According to Dan Carlin in his most recent podcast, this is likely part of a scam. Drug dealers will send a package to a wrong address, and the delivery person will leave the package on the door step. Another person will then pick up the package. This way, it's harder to trace the sender and the receiver. Carlin seems to think that the mayor may have been a victim of this scam, and may have been OK had the authorities not gotten involved.
What fascinates me most about this case is the fact that the cops just busted in, when the only thing the mayor did was to pick up the package and take it inside. I didn't know that was a crime. You would expect that the cops would have been better served to see what he did with the package in a day or a week or something, not one minute. What else do you do with a package that's sitting on your porch, leave it. If it appears to be something that is sent to me in error, I would still bring the package inside. Not every package I've received has been something I was expecting, so that shouldn't seem like something out of the ordinary. That's what made the unabomber so successful, was people accepted packages that they probably weren't expecting and then opened them. Even if the mayor was guilty, how do you prove that by the fact that he brought the package inside, unless the package is bugged and they have him on tape saying "My pot finally arrived, I better go smoke some."
The other issue with this whole thing is the whole police state nature of this. From what I've heard, the county did not inform the city about the "raid". Dan Carlin asked a pretty good question. What if the people in the house had called the city cops? The county cops were not in uniform, so you can imagine the potential for a deadly shoot-out in this kind of situation, especially when it involves the mayor. That's a great point.
This whole story points to some of the problems that exist when it comes to the drug war. One of the excuses for the drug war is that it is to protect the American way of life. I just don't understand how we're protecting the American way of life by violating rights and allowing police-state tactics to be used on citizens. Events like the one in Maryland are unconscionable, even if the guy is guilty, because it puts innocents in danger and it assumes too much on too little verifiable evidence. I'm sure there are some lawyers out there who can find legal justification for the raid, but where's the moral justification? What if the mayor had been shot and killed trying to protect his family from masked intruders? What if another family member, a child perhaps, had been shot. I think it's fortunate that only the dogs were shot, not that I consider that a good thing. The county could only muster a weak apology. They should be bending over backwards and re-evaluating their policies after an incident like that. They need the mother of all Kaizen events. They've arrested two suspects so far. I'm sure they'll get blame for the incident and the police will just shake off their mistake.
Ultimately this just points to the problems with the drug policy in this country. It's not that I think people should be taking drugs, but the methods being employed to protect the people seem to leave far more collateral damage then the drugs themselves. The Cato institute has written about the drug war and done some writing on legalizing drugs. We may see an increase in use, but we will also be able to actually handle the problem better. The drugs can be regulated ad prices can drop. They can be taxed to bring in revenue, ideally for rehab. Milton Friedman even had some interesting things to say on the subject as well:
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