In January 2013, police raided the home of a Cleveland drug dealer, saying in a search warrant that an informant had recently bought crack cocaine there.
But the drug dealer had surveillance cameras that proved the officers were lying. He gave the tapes to his lawyer, who showed the FBI. The feds then worked to uncover a massive scandal of a rogue street-crimes unit that robbed and framed drug suspects who felt they had no choice but plead guilty to fraudulent charges.
Four years later, authorities are still unwinding the damage.
Three cops who worked for the city of East Cleveland are in prison. Cases against 22 alleged drug dealers have been dismissed. Authorities are searching for another 21 people who are eligible to have their convictions tossed. On top of those injustices, there is a slim chance that any of them will be fully reimbursed, because the disgraced officers and their former employer don’t have the money.
“I always took it on the chin when I got arrested for something I know I did. But when a cop lies to get you in prison, that’s a different story,” said Kenneth Blackshaw, who was arrested in a 2013 traffic stop and spent two years behind bars before his drug conviction was overturned.
The detectives, Blackshaw said, knew just who to target: people with long criminal records who knew their word would never stand up against a police officer’s. He is trying to recoup all that he lost, including $100,000 the cops took from his home in an illegal search.
“A person like myself doesn’t stand a fighting chance for his freedom when he stands accused of something he didn’t do,” Blackshaw, 51, said.
Drugs, race and graft
The Cleveland-area victims are among thousands of people who have been exonerated in cases involving police graft over the last three decades countrywide, from California to Texas, and from New Jersey to Ohio. In Philadelphia, more than 800 people have had their convictions dismissed. The Rampart scandal in Los Angeles in the late 1990s led to at least 150 tossed cases.
Former East Cleveland Police Officers, clockwise from left: Torris Moore, Antonio Malone, and Eric Jones. FBI; Cuyahoga County Sheriff; East Cleveland Police.
These “group exonerations” are distinct from the stories of people cleared by DNA or new evidence, a movement led by crusading lawyers who dig into individual cases to expose faulty forensics, false confessions, mistaken identities and official misconduct.
Group exonerations rarely attract much attention outside of the communities where they occur. They typically involve people convicted of relatively minor crimes that resulted in short prison sentences or terms of probation. The victims often have criminal records and, if not for the corrupt methods that led to their convictions, may actually have been guilty of a crime.
There is no official record of group exonerations, and researchers believe that in some police corruption scandals, authorities don’t bother to identify tainted convictions — or tell victims they could be cleared. Even so, the number of people wrongly convicted under such circumstances likely exceeds the more than 2,000 individual exonerations recorded since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
The vast majority of victims are black — a result that points to national trends in American drug-law enforcement researchers at the registry said in a report issued last month. “As any forger knows, the way to create convincing fakes is to make them look like the real thing,” the report’s authors wrote. “For drug cases, that means arresting mostly black suspects.”
The impact is profound. Group exonerations not only undermine crime fighting efforts, but also destroy faith in police and fuel the belief that the justice system treats poor, minority communities unfairly.
“What I saw in this case is a legitimate reason for these folks to have these feelings toward law enforcement,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Ed Feran, who prosecuted the East Cleveland officers.
Setups and thefts
East Cleveland is a city in distress, much more so than Cleveland, its larger Rust Belt neighbor. More than 40 percent of its 17,843 residents live in poverty, almost all of them black. Mass demolitions of abandoned homes has left the 3-square-mile city pocked with vacant lots. The median household income is $19,592. The local government is near bankruptcy.
That is the atmosphere in which the rogue street crimes unit operated.
After the FBI got tipped-off in early 2013, agents had the drug dealer who caught officers lying about buying crack at his house wear a wire. His secret recordings caught one of the officers shaking him down for $3,000 during a traffic stop.
From there, investigators uncovered more frame-ups and thefts. They documented several of them in an October 2015 indictment that charged the rogue unit’s commander, Torris Moore, and two underlings, Antonio Malone and Eric Jones, with illegally searching and stealing from alleged drug dealers and faking reports to cover up their crimes.
The indictment included charges that the officers had arrested an alleged drug dealer identified as K.B. The following day, while K.B. sat in jail, the indictment said, the officers broke into his room at his grandmother’s house and took $100,000, keeping a third of it and turning in the rest.
Blackshaw did not know his case was under investigation. He learned of the officers’ arrest by watching the news in prison. He called home and an aunt told him she’d already talked to his lawyer. “We’re working on getting you out of there,” he recalled her saying.
A feeling of vindication washed over Blackshaw. He had agreed to go to prison even though he didn’t think his arrest was legitimate. He has a long history of drug offenses, and his charge, possession of more than 100 grams of cocaine, carried a mandatory minimum sentence of 11 years behind bars. He maintains he did not have any drugs on him when he was busted.
He’d told his lawyer he wanted to go to trial. But his lawyer, Terry Gilbert, had advised against it, reminding him that it would be his word against the officers’. So Blackshaw pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received a five-year prison sentence.
“Neither of us ever dreamed that these cops could be crooked enough to steal money and lie about it, and even if they did, who would believe Kenneth Blackshaw?” Gilbert recalled. But, as it turns out, the officers lied in the police report and to prosecutors while defending their illegal search.
‘Legally innocent’
Most of the victims mentioned in the federal indictment didn’t have private lawyers to push for their release. But the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office had just formed a Conviction Integrity Unit, which helped make sure all of the convictions were vacated. Blackshaw was released from prison in February 2016.
All three officers were sentenced to prison: Moore got nine years, Malone six and Jones nearly four. In a tearful courtroom apology, Moore said she’d turned rogue in 2011.
That revelation prompted the Conviction Integrity Unit to review all of the officers’ work since 2011. They came up with dozens of suspect cases. In some, the officers cited the use of confidential informants without proving their existence. In others, money used for undercover drug purchases, or money seized in arrests or raids, was not properly logged, raising questions about where the cash ended up.
Each of the defendants, like Blackshaw, had pleaded guilty. Now they were all eligible to have their cases dismissed.
Some of the victims had likely committed drug offenses. But because the entire process was corroded, the cases could no longer be defended in court. Justice required their dismissal.
“We didn’t go all the way to determine whether they were factually innocent or not,” Jose Torres, who heads the unit, said. “We were convinced that they were legally innocent, and that’s enough for us.”
Search for victims
So far, authorities have identified 43 people whose convictions deserved to be tossed. But in order for that to happen, they or a lawyer representing them needs to appear in court to ask a judge to dismiss the charges.
Working with the county public defender’s office, they’ve only been able to dismiss convictions for 22 people, Torres said. They’ve tracked down a couple of others who are expected to appear in court soon. The rest either haven’t been found or don’t want to come forward.
In each case, defense lawyers have insisted on protecting the victim’s right to sue for damages. But whether they get any award remains to be seen.
Blackshaw, out of prison for more than a year, says he’s trying to start a commercial cleaning business. He is grateful to be released, but he lost two years of freedom.
And he is still fighting for the rest of his money.
When Deborah Young of Ferndale sent her $60 fee to Lansing this year to register as a medical-marijuana user, she assumed the state would use her money to review her paperwork and print her ID card.
The fees are “for the operation and oversight of the Michigan medical marihuana program,” says state law — spelling marijuana with an “h,” the old-fashioned way as in federal law.
Last month, though, Young said she and other card holderswere shocked to learn that Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs — LARA — had built up so much in fees that it gave $1.2 million to 18 county sheriffs, including those in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. The grants are intended via legislative approval to be used by sheriffs for training and enforcement of Michigan’s medical marijuana act.
“They’re raiding the same people who paid those fees,” said Young, 58, who has glaucoma, a serious eye disease approved for medical-marijuana treatment in Michigan.
“We couldn’t believe it,” said Young. Ferndale residents learned not only that the Oakland County Sheriff received fee revenue from the ID cards but that their own city’s police department was set to get a share of it for use in medical-marijuana investigations.
The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office received $323,725 this year from LARA, according to a county memo sent to cities getting the grant offers. According to the memo, the county sheriff plans to spend $98,000 on 28 raid-style bulletproof vests, $80,000 on a Chevrolet van, pickup and trailer to transport seized marijuana plants; $10,000 to train investigators, and $134,000 for overtime pay to medical-marijuana investigators. Much of the overtime pay is being offered to 15 communities in Oakland County that lend officers to OAKNET — the Oakland County Narcotics Enforcement Team.
The Ferndale City Council rubber-stamped the grant without discussion in mid-July. Rochester and Royal Oak city councils also voted last month to accept grant money. Ferndale’s share of $5,582 was to pay overtime for officers in countywide medical-marijuana raids, according to the county memo.
When Young and other residents began calling the city to complain, the council put the grant back on its agenda. And it prompted Young to stand before the council members to demand that they rescind their decision.
“Why would we need a medical-marijuana oversight grant in Ferndale? Why would we even be a part of something to harass sick people?” she told council members.
Her questions also prompted bigger ones: Whether medical-marijuana users are primarily law-abiding Michiganders who merely seek a respite from pain and other conditions approved for medical-marijuana treatment; or whether they’re mainly seeking a sensory high, with the aid of complicit doctors willing to sign forms, and of drug dealers bent on making big profits while dodging federal drug laws.
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said he sees dispensary operators as a serious threat to society.
“These grants aren’t to prosecute someone who’s not breaking the law,” Bouchard said. Oakland County’s memo offering grants to local police departments, provided to 15 city councils and township boards, said that medical marijuana “is being smuggled, mailed and transported into Oakland County from other states on a regular basis.” Michigan’s medical marijuana act, a vague law passed by voters in 2008, is an invitation to drug dealing, profiteering and the involvement of organized crime, Bouchard said.
Bouchard is unabashed about his vigorous campaign to wipe outdispensaries in Oakland County, citing a state Supreme Court ruling in 2011, which Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has said means that most dispensaries were illegal in Michigan. Law enforcement officials in some counties, including Wayne, have tolerated the spread of dispensaries, but Bouchard said he is adamantly opposed to such leniency.
Oakland County investigators recently learned that two workers at a chain of four dispensaries, operating in Wayne and Oakland counties, were shot by a rival group, he said.
“One individual was murdered. The other was shot several times, but survived,” Bouchard said, adding: “I don’t care what some other counties are doing. The law says these types of facilities are illegal (and) they put law-abiding citizens at risk.”
The practice of turning medical-marijuana users’ fees against them by police agencies is not new in Michigan, although this year’s escalation of grants was shocking, said Rick Thompson, editor of the online Compassion Chronicles, a blog for medical-marijuana patients.
“This started out as a small, hidden part of the state’s budget in fiscal year 2014,” Thompson said. As the medical-marijuana funds swelled from cranking out ID cards, the Legislature began earmarking grant money for county sheriffs, Thompson said.
“The language said it would be for education about and enforcement of Michigan’s medical marijuana act, but you can see what that turned into,” he said. In the first year, four counties spent $116,000, state records show.
This year, the grant money grew tenfold, said State Representative Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor. The Macomb County Sheriff is allowed up to$254,125, and the Wayne County Sheriff got $473,256, Irwin said.
The grants could expand dramatically again next year because LARA now has a whopping $31 million in its medical-marijuana fund, mainly from fees paid for ID cards by nearly 200,000 Michiganders, who were either approved to use medical marijuana or approved to be caregivers and provide medical marijuana to others.
The fee revenue this year flows in at nearly $9 million a year, $3 million more than the cost to administer the program, Irwin said.
Funneling fresh windfalls to law enforcement could mean more raids of dispensaries, home growing operations and other medical-marijuana sites, Irwin said.
Michigan is one of only two states that allows medical marijuana but doesn’t allow dispensaries, said Karen O’Keefe, a lawyer who is director of state policies for the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Marijuana Policy Project.
“The big problem in Michigan is that the Legislature just has not updated the law” to allow dispensaries, O’Keefe said.
“It just does not make sense that you tell people, your only legal option is to plant a seed and wait four to five months” for it to grow the plant, said O’Keefe, in Grosse Pointe Woods last week to visit her parents.
Law-enforcement leaders have lobbied to block bills in Lansing that would’ve allowed and regulated dispensaries. This fall’s lame-duck session of the state Legislature could change that, said State Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge.
“Right now, we have a package of bills that would do that, and in a way that would be acceptable to police, acceptable to the cities and townships, and acceptable I think to most of the patients,” said Jones, a former sheriff of Eaton County and chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.
“The only people who oppose this are the ones who are profiting greatly” by hiding criminal enterprises behind the cover of Michigan’s medical marijuana law, he said. In the meantime, police must keep the pressure on those who’ve turned dispensaries into dens of illegal drug dealing, he said.
At the Ferndale City Council meeting late last month, another speaker who opposed accepting the county’s grant was former Ferndale mayor Craig Covey, a strong supporter of fully legalized marijuana. Covey is running in November against Bouchard for Oakland County Sheriff.
“So the money that’s coming back to Ferndale (as a grant to police) is coming from people with glaucoma, people with pain conditions, people who are legal patients using medical marijuana, and it’s being used to shut down compassion clubs and dispensaries,” Covey told the city council.
Standing nearby, Ferndale police Chief Timothy Collins already was counting on having an extra $5,000 in his budget.
“This is simply a vehicle for the city to be reimbursed for some of our overtime. Royal Oak accepted it two weeks ago,” Collins told the city council.
After a short debate, the council voted 3-1 to rescind its previous vote. The grant had been rejected. “Thank you, Ferndale!” shouted Young, as she and others applauded. But moments earlier, the audience heard Councilman Dan Martin’s dire assessment of the vote: “I understand that this is a symbolic stance — the county’s going to do what it’s going to do.”
Bill Laitner , Detroit Free Press 10:39 p.m. EDT August 6, 2016
We know where marijuana law and access in Michigan is going in the short term. Two recent legal developments have laid it out.
The first development is that there will be no vote on legalizing recreational use of marijuana on this year’s ballot. It’s been lingering on life support as MI Legalize went through various legal challenges and appeals in the state courts to get the signatures on their petitions counted. But it died when the state Supreme Court refused the case. There is still a federal challenge to the state decision, but even if there were a win down the road on that front, it wouldn’t happen in time for a vote this year. A federal judge denied a motion to stop the printing of ballots for this year’s election.
Not that MI Legalize has given up the effort. The organization is pursuing a federal appeal. At the same time the group is reorganizing — with lessons learned — for an attempt to get on the ballot for 2018, a gubernatorial election year. Presidential elections bring out more voters, which is what MI Legalize was hoping for, but apparently they don’t want to wait four years before calling the question again. If public opinion trends keep moving in the direction they have been, it’s a question of when, not if, marijuana will be legalized.
The second development has a more immediate impact for the 212,928 medical marijuana patients registered in the state. Gov. Rick Snyder signed Public Acts 281-283 last week, setting up the system for medical marijuana sales in the state, and possibly giving us a preview of what a recreational sales system will look like down the line. The Michigan Medical Marihuana Act (MMMA) did not specifically account for marijuana dispensaries for distribution, and some counties enforced the catch-22 of “patients may have marijuana, but there’s no place to buy it.” Now there can be dispensaries, and it is up to local municipalities whether they want to allow them or not.
PA 281, the Medical Marihuana Facilities Licensing Act, regulates the growth, processing, transport, sales, and taxation of medical marijuana. The law creates three levels for growing licenses: up to 500 plants; up to 1,000 plants; and up to 1,500 plants.
PA 282 changes the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act to allow for extracts, oils, and infused products. That was another testy point, because the MMMA specifically referred to the “dried leaves and flowers” of the marihuana plant, but not extracts made from them. State law enforcement was never comfortable with high potency substances made from marijuana extracts.
A seed-to-sale tracking system for medical marijuana — known as the Marihuana Tracking Act, or PA 283 — was tacked on later in the process with backing from business interests and law enforcement.
The laws take effect immediately, although in practical terms the only one that matters is PA 282, for patients who need oils and extracts. The practicalities of how the licensing is administered will be up to a new state-appointed board.
Getting the laws in place is an important point in a long and ongoing process. Whether they are good or not depends on who you talk to.
“When we first started approaching public officials and legislators, most of them didn’t even want to talk to us about medical marijuana,” says Robin Schneider of the National Patients Rights Association. “Many didn’t believe there was medicinal benefit at all. We spent years debating with law enforcement about regulations, the need for transporting security, and seed-to-sale tracking. The two opposite sides had to meet in the middle.”
That was spoken like a veteran of political negotiating. Schneider has spent six years working in Lansing trying to get something like these laws passed and sees them as a good thing. She’s seen the opposition up close and personal, and believes this is a major victory, particularly for patients who need extracts and oils.
The regulations do reflect something of a law enforcement approach when you look at the seed-to-sale tracking and secure transport provisions. This generates questions as to how the governor-appointed Marihuana Advisory Council will approach its duties. Will it take an oppositional or nurturing attitude to a new industry in the state?
“The bills were driven, written, and approved by the law enforcement community, which will not have the same interests in the success of the program as the dispensary people,” says attorney Michael Komorn, president of the Michigan Medical Marijuana Association. “This is a police oversight program that has nothing to do with the medical marijuana act. It’s a license that is supervised by the law enforcement team akin to the liquor control system.”
At the very least, the new laws add layers of bureaucracy to the distribution of medical marijuana, which was expected. It also regulates where some of the money in a lucrative new industry will go. Dr. Gary Wolfram, a Hillsdale College economist, has given a conservative estimate that the state will collect $63 million annually in fees and taxes, while generating about 10,000 jobs.
The money involved helps draw in those reluctant to engage with marijuana. With tight budgets and reluctance to raise taxes, this is an opportunity for state resources. It also draws in others who want to get a piece of that financial action. Will there be a level playing field for anyone to join in? Or will it be stacked toward those who are — for lack of a better reference — friends of the governor?
“I’m still skeptical of this legislature and their plans,” says Jamie Lowell of the Third Coast Compassion Club in Ypsilanti, the first licensed dispensary in Michigan. “How will the state actually treat this process? I’m a little paranoid. I’ve seen enough shenanigans and tomfoolery to have legitimate questions.”
Lowell is active with the MI Legalize group and is feeling the sting of the state legislature’s action to block the legalization petitions, such as a law passed last spring that kept all the signatures collected from being counted.
Not everybody is holding hands and singing the praises of these laws. But they are adding some definition to contested provisions of the MMMA that have led to legal problems and even imprisonment for some. At least the question of whether dispensaries are legal in Michigan is settled. They are.
“I think it’s a good thing anytime you get a little more regulation and a little more transparency,” says Julius Dubose, founder of Dubs Apothecary, a self-described mobile facility that has had its wares at medical marijuana events in Detroit. Dubose wants to open a storefront facility soon. The new laws make that possibility much more clear.
“I’m open to any municipality that will allow it,” Dubose says.
Michigan’s new medical marijuana laws may not be the most enlightened, but they do provide more clarity for those who want to operate dispensaries and produce extracts. And for most, just knowing what the rules are will make a difference.
DETROIT, Mich. — A judge on Wednesday heard arguments in a federal class action lawsuit filed by medical marijuana patients and caregivers against several Michigan law enforcement and crime lab officials.
The suit, filed in June, claims that because of false lab reports, prosecutors are charging people with felonies without proof, illegally arresting them and seizing assets. Four patients and caregivers are suing the directors of the Michigan State Police, their crime labs and the publicly-operated Oakland County lab and that county’s sheriff.
Chief Judge Denise Page Hood of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in Detroit said she will issue an opinion and decide whether the labs’ marijuana reporting policies violate the Fourth Amendment and due process rights of the medical marijuana patients and caregivers.
“The problem is, the way that the Oakland County lab and the Michigan State Forensic Science Division is reporting still would allow for arrests, still would allow for these patients and caregivers to not have immunity because they’re reporting it as something other than marijuana,” said Michael Komorn, the plaintiffs’ attorney. “And the law enforcement community, as far as we know, is still arresting people for possessing these substances.”
In court Wednesday, Defense Attorney Rock Wood with the Michigan Attorney General’s office representing the state police and crime labs’ directors, along with Defense Attorney Nicole Tabin representing the Oakland County lab’s director and sheriff, declined requests for comment. Wood argued this is not a case involving altered, hidden or destroyed evidence. Instead, the defense writes in their motion to dismiss the case:
“The MSP policy is consistent with the current national standard for testing of seized drugs and avoids speculation as to the source of chemical components unless there is zero qualitative uncertainty.”
Ultimately, the labs’ policy states that unless there is marijuana plant matter seen along with THC, scientists label it “Schedule 1 THC, origin unknown,” instead of marijuana. This is the difference between a felony, or a marijuana possession misdemeanor which patients and caregivers can be immune for under the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys and their experts say that 100 percent certainty for any evidence, even DNA is not possible.
“You know that nobody’s going to go through the trouble of synthesizing THC, along with other cannabinoids,” said Timothy Daniels, another attorney representing the plaintiffs. “And therefore you know to almost a 100 percent, and I won’t say 100 percent, let’s say 99 percent certainty, that is marijuana, not synthetic.”
Overall, the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act protects licensed patients and caregivers from charges and prosecution for having limited amounts of usable marijuana, not THC with an unknown origin. It’s this lab policy the suit is working to stop.
“It’s a little troubling that the defense is still suggesting their reporting practices are honorable,” said Komorn.
Statewide, as crime labs continue to report THC and marijuana in ways that many call controversial, the decision now rests in the judge’s hands. It’s a decision that could potentially reopen hundreds of cases across Michigan.
Meanwhile, recently passed legislation now legalizes medical marijuana patients and caregivers use of marijuana extracts like oils and edibles. The defense argued the lawsuit is moot in part due to this, however the plaintiffs’ attorneys stand firm that people continue to be unlawfully arrested, charged, and prosecuted for possession of extracts due to the labs’ reporting policy.
Last night’s episode of VICELAND’s Weediquette focused on how police forces in Michigan are using civil asset forfeiture to target legally run medicinal marijuana businesses in the state.
Weediquette host Krishna Andavolu – about his reflections after filming the episode; an edited and condensed version of his comments are below.
In Michigan, medical marijuana is legal—but last year, arrest rates were on the rise. Why? It seems like marijuana legalization is meant to at least take the drug out of the realm of the criminal justice system, but while doing research for this season of Weediquette, we found out that there’s still a strong incentive for police officers to go after legal marijuana growers in Michigan. The doctrine that the incentive is based off of is called civil asset forfeiture—which means that if a cop busts you, he or she can take your stuff in addition to throwing you in jail and charging you.
Even though medical marijuana growers have cards that say that they’re legally allowed to grow, civil asset forfeiture incentivizes police departments in Michigan to pursue really small technical violations
—For instance, if there’s a lock on a door that isn’t secure enough, or a key to a room in your grow house or dispensary is left on a counter when it should’ve been in a safe space. So law enforcement targets medical marijuana growers, finds enough evidence to justify a raid, takes all the growers’ stuff, and then makes an excuse for it after the fact.
It’s tough for Michigan cops. The state’s economy is pretty bad, and a lot of their police departments aren’t funded particularly well—so the police are using the doctrine of civil asset forfeiture to target mom-and-pop businesses. One of those businesses was run by the Shattucks, a family we visited who decided to go into the medical marijuana business because they saw people using it and thought it would be a good business to try for a couple of years to raise some capital to go into real estate. They were after the American dream, small business ownership.
However, the St. Clair County drug task force got wind of what they were doing, raided their grow facility, dispensary, and home, and took more than $80,000 worth of their goods. Losing the money and goods was bad enough—but their kids were also at home when the SWAT team came through the door, so their nine-year-old daughter is the one who saw the door broken down and men with guns rushing in.
You could look at the Shattucks and say, “I’m sure they were doing something wrong.” But a SWAT team seems like a disproportionate reaction. It’s an issue of how you implement medical marijuana legalization, but also of what we ask for in our community policing. What’s the relationship between those who are being policed and the police themselves? How do you balance making sure that the marketplace is legitimate while also respecting the people who are already operating legitimately in the marketplace? The Shattucks did everything they could to show the cops that they were doing the right thing—they met with the police department and showed the cops all their paperwork—but that didn’t stop the police from going after them two months later.
Another family we talked to, the Fishers, were in a hearing about a similar criminal case against them, and under cross-examination, the police officer who conducted the raid was asked if he questioned the family about whether they had medical marijuana cards—and he said no. There aren’t lawmakers who are trying to crack down on this stuff, so in a lot of cases drug task forces have no legislative oversight, meaning it’s up to individual cases in court to set any sort of precedent.
On Weediquette, we cover a lot of different stories—stories about medicine and recreational drug use—and this story is about how pot has always made it easy for law enforcement to go after vulnerable communities. We’re on a trajectory where medical marijuana and marijuana in general is going to become legal—it feels inevitable and that the war on drugs will also inevitable fade away—but stories like this bring to light that there’s a lot to still fight for.
