Newshoggers.com

Celebrating 35 years of epic failure

By Libby

I'm a couple of days late in wishing the DEA an unhappy anniversary. Brainchild of Richard Nixon, the agency was created 35 years ago when Tricky Dick declared an open war on drugs. "At its outset, the DEA had 1,470 Special Agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Furthermore, in 1974, the DEA had 43 foreign offices in 31 countries. Today, the DEA has 5,235 Special Agents, a budget of more than $2.3 billion and 86 foreign offices in 62 countries."

What has the agency accomplished in these three and a half decades? Not much besides laying the groundwork for our budding present day police state, where it's considered patriotic in certain influential circles to support the abridgement of civil liberties in the name of false safety.

Meanwhile, a NYT editorial didn't mark this sad anniversary but did note the failure of the war on some drugs this week and correctly stated, "Over all, drug abuse must be seen more as a public health concern and not primarily a law enforcement problem. Until demand is curbed at home, there is no chance of winning the war on drugs." I would amend that to say drug abuse myself.

Today, a LAT op-ed goes them one better and looks at the costs of this failed 'war.'

The United States has been spending $69 billion a year worldwide for the last 40 years, for a total of $2.5 trillion, on drug prohibition -- with little to show for it. Is anyone actually benefiting from this war? Six groups come to mind.

These would be the drug lords, street gangs and terrorist groups, all of whom benefit from the tax-free profits of the black market created under prohibition. On the law enforcement side, the beneficiaries are politicians who talk tough on drugs to get elected, but legislate dumb in terms of solving addiction and abuse problems, the professional prohibitionists like those in the DEA and assorted private groups like Drug Free America and corporations that sell urine tests for example and last, but certainly not least, the prison-industrial complex which benefits greatly from the largest prison system in the entire world. Few lobbyist groups are as powerful as the prison guard union. The LAT op-ed gets it exactly right.

Ending drug prohibition, taxing and regulating drugs and spending tax dollars to treat addiction and dependency are the approaches that many of the world's industrialized countries are taking. Those approaches are ones that work.

Approaches the US is unwilling to embrace as long as there is so much profit to made in 'fighting drugs.' The beneficiaries of bad policy have no incentive to 'win' this 'war.' Until non-consuming citizens understand that these failed policies are doing much more harm than the use of illegal drugs themselves and call for an end to prohibition and its associated negative social costs, we will continue to waste tax dollars that could could be much better spent on badly needed social and civic programs that would better civil society instead of slowly destroying it. [h/t to TalkLeft and Media Awareness Project]

A VAT for Opium

By Fester:

The Value Added Tax (VAT) is a common tax structure where the tax is levied against each stage of production on the basis of the value added by that stage.  For example, let us assume that an oil refinery bought a barrel of heavy sour crude for $110 and after they finished refining the barrel into its gases, gasoline, diesel and heavy fuel oils, they were able to sell that barrel for $150.  In this hypothetical example, the refinery added $40 of value to the barrel of oil and a VAT would be charged against this $40.  The VAT is a very common tax throughout the world. 

It is so common, it looks like the Taliban in Afghanistan is charging what is effectively a VAT tax on opium production.  The BBC reports that the Taliban tax the raw materials and receive a decent sum of money from the farmers:

The Taleban made an estimated $100m (£50m) in 2007 from Afghan farmers growing poppy for the opium trade, the United Nations says.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said the money was raised by a 10% tax on farmers in Taleban-controlled areas.

As Dr. Taylor at Poliblogger notes, the Taliban is taxing and collecting fees at other points in the value chain, especially at the higher end of the chain.  The Taliban provides security in exchange for signficant pay-offs.  He makes a worrying observation:

The “FARCization” of the Taliban continues…

FARC is a Columbian guerrilla group that has been fighting the Columbian government for almost two generations now.  It is being funded primarily by its connections to the cocaine trade and resource smuggling.  And it is a sustainable model as long as there exists a massive black market for a desirable product which means the suppliers of that product must turn to non-state groups for support and security.  FARC has a similiar quasi-VAT structure on coco and cocaine production. 

It provides a predictable, multi-level revenue stream.  Predictable revenue allows for longer term planning and the provision of credible promises of support.  The Taliban and the Pashtun groups already have strong loyalty claims on some members of its population but the ability to make credible long term promises should expand and strengthen loyalty claims.  That is not good.....

Congress funds police corruption program

By Libby

Bill Piper of Drug Policy Alliance brings the bad news. Congress has once again funded one of the worst programs in the war on some drugs.

Congress has rubber stamped (yet again) the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, a federal law enforcement grant program that is feeding the war on drugs and fueling racial disparities, police corruption, and civil rights abuses. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee voted unanimously today to renew the controversial but politically popular program. The Senate has already voted to renew the program.

The Bryne Grants should rightly be called a corruption slush fund for prohibitionists. Some of the worse law enforcement corruption scandals have arisen out of projects directly funded by this program, the most famous being the Tulia scandal where 16% of the black people in one small Texas community were jailed for drug violations based solely on the bogus testimony of a single informant. They were finally released four years after the fact, when the informant's deceit was finally proven and the wrongly accused received a small settlement.

Piper doesn't give the monetary amount of the new funding but program throws away hundreds of millions annually and the grants are freely distributed with little to no oversight. Further, there is no statistical evidence that they have been effective in reducing the amount of drugs on the street and much evidence that the task forces have contributed greatly to the overcrowding of our jail with non-violent offenders who are mostly people of color.

The money would be far more effectively spent if they abolished this program and for instance funded drug counselors for public schools instead.

4GW in America's Backyard

By BJ

While the dual insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan are what most of us focus on when discussing fourth generation warfare, it isn’t there that the US faces its most dire threat. As John Robb states:

The only existential threat the US faces in the near term, is from global guerrillas in Mexico and not the Middle East. A breakdown there could result in massive population movements, refugee centers, and the spread of guerrilla warfare into US border states.

The LA Times put out a long and interesting article examining just how dire the situation is in Mexico. Though the place names and causes of conflict are different, the article reads very similar to those of the paradoxically far more familiar battlefields half the world away.

Helmeted army troops steer Humvees past strip malls in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, some of the 40,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal police officers President Felipe Calderon has deployed to secure large swaths of the country against entrenched drug traffickers.

. . .

Criminals unleash machine guns and grenades in urban battles that the State Department describes as "equivalent to military small-unit combat."

In the year and a half since Calderon launched a crackdown against drug gangs, about 4,100 people have died, the government says. At least 1,400 have been killed so far this year, including 170 in Tijuana, about 400 in Ciudad Juarez and 270 more in the western state of Sinaloa.

. . .

Political analysts say the campaign has succeeded mainly in pushing violence from one region to another, without uprooting the mafias that are challenging the power of the Mexican state. Federal troops often are introduced only after particularly violent outbreaks. They have helped bring calm to Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas state, for example, only to see the killing increase in Baja California and Chihuahua, or farther south in Guerrero state.

"It's a strategy of temporary occupation that achieves just moments of relative quiet, only to return to worsening violence," said Eduardo Valle, a writer and commentator who once worked as an advisor in the federal attorney general's office.

Even the rhetoric from the Mexican government has a familiar ring to it.

The president asserts that the level of violence is one measure of success. He says the cartels have been hurt badly, and that they are now lashing out at the government and battling one another for control of territory.

Given the likelihood that the various splinter groups formed by the decimation of the “old guard” cartel leadership will eventually slow their internal fighting as territories and influence become more defined, the danger to both the Mexican state and the US will increase dramatically.

It’s clear from some of the assassinations of top cops and officials in the Mexican government and drug raiding teams being ambushed that the power structure has been thoroughly infiltrated. Such infiltration virtually guarantees that efforts to eradicate the gangs will be more cosmetic than effective. That gives the gangs virtual free reign to operate from a safe haven, in much the same way as the Taliban does now in Pakistan. As Bill Lind puts it:

. . . operating within a hollowed-out state may benefit many 4GW entities more than replacing the state. A Potemkin state protects 4GW organizations from foreign attack; the U.S. cannot go after drug gangs within Mexico except in a surreptitious manner, because doing so would violate Mexican sovereignty.

And so one begins to see just what shape part of the threat will take. The other part comes from the US side of the border. How will the threat be treated? To treat it as a war is tempting, because in war the Executive gains great power, but as DNI’s Chet Richards points out, such an usurpation of power may not be wise.

While such powers have proven useful when the country faces the military forces of another country, they also allow the president to undertake activities that would be counterproductive if used against a guerrilla-type opponent, where the outcome depends primarily on moral elements — that is, on our ability to attract allies, maintain our own determination, and dry up the guerrillas’ bases of support.

Granted that for myself, this is almost as far geographically as the wars in the Middle East, but the same can’t be said for my co-bloggers, and the political choices made when there is such a conflict likely to spill across the border will affect everyone on the continent.

Definitely something to keep an eye on as it develops.

Incarcerex

By BJ

While Libby has noted where the real drug problem is, I'm willing to bet that the following is what we're all more likely to see as November looms ever closer. Via

America's real drug problem

By Libby

This isn't exactly news. It's long been known and remarked on within drug policy reform circles, but it's worth mentioning when the media periodically rediscover that legal drugs kill more people than illegal ones do.

MIAMI — From “Scarface” to “Miami Vice,” Florida’s drug problem has been portrayed as the story of a single narcotic: cocaine. But for Floridians, prescription drugs are increasingly a far more lethal habit.

An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined. [...]

The report’s findings track with similar studies by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which has found that roughly seven million Americans are abusing prescription drugs. If accurate, that would be an increase of 80 percent in six years and more than the total abusing cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, Ecstasy and inhalants.

There's two major points we can take from this. One is that the urge to alter our perceptions and our mood is strong in humans and people will take mind altering substances to do so. They've been doing it from the beginning of time and no threat of penalty will stop them.

The second point is that deaths attributable to the abuse of legal pharmaceutical drugs are three times greater than illegal ones, but you don't hear any huge calls to ban those drugs. Instead our professional prohibition profiteers use the same failed approach as they do in the war on illegal drugs. They go after those least culpable. In this case, the doctors who prescribe them and the pain patients who legitimately need them . See Richard Paey and Radley's voluminous chronicles of persecuted doctors.

As an aside, it's useful to note that at 4,179 incidences, "alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug" found in bodies of the dead, although listed as the sole cause of death in only 466, but marijuana remains the only so-called dangerous drug which has not been attributed as a cause of a single fatality in 5,000 years. Yet in 2007 there were 44,640 Americans imprisoned at the state and federal level solely for offenses related to this natural herb. There's no count on the numbers held in local and county jails.

America's real drug problem is its addiction to prohibition. It hasn't worked in the last 40 and more years and it won't ever work. For a fraction of the billions we spend on failed policies that rely on eradication, interdiction and incarceration, we could invest in treatment facilities that would actually solve the problems of addiction and abuse, which are the only real dangers of drug use and allow responsible substance consumers to live in peace and productivity. [h/t Tits McGee]

World's biggest hashish bust

By Libby

I don't know if that is true, but this is a lot of hashish.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan counternarcotics officials said Wednesday that they uncovered 260 tons of hashish hidden in 6-foot-deep trenches in southern Afghanistan in what one DEA official said appears to be the world's biggest drug bust.

The hashish, found in the southern province of Kandahar on Monday, was worth more than $400 million and would have netted about $14 million in profits, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said.

It's being touted as a huge victory in the war on some drugs and a deadly blow against the terrorists. I seriously doubt that. Yes, it's an impressive bust, and it sounds like a lot of cash but at that level of dealing, it's an easily absorbable loss. The real money is in heroin.

This may dent the local Afghani hash market for a while but it's unlikely it seriously disrupted the drug trade in Afghanistan. In fact, I have to say I find the storage scheme odd. It feels like a setup to me. The government gets a glamourous bust of the least profitable product to prove it's seriously fighting the drug problem and drug lords get to keep the opium trade running. In reality, the government can't afford to shut down the heroin industry. It's the only thing keeping the country's economy alive.

Still, I'm glad to see that at least they busted at a high level instead of harassing the dirt poor farmers at the bottom of the chain.

Cannabis capitalism - part two

By Libby

Some will probably use the NYT's latest piece on medical marijuana that details community complaints about the current businesses in operation in California as proof that a legalized cannabis industry won't work. However the complaints are mainly about the encroachment of grow houses in residential neighborhoods and people who have abused the current somewhat amorphous language to create commericial operations that go beyond the intent of the law. And a lot of people don't like the smell of the plants, although if you ever smelled a livestock farm for instance, it's far less offensive and in any event technology exists to mitigate odors.

These small problems don't so much illustrate a failure in legalizing marijuana, as they underline the danger of taking half measures. The laws are unclear and since the current legislation leaves the cannabis industry with only a quasi-legal status these problems are to be expected as people test the limits. In a fully legal environment, these problems could be easily solved with standardized regulations and zoning restrictions.

The bottom line is medical marijuana is a wanted and needed commodity with huge potential to generate much needed revenue. If we also legalized recreational use, the potential growth of the industry is almost limitless. The current problems are simply a result of the failure to fully commit to this plant as a legitimate agricultural crop. [Part one is here]

Cannabis capitalism

By Libby

The professional prohibitionists and other naysayers have successfully avoided the scientific evidence and discounted the medical efficiacy of marijuana, but there is no way to deny the revenue generating capacity of the cannabis industry.

JANE WELLS of CNBC keeps a blog called Funny Business, but her recent reports on California’s medical marijuana industry are about a business that is increasingly being taken seriously. They amount to a short primer on how the business works and how the operators of the state’s estimated 500 dispensaries deal with the high risks and high costs of working in a legal gray area.

Medical marijuana is legal in California, but federal law still bans sales. Amid the uncertainty that this creates — including the occasional raid by federal agents — a full-fledged industry has blossomed, taking in about $2 billion a year and generating $100 million in state sales taxes, CNBC reported.

That's a lot of pot. Medical marijuana has been legal in California for many years now. Those numbers suggest a whole lot of people are smoking it regularly and nothing bad has happened. No mass psychosis. No marijuana fueled mayhem. No huge drain on the medical system from massive influxes of marijuana addicts. In fact, it's far more likely that taxpayers paid less collective costs because subsidized, terminally ill medical marijuana patients were able to obtain pallative relief with an relatively inexpensive, natural herb as opposed to prohibitively expensive pharmaceutical poisons.

Add that to the postive revenue flow created by the current Cali entrepreneurs, and I don't think those numbers even include the ancillary businesses. Multiply that by 50 states and I can't think of a better argument for national legalization. Perhaps the current economic meltdown might finally accomplish what 40 years of activism couldn't, that being bringing some common sense to cannabis policy.

A legal cannabis industry could create millions of jobs in every field from the farms to the cafes and as a added benefit, the industrial hemp industry could be reestablished at the same time, as should have been done lone ago. Hemp is one of the most environmentally friendly crops to grow and has hundreds of uses already. I'd be willing to bet if they allowed the research to be conducted, a far superior biofuel than ethanol could be made from it.

Cannabis capitalism. Think about it. It could not only save our economy, it could save the planet.

Conflicting Wheat-Opium Trade-offs

By Fester:

In early April, I was riffing on the idea that the high prices of scarce wheat in comparison to the stagnant prices for abundant opium offered a plausible economic wedge issue for counter-insurgent exploitation in Afghanistan:

The incentive for profit seeking Afghan farmers is to change their production profile from the black market poppy to white-market wheat.  Some of this is due to the price increase in wheat due to shortages, and part of this is the global heroin glut as production has boomed over the past couple of years.  Since a wheat farmer (all else being equal) does not need to fear eradication efforts, the need for Taliban protection decreases massively, as well as Taliban smuggling profits (who wants a black market loaf of bread....). 

The increased white market cash flows to farmers are coming out of local urban markets which may be a bit of a problem as Afghani cities are not that productive and do not produce large surpluses to pay for rural goods. So while rural landowners and steadholders will benefit, the relative prices of living in the cities have gotten a whole lot higher to provide this rural benefit. I do not know enough about Afghan city population composition to intelligently speculate how the Pashtun/non-Pashtun splits are in the cities, BUT on the economics, providing bread subidies as part of a counter-insurgency effort to urban populations could probably mitigate most of the impact of higher local and global wheat prices while tying people closer to the government.

Kip at Abu Muqawana disagrees with this analysis as they outline their take on the food crisis and how it impacts Afghanistan and counter-insurgency efforts:

The global food crisis is perhaps the least reported big event of the year. It stands to kill far more people than the cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China. First it will kill through starvation, and then through the conflict over resources that it spawns. At a conference of experts that Kip observed on Afghanistan several weeks ago, all agreed that rising food prices were the single thing capable of throwing the country into utter and perhaps unrecoverable chaos. The same might be true of nuclear-armed Pakistan as well, not to mention several dozen other weak or failing states....

In Afghanistan, rising [food] prices may result in further entrenching the opium economy as the sure way to provide the cash needed to import grains. This would be bad news for the counterinsurgency effort, which needs to weed the populace and the government off of the proceeds of opium if we are to have a shot at winning....

I agree with Kip that high costs of food and food scarcity is a massive threat of legitimacy of governments in weak and poor states.  However I am grappling with the implied economic dynamics within the Afghanistan example.  One of the big comparative advantages the United States has in a counterinsurgency effort is that we print our own hard currency (albiet a weakened one) and can pass out big blocks of fresh fifty and one hundred dollar bills.  The Taliban and Pashtun insurgent/guerilla bands can not do that.  They actually need to participate in a market to gain cash.  Why not pass out food stamps or cash bread subsidies?   

The murderous war on drugs

By Ron Beasley

Two years ago Anthony Gregory presented examples of people killed or dying as a result of the war on drugs.

Speak out too loudly against the drug war, and you might be targeted. Peter McWilliams had AIDS and cancer and was dependent on marijuana to stay alive. It turns out that the people who had been using the stuff medicinally for thousands of years were onto something. No one has ever been recorded as dying from the physiological effects of marijuana. But the federal government wouldn’t let McWilliams, a vocal anti-prohibition activist, have his medicine. They threatened to take his mother’s house away if he used the substance that was keeping him alive. He was found dead in his home in June 2000. The drug war killed him directly.

And now Steve Kubby is in jail, being deprived of the medical marijuana that has kept him alive. About a quarter-century ago, he was diagnosed with an exceedingly rare strain of adrenal cancer that no one else has been able to survive for more than five years. He was expected to die within the same timeframe. His physician, Dr. Vincent DeQuattro, an expert on this rare condition, has credited marijuana with saving his life. Several years ago, Kubby was forcefully deprived of his medicine for three days in jail, during which he suffered extreme vomiting and shivering and went temporarily blind in one eye. In U.S. custody again, after having taken refuge in Canada and being extradited back to the Land of the Free, he now has a good chance of dying, of being murdered by the state, all so it can make an example of this courageous anti-drug war activist.

For Kubby, as was the case for McWilliams, prohibition of life-saving medicine could prove a cruel and unusual execution, all for the non-crime of self-medication, the right to which all humans are born with. Apparently, he has been allowed to use some Marinol, but the synthetic THC simply isn’t a replacement for the complex mixture of cannabinoids in marijuana. Smoking about twelve grams of pot a day has worked for him, allowing him to live a healthy life; the government’s approved version does not quite do the trick, though it might barely be keeping death away. It is very uncertain at this point what will come of his health and legal situation.

The drug war is misdirected. It is foolish. It is stupid, unworkable, disastrous, tragic and sad. But beyond all that it is evil.

Today Paul Armenanto wonders if Senator Ted Kennedy will be one of the next victims of the war on drugs.

In the fourteen years I’ve worked in marijuana law reform, few events have struck me as so needlessly tragic as the federal government’s consistent and deliberate stifling of medical cannabis research. Nowhere is the Feds’ refusal to allow this science more overt and inhumane than as it pertains to the investigation of cannabinoids as anti-cancer agents, particularly in the treatment of gliomas.

As noted in today’s wire stories regarding Senator Edward Kennedy’s diagnosis, glioma is an aggressive form of cancer that affects an estimated 10,000 Americans annually. Standard treatments for the cancer include radiation and chemotherapy, though neither procedure has proven particularly effective – with the disease killing approximately half its victims within one year and all within three years.

But what if there was an alternative treatment for gliomas that could selectively target the cancer while leaving healthy cells in tact? And what if federal bureaucrats were aware of this treatment, but deliberately withheld this information from the public?

Armenanto explains that these are not a hypothetical questions and in fact he had written on the subject in 2004.

In fact, the first experiment documenting pot’s anti-tumor effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the behest of the U.S. government. The results of that study, reported in an Aug. 18, 1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana’s psychoactive component, THC, “slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent.”

Despite these favorable preliminary findings, U.S. government officials banished the study, and refused to fund any follow-up research until conducting a similar – though secret – clinical trial in the mid-1990s. That study, conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program to the tune of $2 million concluded that mice and rats administered high doses of THC over long periods had greater protection against malignant tumors than untreated controls.

However, rather than publicize their findings, government researchers shelved the results, which only became public after a draft copy of its findings were leaked in 1997 to a medical journal which in turn forwarded the story to the national media.

In the years since the completion of the National Toxicology trial, the U.S. government has yet to fund a single additional study examining the drug’s potential anti-cancer properties. Is this a case of federal bureaucrats putting politics over the health and safety of patients? You be the judge.

So why is the federal government so concerned about marijuana?  It's really pretty simple - Big Pharma can't make a lot of money. They can't get a patent on it so there is not billions of dollars to be made.  If it actually works it would seriously impact Big Pharma's bottom line.  This is how your government looks after your health.

Markets coincide with boogeymen

By Fester:

Poliblogger is looking at FARC, the leftist insurgency/cog of multiple drug cartels, while also looking at a stupid question from someone who is either naive or trying to score some cheap political points.  The good doctor outlines some brief history and explains that markets work --- when groups have money and seek reasonably common and available goods, they tend to get those goods:

Here’s the deal: the FARC became an active guerrilla group in Colombia in the 1960s. Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela in 1998. As such, the FARC were able to get guns for over three decades before Tirofijo³ and friends had ever heard of Hugo.

The sad fact of the matter is, the FARC can easily obtain weapons these days via the profits they make over their involvement in the drug trade, as well as via kidnapping. While it would not surprise me to find that they have found aid from Venezuelan quarters in their weapon-gathering activities, it is also the case that Hugo Chávez could be beamed into space tomorrow and the FARC would still be able to get their weapons.

There is a global arms market and it services consumers who are not always nice or honest or friendly to the United States.  And it is global and pervasive with one significant constraint.  Its customers better have cash.  And given that the international drug trade is predominately a cash and carry business, FARC does not face that constraint. 

And this is common.  I believe that the same type of relationship networks exist between many of the Shi'ite militias and elements of the Iranian government but even if the Iranian government was replaced wholesale with US bureaucrats tomorrow morning, the Shi'ite militias (JAM, Badr et al) would still be heavily armed and have reasonably flexible and resilient arms acquisition networks as there is too much money to be made selling them weapons. 

Markets exist and they flow to where the money is and sometimes that is next to the daily boogeyman. 

SWAT team folly of the week

By Libby

Here's the latest in my ongoing series of botched drug raids.

Police and federal agents raided 50 marijuana grow houses around Florida on Thursday, calling it "Operation D-Day." They seized $7 million worth of pot plants, but they also kicked in the door of Noel Llorente's Opa-locka home and found nothing but bewildered homeowners.

The irony here couldn't be more bitter.

The Llorentes said they don't speak much English – they're immigrants from Cuba. They said one of the reasons they came to the U.S. was to escape oppression from the Cuban police.Isabel Llorente said she never thought this could happen here."Never, because they criticize Cuba so much," she said.

Welcome to the police state of America Mr. and Mrs. Llorente.

"What added salt to this injury was after the situation – house is searched, door is broken – they just walked away," the Llorentes' lawyer said. "Like, 'We're the government. We made a mistake.'" The homeowner said he received only a minimal apology from police and federal agents. "When I asked them about the door, they said, 'Sorry," Noel Llorente said. "When I asked them about my reputation, they said, 'Sorry.'"

As usual, Radley adds an important bit of context.

It's worth noting that while police say these tactics are necessary because drug distributors tend to be violent and armed to the teeth, this operation apparently turned up just eight guns from 150 homes.

This is your government on drugs folks. The valuations of the seized plants are no doubt vastly overstated and in comparison to the costs of the raid, hardly justifiable, but that's not the point of these raids anyway. They're not really after the plants. They don't give a flying leap about getting pot off the streets. It's all about the forfeiture. They'll make millions in seized property which they get to keep on mere suspicion that anything of value was obtained via drug profits, even if any of those grows were only for personal use and the growers never made a cent.

They get to take everything without having to prove the crime. Abolishing the forfeiture laws, or even amending them so the LEOs didn't directly benefit from the forfeiture, would go a long way towards ending these overblown para-military police actions.