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132 search results for “marijuana”

Inside-the-border stops

February 14, 2009
Norm Dicks

Norm Dicks

The decisions by Senator Patty Murray and Representative Norm Dicks to take a closer look at the Olympic peninsula border stops - not stops at the border, which are not under debate, but quite a few miles from it - are likely to generate a good deal of comment. Not all, but most, we suspect, positive.

From a Dicks release on this:

The congressman said he met in October with the Chief of the Border Patrol, but that since then “CBP agents have adopted an even more aggressive strategy of performing ad hoc traffic stops, making individual arrests. While I understand that the Border Patrol mission includes coordination with local law enforcement on border control issues, I have serious questions about the agency’s direct authority to stop individual automobiles and detain, in some cases, legal residents of the United States until they are able to prove their status.”

In the letter, Rep. Dicks also said that he was also disturbed by reports of Border Patrol agents boarding local buses and primarily questioning riders about their citizenship.

“I would appreciate your personal attention to the question of whether these activities are the appropriate and best use of the limited resources available to your department as it confronts the myriad of serious threats to the security of our homeland,” the congressman’s letter concluded.

You need to recall here that Dicks may be a Democrat but he is also one of the closest to military and security interests - this is not someone automatically and by nature suspicious of that community.

There is, as noted, a lot of comment about all this. There's a string, pro and con, well worth reading tagged to a Seattle Times piece on this. One of the comments that caught our attention:

I guess none of the other posters on this thread live out on the Peninsula. The Border Patrol's random stops have caught no-one with any connection with terrorism or illegal drugs or anyone who has crossed into the US from Canada. They have caught medical marijuana users (legal in Washington State, illegal at the Federal level), harvesters of salal without a permit, and a few inoffensive Mexican agricultural workers who have been in the country for years, some undocumented, some who actually are legal but are still sent to immigration detention. For this they violate our fourth amendment rights, make us miss our ferries, and squander our tax dollars.

By the way, the right they claim - to suspend the Fourth Amendment anywhere within 100 miles of a border - would allow them to conduct stop-and-search operations on I-5 in Seattle. If they did that, maybe you'd feel a little different.

Not quite so much the warrior, maybe

February 11, 2009
Gil Kerlikowske

Gil Kerlikowske

For coming on to 40 years, we've had a "war on drugs," which has become quite a war indeed. The February 2 Washington Post Magazine featured a must-read, detailed report about the raid on the home of a small-town mayor in Maryland: "Acting on a mistaken drug trafficking suspicion, a SWAT team broke down their door, shot beloved pets and shattered a happy home. Was it an extreme reaction, or business as usual in America's war on drugs?" (The pretext for the raid was a box containing drugs, which police themselves had planted at the mayor's front door.) In a followup online chat, one of the writers remarked, "Obviously, one of the most frightening aspects of this sad tale is that it could happen to any one of us."

This paramilitary activity in our country has been a federally-driven, primarily, development, pushed by presidents of both parties for four decades; the results have included no diminishment of drug activity but unabated violence which is becoming increasingly hazardous. Might the Obama Administration try a different direction?

In nominating Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske as "drug czar," Obama may be signaling that change is in the wind. Not radical, 180-degree turnarounds - which might have been what appointment of his predecessor, Norm Stamper, would have indicated - but significant adjustment at least.

The key touchstone here is Seattle Initiative 75, a 2003 measure which specifically called for making marijuana not legal exactly, but the lowest priority for law enforcement. The measure passed. It didn't pass with Kerlikowske's endorsement, but that has to be parsed: The Seattle Times reported local law enforcement considered it "vague, potentially confusing and unlikely to change what they do on the street" - in other words, not wrong as policy, but simply unnecessary. The followup sentence: "Arresting people for possessing marijuana for personal use, says Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, is not a priority now." Since the measure's passage, the chief appears to have abided by its terms, without complaint. (more…)

EZ on

October 30, 2007

We've suggested before that the threshold for many of the direct democracy activities - initiative, referendum, recall and so on - is much too low. Not that these things shouldn't be available, but that they shouldn't be easy. We'll revisit this again soon.

If you're inclined to think otherwise, consider this from the Spokesman-Review blog by Betsy Russell:

In today’s Twin Falls Times-News, reporter Jared Hopkins reveals why it’s the Wood River Valley city of Hailey that’s voting next week on four pro-marijuana initiatives. The measures’ sponsor, Garden City resident and activist Ryan Davidson – who fought all the way to the Idaho Supreme Court to win the right to put the measures before voters, regardless of the legal complications if they were to pass – told Hopkins that he lived in Hailey for a few months in 2004, and picked it for the initiatives because it was one of the “easiest places” to get on the ballot.

The reason? Getting a measure on the ballot takes petition signatures from voters equal to 20 percent of the turnout in the last election. In Hailey’s last city election in 2005, only unopposed candidates were on the ballot – so the ho-hum balloting drew a total turnout of just 85 people. That meant Davidson needed just 17 signatures to qualify his measures for the ballot.

No tomatoes for you

April 14, 2007

Have you seen the late-night TV ads promoting indoor tomato growing, so you can have year-round fresh tomatoes? Sounds like not a bad idea, except that you then read about cases like the eager drug-busters of Pullman, and you wonder if it would be worth the effort. [Hat tip: The Slog.]

Pullman is where three college roommates were growing indoor tomatoes - perfectly legal tomatoes - when, the Daily Evergreen reports, "eight to 10 police officers, guns drawn, came into the apartment and served the unsuspecting men a search warrant." On suspicion of growing marijuana, of course; the ensuing search turned up none. Only tomatoes.

The grow light aimed at the tomatoes was apparently the one piece of evidence which led to a search warrant alleging that “a crime has been committed or reasonably appears about to be committed, to-wit: controlled narcotic substances, in particular growing marijuana and burnt marijuana . . .”

What passes for reason these days . . .

What’s news

January 26, 2007

televisionAs indicated earlier, we're taking a look at the content of two news reports, following up on the description on Blue Oregon of a KOIN broadcast. We're running through the stories as they appeared up to the first weather or sports segment. So here we go . . .

KPTV Fox 12, at 10. This is Portland's second-ranking station, and this is an hour-long program, which would afford plenty of time for news of substance amid, ah, the rest. With two minor exceptions, it didn't happen. The graphics, sound design, pacing, promotion of exclusivity and teasers for upcoming material closely resembled the tabloid shows ("Hard Copy" etc); the station has been said to be crime-heavy, and this evening's broadcast certainly did nothing to counter that. Consider the long string of crime stories in this list of all the stories they ran, in order.

(more…)

The right, not the ability

September 18, 2006

Comedian Ron White has a crowd-pleasing bit about his arrest for drunken behavior at a New York bar, and his conversation during that event with the police. Alcohol had loosened his tongue, and he baited them, playing the smartass. As he recalled, "I knew I had the right to keep silent. I had the right. I just didn't have the ability."

Now federal prosecutors are jumping into the ability of people to maintain their rights, and it should chill anyone interested in preserving their rights should they ever have a run-in with the law.

One of our well-known rights, as anyone who has watched a police show in the last generation well knows, is the right to be represented by an attorney, to the point that one will be appointed and paid by the state if one cannot otherwise be afforded. The idea is that people charged with a crime ought to have some support and counsel on which they can rely and in whom they can confide, so they aren't simply railroaded by overmatching expertise. That is why attorney-client confidentiality is so strictly protected in legal proceedings.

Or at least it has been. But suppose you're in a legal jam and you want the advice of a lawyer. How candid will you be with that lawyer - and, as a result, how effective can he be - if you knew that everything you said might wind up in the hands of the prosecutors? That pretty much wipes out your right to legal help, doesn't it? Under those conditions, you'd probably be as well off representing yourself. (Which - don't get us wrong - is poorly.)

Can't happen because of the attorney-client privilege, you say? Guess again.

The Eugene Register Guard reports about Roseburg attorney David Terry, apparently the lawyer for several people who have been either suspected or charged with drug offenses. On September 13, the RG says, "More than a dozen [federal] agents with a search warrant approved by a federal magistrate judge walked into the office of David Terry just after 7 a.m. and seized financial, property, business, travel and personal records of 17 people. Terry, a lawyer for 27 years, is not charged with any crime. However, he is obviously the unnamed 'Attorney A' in a 196-page federal indictment issued Wednesday that named 12 men allegedly involved in an international conspiracy to smuggle marijuana and cocaine, grow marijuana and make methamphetamine." (more…)

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