Why is a SWAT team assaulting me? I’m just dancing at a rave (Militarized cops and the "drug war")

[villager]

<snip>

Bush also continued Clinton’s assault on medical marijuana. In the 2000 campaign, Bush had promised a federalist approach to the issue—he had said he would leave it to the states to decide. That promise didn’t last long. It quickly became clear that, like Clinton before him, Bush would give no quarter to sick people using pot in states that had legalized it for treatment. The aggressive raids that began during the Clinton administration increased, in both number and intensity.

The result was the perverse spectacle of armed federal cops taking down medical facilities and their patients. On September 5, 2002, for example, federal agents raided the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz, California. Suzanne Pfeil, a post-polio patient who couldn’t walk without leg braces and crutches, told columnist Mitch Albom that she awoke to find federal agents pointing assault rifles at her head. They yelled at her to get up. She said she couldn’t. They yelled at her some more. She explained, again, that she was crippled. They finally handcuffed Pfeil to her bed, then moved on to other patients. Because she was allergic to many classes of drugs, Pfeil smoked marijuana to alleviate muscle and nerve pain brought on by her condition.

On the same day, federal agents also raided the home of the facility’s owners, Valerie and Michael Coral. A DEA SWAT team decked out in flak jackets and M-16s stormed the house, shoved Valerie Coral to the ground, and put a gun to her head. She was cuffed, arrested, and taken to a federal detention center, still wearing her pajamas. When asked if such heavy-handed tactics were necessary given that Valerie Coral was hardly a dangerous drug kingpin, DEA spokesman Will Glaspy replied, “We target drug traffickers. There is no such term as ‘medical marijuana,’ except as created by the marijuana lobby.” A week later, agents raided the Genesis 1:29 medical cannabis dispensary and the grower that supplied it. California attorney general Bill Lockyer was angry, protesting, “A medical marijuana provider such as the Santa Cruz collective represents little danger to the public and is certainly not a concern which would warrant diverting scarce federal resources.”

The heavy-handed federal enforcement on medical providers wasn’t limited to marijuana. As fears about prescription opioid painkillers started to take root in the media in the early 2000s, the DEA began targeting doctors, and it has been doing so ever since. These are professionals with medical degrees, practices, offices, and patients, singled out for allegedly overprescribing a certain class of drugs. There’s still a debate over whether overprescribing these drugs—as defined by drug cops, not other doctors—should even be a crime, and whether some of the doctors were even overprescribing in the first place. Those questions aside, it’s hard to fathom why it would be necessary to send SWAT teams to storm their homes and offices, subjecting their families and patients to the violence and volatility of a typical raid.

The federal government wasn’t even pretending anymore. Alleged “states’ rights” supporters like Asa Hutchison, the head of DEA appointed by Bush in 2001, and Attorney General John Ashcroft were making an example of these doctors, these dispensaries, and the people who owned, supplied, and patronized them. The guns and commando tactics were completely unnecessary. No reasonable person believed that Suzanne Pfeil or Valerie Coral was going to take out a couple of DEA agents in a suicidal blaze of glory...

<snip>

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/30/why_is_a_swat_team_assaulting_me_im_just_dancing_at_a_rave/

[awoke_in_2003]

1. "States rights", at least until the state decides to do something the fed doesn't like. nt

[formercia]

2. Big Pharma, makers of Police Toys and the Prison Industrial Complex.

Don't want Pot Legalized. Their Rice Bowl being full, depends on sending people to Prison and Seizing Property under Civil Forfeiture.

[UglyGreed]

3. All the Presidents in my life

time has passed the baton to the next with no real change.