Radley Balko has a long, but interesting (and sad) report on the ongoing injustice in the Cory Maye case:

One of the people I spoke to during my visit two years ago is Linda Shoemaker, who runs the Prentiss tobacco shop. Shoemaker’s a white woman, middle-aged, and was described by many to me as the town’s unofficial historian. She knows everything that happens—judging from my time there, likely because nearly everyone in town stops by her shop to buy tobacco. Shoemaker knew Ron Jones well, for most of his life, and was quite fond of him. But she’s also one of the few white people in the area who doesn’t believe Cory ought to be in prison. I still have a quote from her in my notes from two years ago. “If somebody every broke in on me and my grandbabies…” She then paused. Her eyes filled with tears and she glanced upward. “Forgive me for saying this, Ron,” she said. “You know I love you. But if anybody broke in on me and my grandbabies at night, I’d have done the same thing Cory Maye did.”

You have one man taken from his family, in the prime of his life. You have another man, also taken from his family, now losing the prime of his life. You have a son taken from his mother and father. And you have a loving father being taken from his son and daughter.

Thank this war. The goddamned drug war. It is so incredibly senseless and stupid. And it’ll continue to claim and ruin lives, because too few politicians have the backbone to stand up and say after 30 years, $500 billion, a horrifyingly high prison population, and countless dead innocents, cops, kids, nonviolent offenders, decimated neighborhoods, wasted lives, corrupted cops, and eviscerations of the core freedoms this country was allegedly founded upon, the shit isn’t working. It’ll never work. It never has. It’s a testament to the facade of truth that is politics that no leaders from the two majors parties have in thirty years been able to say this. That maybe, just maybe, we’re doing it wrong. Maybe, just maybe, kicking down doors in the middle of the night and storming in with guns in order to stop people from getting high….isn’t such a good idea. Maybe, just maybe, the idea getting tips from racist, illiterate, drug-addicted informants about which doors, if you kick them down, will lead to drugs? Well maybe that isn’t such a sound policy, either. We can’t even get one of the leading candidates for president to say that. The safe position is always to advocate for more money, more government power, more militarism—and less freedom, less common sense, and less worry about collateral damage. Sensibility, honesty, or compassion? Too risky.

B-b-but ... I thought the Constitution was only trampled by McChimpyBushitlerHalliburton, and the trampling started precisely at 12:01 PM on January 20, 2001 ...

Yes Jay, there are several people out there (Radley included) who are willing to call a spade a spade, regardless of which party it is doing the trampling. Because quite frankly both parties (and their partisans) are quite wiling and enthusiastic about their abuse of power and their rationalizations thereof.

~Jon

I have wondered if the price of waging the War on Drugs is worth the cost. It is argued that pharmaceutical-grade opiates are no worse than alcohol, that pot is much safer than alcohol from its favorable L/D ratio, and that the 19th Century patent medicines often had cocaine or opiates as their "secret" ingredients and that era had many users/addicts of those drugs as functioning members of society. All of this has to be weighed against the filling up of our prisons and jails and all of the other casualties of the War on Drugs.

The thing that always nags at me is the notion that China was brought down from national greatness to colonial servitude as a result of a war fought with the British to allow imports of opium. The China-brought-down-by-opium-forced-on-them-by-the-British meme seems to be a strong justification for the War on Drugs, or at least among the intellectual classes.

Can anyone fill me on China, the British, opium, and the effect on Chinese society of that era? Is the notion that allowing citizens access to clean, pure, and legal opiate, cocaine, and marijuana having national security implications a paranoid fantasy, or is there some historical precendent that a nation needs to defend its borders against drug imports?

Opium, cocaine or marijuana? These days kids are drinking liquid GHB made in their own neighborhood or by themselves.

Seems to me both sides of the narcotics "debate" are mostly wrong and exaggerate the benefits and validity of their arguments.

While I don't mind others choice of poison (mine is smoking nicotine; the natural insecticide - aka cigars & cigarettes) I do mind that many seem to think notions like pushers, forced or pseudo-voluntary use, addiction itself, and detrimental effects to third parties are somehow non-existent myths or unimportant or that they will be if only things were done their way.

Legalization (which I do support) doesn't remove those issues; they're still there for all the more-or-less legal drugs so why would it be different for any new ones? No, the typical advocates for either side of the "discussion" are all overselling hopelessly naive dreams.

No matter if somebody they care about dies of an OD or if somebody dies in a drug-related bust (whether gone wrong or not) they'll tend to blame whoever or whatever they don't like.

That's only natural but it's called a blame game and adds absolutely nothing but noise.

I doubt Cory should be in jail but the judge & jury don't agree. As for the article I couldn't stomach reading all of it that's how obviously manipulative it was, the rest of you need to get your propaganda detectors checked.