Tag: the war on (some) drugs

Innocent Mom Hospitalized After Being ‘Legally’ Raped by Cops Looking for Non-Existent Drugs

Rape in the United States is defined by the Department of Justice as “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” At the end of the following story about what happened to Erica Reynolds, you will have zero doubt that she was raped. However, because her rapists wear a badge and claim to protect society, no one will be going to jail and the rapists claim everything they did was legal.

Erica’s nightmare started the day after Christmas in 2018 when police suspected her of having a substance deemed illegal by the state. Because the state claims the immoral authority to kidnap, cage — and, in Erica’s case, rape — people in search of these substances, this innocent mother was kidnapped and brought down to the Phoenix police department.

As police searched for the arbitrary substance, Erica was stripped naked, forced into a concrete room — and raped.

She recalled, in horrifying detail, to the Arizona Republic, about how the rape unfolded. Erica was in the room with a male officer and a female officer. When she noticed the female officer begin to put on rubber gloves, Erica went into panic mode and began begging the officers not to do what they were about to do. They did not listen, even when she demanded they stop.

“I said, ‘You can’t do this to me,’” she says. “He said, ‘We can. And we will.’”

Without putting any lubrication on the glove, Erica was forced to bend over as the female cop rammed her dry fingers into Erica’s anus. Having given birth just a few months earlier, Erica was suffering from hemorrhoids which were prodded and torn during the search for non-existent drugs. Erica screamed out in agony, but the callous state-sanctioned rapists couldn’t have cared less.

After anally raping the innocent mother, the female cop — without changing gloves — proceeded to vaginally rape Erica. After finding nothing again, Erica was sent on her way. She went home vomiting and was in so much pain that she had to go to the hospital to be treated. Her injuries were so bad that hospital staff called police to report a sexual assault.

Clearly understanding that what she just experienced was an act of rape, Erica filed a complaint. But no one would even listen to her, much less be held accountable because, as mentioned above, it’s not called rape when cops are searching for substances deemed illegal by the state — it’s called policy, even when they violate it.

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From Mass Incarceration to Plan Colombia: Biden’s Role in the Failed War on Drugs

In an increasingly angry and bad faith campaign, Donald Trump and his team are presenting Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as an anti-police radical controlled by the far left. Last week, the Trump campaign sent a text message to supporters warning them that Antifa would raid their homes if Biden wins in November. “They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door,” warned Florida congressman Matt Gaetz.

The reality, however, is that the 77-year-old former vice president has a long history of opposing progressive legislation and spearheading increasingly more draconian police, immigration, and criminal justice measures. Biden first shot to prominence in the 1970s, when, as a freshman senator, he became a leading voice against bussing, the practice of desegregating schools via public transport (something his now-running mate Kamala Harris grilled him on during the debates). He also maintained a close relationship with arch segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond, who left the Democratic party and became a Republican due to his vehement opposition to the Civil Rights Act. He even read the eulogy at Thurmond’s funeral, around the time of which it came out that Thurmond had fathered a child with a 15-16-year-old black servant girl working for him.

“Hang People for Jaywalking”

But Biden’s problematic history with race goes much further; the Delawarian has been one of the chief architects of the racist prison system we live under today. For decades, he pushed for more cops, more jails, more arrests, and more convictions, even criticizing the notorious Ronald Reagan for not locking enough people up.

Throughout the 1980s, he and Thurmond worked on a number of bills that radically reshaped the criminal justice system, including the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act which limited parole and cut sentence reductions for good behavior. Biden continued to attack Republican George H.W. Bush from the right on crime, in 1989, condemning his draconian proposals as not going far enough. “In a nutshell, the President’s plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time,” he said, later demanding to know why Bush hadn’t executed more drug dealers like he wanted.

Despite Bush pushing through substantial increases to the prison industrial system, Biden continually demanded more, publishing his own plans that included billions more in funding for increased numbers of police, FBI, and DEA agents.

This all culminated in what in 2007 he called his “greatest accomplishment” in politics: the controversial 1994 Crime Bill. Often labeled the “Biden Crime Bill” because of its author and chief promoter, the bill laid the basis for an ever-increasing prison population, introducing the death penalty for dozens of new offenses and spent billions on hundreds of thousands of extra police and prison cells. Just as Bill Clinton was making a point of returning to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally handicapped black man, Biden was staking out his position as a new leader of the new, “tough on crime” Democrats, boasting that his bill meant that “we do everything but hang people for jaywalking.” As his biographer Branko Marcetic wrote, Biden makes Hillary Clinton look like [civil rights advocate] Michelle Alexander.

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Democrats Scuttle Marijuana Decriminalization Vote Over Fears of Not Being Deferential Enough to Cop Lobbyists

A planned House vote on a bill to decriminalize the possession of marijuana was canceled on Thursday under pressure from law enforcement lobbyists and other pro-prohibition special interests.

The expected floor vote on the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act would have been the biggest accomplishment yet for cannabis reformers, but the effort has been postponed until after Election Day, Politico reports. Democrats have gotten weak-kneed about a bill that they once saw as a major criminal justice reform.

Indeed, it would have been. The MORE Act, sponsored by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.), would remove cannabis from the schedules of the Controlled Substances Act and make that change retroactive, effectively expunging any federal marijuana offenses and convictions. The bill also orders federal courts to lift all sentences for people currently locked up due to a marijuana conviction.

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explained when the bill was introduced last year, the MORE Act was in many ways superior to other marijuana legislation, because it “completely deschedules marijuana rather than moving it to a lower schedule or making exceptions to the ban for state-legal conduct, and it seeks to lift the burdens that prohibition has imposed on people caught growing, distributing, or possessing cannabis, a vital project that too often has been treated as an afterthought.”

This year, the bill had collected more than 100 co-sponsorships in the House—it even had support from three Republicans—and appeared on track to pass the lower chamber. Even though the bill was expected to die in the Senate, that House vote would have been historic.

Unfortunately, cop lobbyists seem to have convinced House Democratic leaders that it would also be a liability. A coalition of law enforcement special interests and other proponents of the drug war sent a letter to congressional leaders last week warning about the potential dangers associated with legalizing and “commercializing” marijuana.

That, combined with vague fears about how Republicans might weaponize the legalization vote for negative ads in swing districts, was apparently enough to convince Democrats to scuttle the vote.

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