Agitating for your rights

This piece by Radley Balko at Fox News on how the war on some drugs is destroying our Bill of Rights has been well covered by Scott and Pete but it deserves wide distribution and besides I'm feeling kind of charitable towards Fox today.

Swallow your cynicism JackL, I received another email from the editor of Tonguetied. I made the first cut and miraculously am still in the running for a blogger spot there. We're to "audition" this week but don't start holding your breath yet folks. I seriously doubt I'll be invited in, nonetheless I like that I'm at least still under consideration. I'll keep you posted if anything develops.

Anyway, back to Radley, who makes some excellent points on how criminal justice has devolved into a two-tiered system where the rights of drug offenders (and that includes alcohol) have been abridged well beyond what would be considered constitutionally sufficient for other crimes. He notes,

Courts have carved out a "drug war exemption" in the Bill of Rights for multiple search and seizure scenarios, privacy, wiretapping, opening your mail, highway profiling, and posse comitatus -- the forbidden use of the U.S. military for domestic policing.

He counts the ways "substance-abuse hysteria" has provided an environment for the courts to allow these infringing practices and nothing escapes his notice.

The drug war has been eating at the Bill of Rights since its inception. Asset forfeiture laws, for example, allow law enforcement to seize the assets of suspected drug dealers before they're ever convicted of a crime. Even if the defendant is acquitted or the charges are dropped, the mere presence of an illicit substance in a car or home can mean the loss of the property, on the bizarre, novel legal principle that property can be guilty of a crime.

He's not optimistic about solving the problem, but nails the solution.

It would take a rare and brave politician to stand up and say that we need to roll back or reconsider our drug laws, or that it's unfair to give accused murderers or rapists more rights than we give DWI defendants. But that's exactly what needs to happen.

Indeed. So all we need to do is get more drug policy reformers to run for office.