Kaleys, the Dehkos and countless other victims of forfeiture abuse, it is vital that they do so.
20131007
Government school asks kids to justify repealing amendments from the Bill of Rights
Students are told that the Bill of Rights is "outdated" and amendments needed to be "pruned."
BRYANT, AR — A school district in Arkansas delivered a controversial assignment to 6th grade students. The assignment asked them to pretend to be on a government panel tasked with dissecting and revising the “outdated” Bill of Rights.
To help the children feel more like real bureaucrats, they were given a 4-letter acronym for their team, theNBTF: the National Revised Bill of Rights Task Force.
The worksheet, dated October 7th, students them with “pruning” amendments from the Bill of Rights because the government has “determined that it is outdated and may not remain in its current form any longer,” in a country mired in terrorist threats.
It reads as follows:
A worksheet from a government school in Bryant, Arkansas (Source: Lela Spears / digitaljournal.com)
Continued on page two:
A worksheet from a government school in Bryant, Arkansas (Source: Lela Spears / digitaljournal.com)
This assignment might have been intellectually stimulating if delivered to students who had a firm grasp of the constitution, and was not presented in such an inaccurate and leading manner.
Students aren’t being asked if the constitution has a problem. They are being told it has a problem.
Not only that, they are being told that the problem is derived from the original 10 amendments, not the subsequent amendments and laws that would follow.
Instead of an open-ended analysis of the amendments — and if they are being followed — students are told to pick two and delete them; finding faults in things that may not be faulty.
The assignment leads students towards conclusions that many Americans would find offensive.
Furthermore, the 6th grade students are probably coming away from this assignment with a totally false impression of the amendment process. It isn’t done through a panel of bureaucrats because “the government determined” that some edits needed to be made. The constitution is amended when 3/4 of the state legislatures agree to ratify a new amendment.
Which rights are you willing to give up?
The Bill of Rights, as mentioned earlier, is comprised by the first ten amendments to the constitution. These enshrined an effort to contain the federal government from grasping powers it was never meant to have by the nation’s founding fathers. If followed, these particular amendments would provide a strong barrier against the federal government turning into a centralized police state.
Most modern, government-educated Americans have very little understanding or appreciation for what is contained in the Bill of rights. Statist politicians, educators, and journalists regularly push the idea that the document is “outdated,” or that it is a “living document” that can be reinterpreted without following the amendment process.
Its no surprise that the country has been allowed to fall down the path toward authoritarianism when the public is dubiously “educated” in this way during their time spent in compulsory government institutions. Either people don’t know their rights, or they are predisposed to want to give them up for more government-imposed security.
Does it seem like a conflict of interest for the government to teach citizens about how to contain thegovernment’s power? Do you see any amendments that you are willing to “prune” from this list?
- Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
- Amendment II. A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
- Amendment III. No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
- Amendment IV. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
- Amendment V. No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb, nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
- Amendment VI. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed; which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence.
- Amendment VII. In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
- Amendment VIII. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
- Amendment IX. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
- Amendment X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Ministry of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Truth
By Rita Cant, Attorney, ACLU
The frenzy over "Operation Fast and Furious" has been hard to avoid. It's been the subject of a massive DOJ report, Congressional hearings, contempt votes, subpoena fights in federal court, and relentless media scrutiny. But if there's one telling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) would love to rectify, it's the "thoughtcrime" account of Agent John Dodson, one of the ATF insiders who helped bring the operation to public light.
The ACLU sent a letter today to the ATF, which has refused to allow Agent Dodson to publish a manuscript about Fast and Furious. Our letter explains why the denial violates his First Amendment rights, and undermines the importance that whistleblowers and public employee speech play in revealing wrongdoing and contributing to public debate.
If "Fast and Furious" makes you think of Vin Diesel, and "gunwalking" of vigorous calisthenics, let's back up a bit. The Phoenix field division of the ATF launched a gun smuggling investigation in late 2009, in which they deliberately let straw buyers get their hands on assault rifles, which agents hoped to follow south to their ultimate consumers – drug traffickers in Mexico. But the ATF lost track of some 2,000 weapons, later implicated in hundreds of murders in Mexico.
Agent Dodson blew the whistle on the decision to "walk" the guns – alerting Congress after it appeared that two were used in a shootout that killed a U.S. border patrol agent. But when he recently asked to publish his own first-hand account of these events, ATF censorship was fast, and it was furious.
Foregoing redactions, they nixed his entire manuscript. Claiming a right to refuse publication requests "for any reason" (the ATF's emphasis), the ATF explained to Agent Dodson that his book would have "a negative impact on morale in the Phoenix [Field Division] and would have a detremental [sic] effect on our relationships with DEA and FBI." Agent Dodson doesn't deny that his book could add to the ATF scrutiny, or even its three-year streak of bad press as a result of the affair. But these reasons just don't cut it when it comes to a whistleblower's right to speak – and the public's right to hear what he has to say.
We decided to send the ATF a friendly reminder that we don't lose our rights to speak, write, and teach when we accept government employment. Forty-five years ago, the ACLU stood up for Marvin Pickering, a high school teacher whose name marks the first Supreme Court case recognizing public employees' speech rights. In 2009, we defended U.S. Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions, who was fired from his job at the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service because of opinion pieces he wrote about the military commissions system. Just last year, we sent a letter to the State Department on behalf of Peter Van Buren, a State Department employee who is being punished for publicly criticizing the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq. And rest assured we will continue to remind government employers of those rights as the need arises.
Marvin Pickering was fired after the local school board determined that his unauthorized letter to the editor criticizing school board policies was "detrimental to the efficient operation and administration of the schools of the district." In the case that bears his name, the Supreme Court said that the"public interest in having free and unhindered debate" was "so great" that government could not shut down employee speech simply because it tarnishes agencies, embarrasses officials, or generates "controversy, conflict and dissension" among the ranks. The court decreed the "Pickering balancing test" to protect speech unless and until a government employer's concerns outweigh all the First Amendment interests at stake.
While it's undoubtedly an embarrassing time to be the ATF, speaking truth to power just isn't an injury the Constitution recognizes, much less seeks to prevent. And it's not just Agent Dodson's Constitutional rights on the line. The American public has a stake in this fight too.
That's because protecting employees' speech is especially crucial when it informs deliberation on matters of public policy. Fast and Furious ignited national debates over gun policy, border security, whistleblower protections, and the "gunwalking" techniques deployed in the operation. These debates address matters of public concern at the heart of the First Amendment.
Public employee speech is even more valuable when it shares critical views of our government agencies we wouldn't otherwise see. The Supreme Court hasrecognized that government employees are often in the best position to know "what ails the agencies for which they work." We couldn't agree more.
"Americans need and deserve truthful information about what the government is doing, particularly where the activity infringes on individual rights," said ACLU Policy Counsel Mike German, who – like Dodson – endured years of internal retaliation after blowing the whistle on dangerous federal law enforcement policy.
That's why protecting Agent Dodson's right to speak should be a priority issue for civil libertarians, regardless of political stripe. "I don't care if you're on the left or the right. At the end of the day, we have a right to know and talk about what law enforcement agencies do in our name," said Agent Dodson.
Given the national importance of both the Fast and Furious operation and ATF practices more broadly, the ATF should correct its mistake by approving Agent Dodson's publication request, and by changing its policy to reflect the Constitutional principle that government needs a damn good reason to shut down employee speech.
TSA Might Allow You to Board Plane with Your Marijuana
BY AARON KASE
The mile high club may soon take on a new meaning as states continue to liberalize their marijuana laws.
Although it’s a try-it-at-your-own-risk scenario, airplane passengers in certain situations are being permitted to carry marijuana on board, even if TSA agents sniff out the drugs.
It’s never technically altogether legal to fly on commercial airlines with weed because the airports all fall under federal jurisdiction, and marijuana is still illegal under federal law. However, TSA policy and anecdotal reports suggest that passengers who travel between states in which they can legally use pot are likely to be allowed to fly.
The reason is that although TSA reserves the right to ruin your day if they so choose, their official policy on drugs is to refer them to local law enforcement. So if the passenger has authorization to use medical marijuana, or if he or she is flying between Washington and Colorado, where possession of the drug even for recreational purposes has been legalized, local law enforcement isn’t going to intervene.
According to a statement on the TSA web site:
TSA security officers do not search for marijuana or other drugs. In the event a substance that appears to be marijuana is observed during security screening, TSA will refer the matter to a law enforcement officer.
Whether or not marijuana is considered “medical marijuana” under local law is not relevant to TSA screening because TSA is governed by federal law and federal law provides no basis to treat medical marijuana any differently than non-medical marijuana.
Even if an item is generally permitted, it may be subject to additional screening or not allowed through the checkpoint if it triggers an alarm during the screening process, appears to have been tampered with, or poses other security concerns. The final decision rests with TSA on whether to allow any items on the plane.
Blurred Lines
While TSA may never come right out and say that it will allow people to carry a federally banned substance, advocates in the field say that’s generally what’s been happening in practice.
“I hear reports from people flying from one medical use site to another or flying from one part of California to another and they generally report that if they carry their authorization, they simply show the letter and are sent on their way and are allowed to keep their medicine,” says Keith Stroup, an attorney and founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “The same policy should apply Colorado to Washington or Washington to Colorado.”
“I’m delighted to hear that because I think it shows that TSA primarily is acting as it was intended when it was established, to protect all of us when we travel on the airlines and to thwart terrorists. It is not supposed to be an anti-drug agency,” says Stroup. “What nobody feels 100 percent comfortable with is it’s a grey zone you’re going through. It’s technically still illegal even though they aren’t enforcing it very strongly.”
It’s also worth pointing out that not all states reciprocate medical use authorizations, so even if passengers are allowed to fly with marijuana from one medical state to another they could be violating state law when they land with it.
And to reiterate, even a medical patient carrying authorization or someone flying between Washington and Colorado is still taking a risk if they choose to carry weed on the plane.
“It is a federal agency, marijuana does remain illegal under federal law, so if you get the wrong TSA agent and he wants to be a pain, he can arrest you,” Stroup says. “I’m glad to see there’s a little give in the system but obviously at some point we need to remove marijuana from federal law so this is not an issue.”
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