DEA Bans Dispensary Security and Armored Cars From Picking up Cash

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! Had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
-- Frederick Douglass

Whenever you think the DEA can sink no lower… dwr

Step 1: Force Pot Clubs To USe Cash.
Step 2. Bar Them From Hiring Guards.
Step 3: Finger-Wag About Drug Violence

… the Drug Enforcement Administration has ordered security and armored vehicle companies to quit serving state-legal cannabis providers, according to industry sources.

The DEA, an arm of Holder’s Department of Justice, confirmed the order to The Huffington Post, but wouldn’t elaborate.

Armored vehicles allow California’s legal medical marijuana dispensaries a secure way to transport large amounts of cash. The services are critical, since federal authorities pressured banks and credit card companies to stop servicing the pot industry in 2011.

The DEA is helping to generate crime by this decision.
Something is really, really wrong here.

“DEA anti-marijuana order might provoke new wave of drug violence”

Michele M. Leonhart (Lying Heart) DEAthead

DEA Bans Armored Cars From Picking up Pot Shop Cash
Aug 23 2013
Medical marijuana is legal in California, but the combination of valuable drugs and what is often a cash-only business can attract some rough characters.

Sunil Kumar Aggarwal has accused the DEA and the Government of trying to corner the market on marijuana for GW. He says “If people understood that this decision to allow only ‘the few’ to legitimately produce cannabis rather than ‘the many’ was being made on their behalf, perhaps they would be compelled to stand up for a right that is essential for all: to farm and cultivate members of the Plant Kingdom in your locality.”

If people are good only because they fear punishment,
and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
--Albert Einstein



SWAT horror stories

Dianne Goldstein weighs in:

Albanian village grows cannabis, takes the drug war seriously:

Tony Newman: Let's get honest about our drug use

Shocking Examples of Police Killing Innocent People in the "War on Drugs"
Aug 22 2013
Many innocent victims have become collateral damage in our pointless, destructive drug war.

To Stay Out of Jail, Must Nonviolent Offenders
Submit to Medical Diagnoses?
the Atlantic by Jeff Deeney:

More progressives lying to support Obama’s drug war dwr

Toxic science dwr

It appears that science is toxic to NIDA.

NIDA's Nutty Nora's Tax Paid Gossip ecp

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their choice,
if the laws are so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they
cannot be understood; if they... undergo such incessant changes that no man
who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow
-- James Madison, Federalist Number 62.

The silence is deafening
I was pleased to hear Attorney General Holder make his announcement about reducing sentencing for low-level drug crimes, not because I thought what he planned to do would have much practical effect (still depending on prosecutors to use judgement), but rather because it appeared that the announcement might end up being non-controversial.

So many politicians still labor under the old notion that anything but “tough on drugs” is a third-rail position. What was important here was not Holder’s comment, but the lack of political “gotcha” reaction to it.

As Steve Chapman notes in Drug Warriors in Retreat

So when Holder gave a speech announcing that the Justice Department would minimize the use of stiff mandatory sentences in some drug cases, it was reasonable to expect a storm of protests from Republicans accusing him of flooding our streets with crack dealers and meth heads.

Instead, the response bordered on the soporific. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, reported Politico, gently suggested that the administration “work with Congress on policies it wants to implement instead of consistently going around it.” Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who has previously called for criminal prosecution of Holder, echoed Cruz’s view, while admitting that “reducing mandatory minimums may be good policy.”

Instead of tepid criticism, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky offered outright praise, calling the change “a welcome development.” Hardly anyone in the GOP cared to defend the merciless approach. At least when it comes to low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, both parties have lost their appetite for locking the cell and tossing the key.

I think there may have been some border sheriff who raised a stink about Holder’s announcement, but otherwise, silence.

Nobody in the media or politics (to the extent that they differ) was going to criticize this move. (Even prohibitionists supported it, since they’ve been forced by us to tack toward the kinder, gentler prohibition.) And believe me, that fact will be noticed by the lily-livered politicians who have good intentions, but are afraid to be seen as soft on crime.

Holder’s statement is not an indication that the Obama administration wants to actually do something important about our serious incarceration problem (after all, Obama could easily commute sentences of prisoners who had received ridiculously long sentences, yet he has chosen to be very stingy in that area). It is, however, additional proof of a change in political climate that could very well embolden Congress or future Presidents.

Weed Beat the Recession in Denver vs 60,000 Dead Mexicans
40 Years of Drug War Failure Represented in a Single Chart
Paul Wellstone on Colombia



That so-called Third Way

Strong article in the Atlantic by Jeff Deeney: To Stay Out of Jail, Must Nonviolent Offenders Submit to Medical Diagnoses?

The following passage, I think, really points out the problem that we’ve been railing about with the so-called “third way” that’s been heavily promoted by ONDCP and S.A.M.

Cover-Ups, Prevarications, Subversions & Sabotage

More Overreaching Arguments Against Marijuana Legalization
by DEA Chiefs and the UN

Go to Hell Dung Worrier Sabet,
You'll be among lots of friends.