Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
I knew my morning ritual of looking through the headlines for something to make fun of, or over-analyze, or riff on or whatever it is I do here, would be extra fun today as the Democratic National Convention just wrapped up and I could already foresee a cavalcade of headlines with the word “historic” in them competing for my attention. My eyes were starting to glaze over at the pettiness of coverage, who wore what, said what and what it means, etc. when something else glazed caught my eye.
Obviously since most of my readers know me personally, my position on the war on drugs is pretty well known by now. It is, however, nice when reality proves me right in new and unique ways. Not all that surprisingly, this new twist on the drug war’s absurdity came from that wellspring of absurdity, Florida.
Daniel Rushing, 65, told the Orlando Sentinel that on December 11, 2015 had dropped a friend off at their chemotherapy appointment and was going to a nearby 7-Eleven store to pick up an elderly friend from his church. Earlier that day, he’d eaten a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut while behind the wheel. Unbeknownst to him, Orlando’s finest were staking out the 7-Eleven store because of neighbors complaining of drug activity there. When Rushing was clocked speeding away from the store, the police swooped in and stopped him. They noticed he had a concealed carry permit and secured his firearm for safety. And then, the highly-trained law-enforcement professionals got down to some serious police work.
“(I found) in plain view, a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were… I recognized, through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer, the substance to be some sort of narcotic,” arresting officer Shelby Riggs-Hopkins wrote in her report, which has been obtained by news outlets, thankfully because it’s hilarious.
Doing her job, Riggs-Hopkins then performed two field tests on the rock like substance and both times the tests indicated positive for a controlled substance.
Rushing attempted to explain what the substance they were testing actually was, but was ignored as Riggs-Hopkins debated with another highly trained law enforcement official whether the substance was crack cocaine or methamphetamine and concluded it had to be the latter.
Rushing was then arrested, strip searched and held for ten hours in jail before bonding out for $2,500. Charges were dropped a month later when the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s crime lab determined the “meth” wasn’t, although a spokesperson quoted by the local Fox affiliate said the lab didn’t determine whether the substance was just sugar glaze as they only test for narcotic content. That same spokesperson was said the state has no record keeping mechanism for false positives that come up in field tests of narcotics.
“It’s a terrible feeling to go to jail when you have not done anything,” Rushing said.
The layers of sad hilarity here are nearly endless. You’ve got an 11-year veteran cop who can’t tell doughnut glaze is on her fingers? I mean, that alone is hilarious. The idea that a 65-year-old guy with a carry permit is going to be rolling around town with flakes of unsmoked crystal meth on the floorboard of his car, presumably speeding out of his mind and armed with a handgun, is a bit funny. Maybe if he was stopped just outside of Barstow, on the edge of the desert…
At least he didn’t get shot, so that’s a win. That he was arrested and subjected to the humiliation of being strip searched and locked up for 10 hours would be wrong even if it turned out he had meth on him; that he was soundly hassled for having crumbs in his car is unconscionable. If he had meth, who was he hurting? No one, save himself.
It is not now nor has it ever been the government’s job to protect people from themselves. Sadly, our modern society assumes that the opposite is in fact true. And, the last several decades have given Americans reason to think this. Every new thing that comes to the market ends up with a new government bureaucracy to regulate it, to “protect” us. We figured out how to make parts of the electromagnetic spectrum carry words and pictures; and soon enough the FCC was there to make sure those words and pictures weren’t naughty. We figured out how to make carriages without horses and soon enough several federal departments were telling manufacturers how to make them safer and more efficient; in some cases safer and/or more efficient than the consumers even wanted. Someone figured out how to make nicotine “vapor” without actual tobacco, and the government reclassified them all as tobacco products anyway. Again, to “protect” us.
When are we going to finally admit that all this “protection” does nothing other than cost us taxpayers a ton of money each year to pay for the various bureaucracies that afford us this “protection” while at the same time stifling innovation and commerce? And that’s in realms outside the drug war; the cost of that bit of “protection,” in both lives and treasure is truly staggering.
For 40 years now, all the war on drugs has accomplished is a steady erosion of public trust in law enforcement, the increased wholesale corruption of law enforcement, the militarization of law enforcement, an inner-city homicide rate that remains high despite falling violent crime in general, the world’s highest per-capita incarceration rate and about a trillion dollars or so of taxpayer money flushed down the drain. Given all that misery, that an 11-year veteran of the force would put a pensioner in jail for possession of crumbs just seems par-for-the-course.
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