Tag: the war on (some) drugs

Innocent 74yo Grandmother Strip Searched in Public After Cops Claimed to Smell Weed

A stop for an alleged traffic violation turned into a nightmare for a 74-year-old grandmother when the police officer conducting the stop claimed to have smelled a plant. Because the police state claims the authority to violate innocent grandmothers over plant smells, the officers involved will face no punishment and now the taxpayers will be held liable instead.

Phyllis Tucker, 74, is now suing the city of Jamestown and Fentress County, claiming the city police and county sheriff departments have illegal policies involving the use of strip searches, according to News Channel 5.

Tucker tells reporters that the incident which unfolded earlier this year has left her and her family traumatized, and rightfully so. According to the lawsuit, Tucker was forced to pull down her pants and remove her bra in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant as bystanders watched.

“If it wasn’t for my mother, I would never go back to Jamestown, never, and I wouldn’t advise anybody else to go through there either,” Tucker said.

Tucker was visiting her mother that night. She had her grandson, his girlfriend, and an infant in her car when a cop pulled them over and claimed to smell weed on her grandson’s girlfriend, Kira Smith, 19.

Instead of simply letting this family go, who had harmed absolutely no one, the cop escalated the situation to what amounts to a public roadside sexual assault — all to search for a plant.

According to the lawsuit, officers from the Jamestown police and the Fentress County Sheriff’s Department strip searched the two women in public view. According to the suit, Smith was ordered to “pull her pants down to her knees” and Tucker was told to remove “her blouse and bra” “exposing her breasts to the public.”

“I just started crying and was humiliated. I didn’t know if there was somebody who was going on the street that was seeing me with my top off,” Tucker said.

The lawsuit states the forcing both men and women to strip on the side of the road is a common practice by law enforcement in Frentress County.

“It is the custom of Frentress County to conduct these type of strip searches,” said attorney Wesley Clark who represents Tucker and Smith.

News Channel 5 reports that Clark also represents two other women who say there were pulled over in Fentress County in July, “stripped completely nude and searched” including being told to “squat” and “cough” while flashlights inspected their “genital areas,” according to the lawsuit.

In that case officers found no drugs and the women left with a ticket for an “improper tag.”

“To argue that it’s appropriate to strip women naked on the side of a public highway in search of marijuana is completely insane,” Clark said.

We agree. Nevertheless, it continues to happen all across the country in spite of marijuana being legal in some form in over half the states.

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The Feds Who Made America’s Fentanyl Freakout Worse

Police officers in Texas were told some terrifying news on June 26, 2018: Anti-government flyers poisoned with a deadly opioid had been placed on Harris County Sheriff’s Office squad cars, and a sergeant who had touched one was en route to the hospital with overdose symptoms. The incident set off a flurry of media coverage, and it frightened police halfway across the country. The Maine Information Analysis Center forwarded Harris County’s bulletin to local departments, while the Commonwealth Fusion Center wrote its own safety alert for Massachusetts officers.

But it wasn’t true. Three days later, a laboratory analysis found that there was no fentanyl on the flyers. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office blamed the panic on a problem with field test kits.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid hundreds of times more powerful than morphine, is responsible for about half of overdose deaths in the United States. Among law enforcement, it has taken on mythical properties. First responders around the country have claimed to have nearly died from accidental exposure, based on the scientifically inaccurate idea that a deadly amount of fentanyl can pass through human skin or even poison the air around it.

That myth has spread through a surprising avenue: America’s counterterrorism agencies.

Leaked police documents reviewed by Reason show that fusion centers—local liaison offices set up by the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of 9/11—have circulated fentanyl myths, causing police officers to panic and wasting first responders’ time.

The documents were first released as part of BlueLeaks, a massive trove of law enforcement data leaked by the hacker collective Anonymous. Out of 121 fentanyl-related bulletins in the BlueLeaks trove reviewed by Reason, at least 36 claimed that fentanyl could be absorbed through the skin and at least 41 discussed the alleged danger of airborne fentanyl.

FBI officials even claimed that fentanyl is “very likely a viable option” for a chemical terrorist attack in a September 2018 bulletin, although they also admitted that there is “no known credible threat reporting” suggesting that anyone was actually planning such an attack.

The more the myths spread, the more officers in the field panicked, convinced that they had fallen victim to an accidental fentanyl overdose.

Fentanyl is a genuinely dangerous drug. A state trooper in Salem County, New Jersey, fainted and had to be revived with naloxone in September 2018 during a drug bust, according to a bulletin by the New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center. The officer had touched their face with fentanyl-contaminated hands—likely bringing the drug into contact with the mouth or eyes—and later tested positive for opioid exposure.

But overdosing “from transdermal and airborne exposure to Illicitly Manufactured Fentanyl (IMF) is a near scientific impossibility,” according to the Harm Reduction Coalition.

In other words, fentanyl can’t jump through air or the skin to suddenly kill you.

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