Jacob Sullum on Baby-Burning Drug Warriors

When Alecia
Phonesavanh heard her 19-month-old son, Bounkham, screaming, she
thought he was simply frightened by the armed men who had
burst into the house in the middle of the night. Then she saw the
charred remains of the portable playpen where the toddler had been
sleeping, and she knew something horrible had
happened. Bounkham “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh, who is in a
medically induced coma at Grady Memorial Hospital in
Atlanta, may never wake up, says Jacob Sullum,
but the appalling injuries he suffered during
a police raid in Habersham
County, Georgia, last week should awaken the country to the moral
obscenity that is the war on drugs.

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