Posted on 07/25/2008 8:49:03 PM PDT by bamahead
After being caught twice with a "baggie" of marijuana, 23-year old Rachel Hoffman was reportedly told by police in Tallahassee, Florida that she would go to prison for four years unless she became an undercover informant.
The young woman, a recent graduate of Florida State University, was murdered during a botched sting operation two months ago.
"The idea of waging a war on drugs is to protect people and here it seems like we're putting people in harm's way," said Lance Block, a lawyer hired by Rachel's parents.
The Florida Attorney General's office says it is reviewing the procedures and protocol of the Tallahassee police.
"I'm calling her a criminal," Tallahassee police chief Dennis Jones told 20/20, who maintains that both drug dealers and drug users are considered criminals to his department.
Under Florida law, possession of more than 20 grams of marijuana is a felony.
The Tallahassee police chief says Rachel was suspected of selling drugs and she was rightly treated as a criminal.
"That's my job as a police chief to find these criminals in our community and take them off the street, to make the proper arrests," Jones told 20/20.
Rachel's case also is raising questions about how police recruit and use informants in undercover operations.
"There need to be some safeguards here," said Block, the Hoffman family lawyer.
The young woman received no training before being sent to an undercover meeting to buy a large amount of drugs and a handgun from two suspects.
Police says Rachel was killed by the very handgun she was supposed to buy.
"I don't think she understood the risk or danger that she was in," said Block.
Rachel was in a drug court diversion program when she became an informant.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Why decriminalize rather than legalize? If you are going to let people possess it, why not take billions of dollars out of the hand of organized crime by allowing for legal production and sales through legal channels similar to the way we do with alcohol. That would be a huge blow to organized crime. They'd lose billions and billions of dollars every year. A legal industry would crate a lot of jobs for law abiding tax paying citizens, and we could raise more than enough in sales taxes and excises to pay for all the costs of regulating the new legal industry. Aside from all the jobs created and revenue generated as an added bonus people who buy marijuana from licensed facilities wouldn't be offered drugs like cocaine and Ecstasy from their dealers like we see happening today. The clerk at the “pot store” wouldn't be any more likely than the clerk at a liquor store to offer customers cocaine or meth or any other illegal drugs. With decriminalization you basically allow people to smoke it, but you don't separate marijuana from the harder more dangerous drugs. You don't deliver a major blow to organized crime by taking a multibillion dollar business from them and depriving them of the massive distribution networks for marijuana that they currently use to distribute the much more dangerous drugs like heroin and meth for which there is far less demand than marijuana. You don't stop people from selling a dangerous product with poisonous insecticides or other chemicals on it. If we're going to decriminalize, we might as well go all the way and legalize it and regulate it similar to the way we regulate alcohol.
War on Drugs:
William F. Buckley, Jr.:
Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
Milton Friedman:
I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
Abraham Lincoln:
A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
Abraham Lincoln:
Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.
I think marijuana will be legalized someday and regulated similar to the way we regulate alcohol now. I'm all for that. I would be absolutely opposed to drugs like heroin or meth being legalized, as would be the overwhelming majority of Americans. There doesn't have to be a “domino effect” where we legalize marijuana and then eventually everything else is legalized. I don't think that would happen. We'll always have some hardcore libertarian types pushing for legalizing everything under the sun, but they'll always be a tiny minority. There's pretty broad support for legalizing marijuana. It's not quite a majority yet, but survey results show that 40 some odd percent of Americans are for legalizing it and regulating it similar to the way we regulate alcohol. I can't see anywhere close to that percentage of our population getting behind legalizing a horrible drug like meth. Would we have meth festivals, meth marches and all that like we see with marijuana today? Heck no. We aren't going to legalize all drugs.
The politicians who vote for industry bail-outs are far more dangerous than pot smokers. They are the ones that should be jailed.
They're more likely to kill each other fighting over the remaining drug business. They can't all just start selling other drugs because there is limited demand for other illegal drugs. When we legalize marijuana and allow it to be produced and distributed through legal channels we'll just take several billion dollars out of the illegal drug trade so there will be that much less money left for these people to fight over. They'll kill each other off fighting over what's left. Some will get out of the business. Fewer will get involved with it in the first place. In the end there will be fewer out there in organized crime.
“I’m told that they look for jobs in warehouses and outdoors mostly so as not to get caught as easily.”
Or they work as lawyers, engineers, programmers, etc. Do you really think all pot smokers work menial labor jobs and
choose their careers by looking for jobs where they can easily get away with smoking pot while at work?
That's just wrong. We can look throughout history and see plenty of instances where one generation tolerated something and the next did not, or see generation after generation tolerating something but never embracing it. If your former youth minister was correct we'd have long ago embraced prostitution, wife beating, etc. Just think of all the things that have been tolerated at some point that are forbidden now or at least are certainly not embraced by society. Your youth minister was short sighted on this topic.
Well that is just fine, but you don’t see the need to STUDY this? Good googly moogly.
Funny I can’t find any evidence of it.
I’m not a doper either but I am fed up with this bs. Here’s another good group of cops:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-...
By Ari B. Bloomekatz and Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
July 25, 2008
An unarmed man was shot and killed by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who believed the suspected drug dealer was reaching for a weapon, authorities said.
Two deputies were patrolling in the 11000 block of Dalerose Avenue in Lennox about 11:40 p.m. Wednesday when they saw the man sitting in his car, said Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department. They approached the vehicle and the suspect was “physically startled, agitated and reached under his seat,” Whitmore said. One of the deputies, “fearing for his safety, fired his weapon, hitting the suspect in the upper torso.”
Christian Portillo, 35, was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said. No weapons or drugs were recovered from the vehicle, he said.
The victim’s father said his son had done nothing wrong and that he watched in horror after the officer shot him in the family’s driveway. “He was holding the door open with his left hand and the gun with his right,” Josue Portillo, 61, said of the deputy. Portillo said he had been reading inside the one-story house when he heard gunfire and rushed outside. My son “was just sitting in the car,” he said.
Los Angeles County public records show that Portillo had three convictions. Five years ago he was convicted of driving with a suspended license, and more than 15 years ago he was convicted on charges of vandalism and bringing drugs into a prison or jail.
Potheads don't B&E.
What a great guy!
Look at cigarettes. They are legal yet becoming more and more unpopular. I think that if we legalized marijuana use would go up some at first, but after the novelty wore off could use go down just like cigarette use is going down? I honestly do not believe the law keeps many people who want to smoke pot from smoking it. I don't think there are hoards of people out there just wishing pot would become legal so they could finally smoke it. If they want to smoke it, they probably do. Most don't want to smoke it though, because of all the really good reasons for not smoking pot aside from its legal status.
In some states it's decriminalized and if you get caught with it all you get really is a ticket and no criminal record. In other states it's crime for which you can go to jail, be forced to pay big fines, lose your drivers license, etc., but per capita use is about the same as it is in states where they've decriminalized. In Holland they allow people to possess small amounts of marijuana and allow licensed shops to sell it, yet somehow or another a lower percentage of the Dutch than Americans have even tried marijuana. Why are Dutch children less likely to smoke marijuana than America children? I understand how you would think our laws must be stopping a lot of people who want to smoke marijuana from smoking it. I just don't see any proof whatsoever that that is actually happening. It doesn't appear to me that the laws or enforcement of same have much if any affect on per capita marijuana use. It's popular in some places, not so much in others, regardless of the respective laws. Nowhere does a much greater percentage of the people smoke it than here in the United States, which tells me there is a natural limit on the number of people who will use marijuana.
Ha ha! Really, that is what is funny (in a sick way). The grunts doing the work get tested, and if they smoke, get caught. Even if it was two weeks ago at a Saturday BBQ at home. But those who binge drink all weekend or can afford to snort coke all weekend get by. And management, who often drink and snort, usually don’t get tested at all.
And show up in tests for weeks instead of hours. I'm sure the poster has no employees who show up hungover and under perform but pass bllod screens. No, I'm sure of it.
If it could we'd have no laws against anything - just fine one pathetic person who was "on the line" and throw out every law..
Silly stuff.
Breathtakingly stupid. Reasoning is over your head, huh?
Maybe to you. The next time you fill your bowl, say a prayer for for the thousands of people that died just across our southern border in a very bloody fashion.
There is a very real war going on across our southern border between drug families. Tijuana, Baha were pleasant places to visit at a time in the past. Not any longer.
We need a president that will collapse the tunnels under the border. And use 60mm HE rounds on any living thing that comes within 3 feet of our border.
There’s a lot of stuff about pot that should be studied. It’s effects on glaucoma, it’s pain killing capabilities, it could probably be the source of a muscle relaxant that would put Advil out of business.
But of course it’s section 1. No studying. Lots of dumb laws in the WOD.
Bump!
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