This Is Your Country on Drugs Drug-War Raids

A nation is outraged, and rightly so, that a 19-month-old
toddler was grenaded
into a coma during a 3 a.m. no-knock police raid to execute an
informant-triggered drug warrant over a $50 methamphetamine
transaction. (Read all of Reason’s coverage of the incident
here.)

And yet this was no isolated incident, as former Reason
staffer (and all-time leader in writing the headline “another
isolated incident“) made plain on
Tuesday’s episode of
The Independents:

On
Monday’s edition of the program, one principal from
another raid-gone-wrong story
familiar to Reason readers came on to describe the bizarre
behavior of prosecutors and law enforcement down in Alpine,
Texas:

To borrow a phrase from Brezhnev,
this is really existing prohibitionism, not some pointless
side argument about how
gobbling too many edibles makes you go fetal (it does,
at least if your name rhymes with Fat Belch), or whether the
president should or shouldn’t
pal around with Jay-Z.

I am heartened to near-giddiness that a majority of Americans
are coming around to the recognition that such a status quo is
indefensible, but I will always find it hard to forgive those who
created and defended the prohibitionist regime, and also
those—including, in living memory, at least some self-described
libertarians—who attempted to wave away critics of the drug war as
debauched libertines motivated primarily by self-interest. I could
give a shit about ever smoking pot again in my lifetime; I just
want the goddamned flash-grenades to stop.