So you say you don’t smoke pot, so how could the War on Drugs affect me?
Watch that video. It’s in Texas, but it could be anywhere in America… well, except now Washington and Colorado, because marijuana is not contraband there, and the smell of it in a car is not probable cause to search its driver and passengers.
In the video, reported by the UK Daily Mail and all over the national and international media, a trooper pulls over two women – a woman and her niece – for allegedly throwing a cigarette butt out of the car.
While talking to the women in the car over a littering charge, the trooper claims he smells marijuana. He then searches the car and finds no marijuana. He then administers a sobriety test, which the woman who was driving passed. No marijuana, no impaired driving, and the observation of a police officer that they might have littered from a car that smells like pot.
So, naturally, he calls a female trooper to the scene to search the women for any contraband marijuana they might have been hiding under their breasts, in their colons, or up their vaginas. Because sober littering driver pot smell drugs r bad, mmmkay?
No, really. The female trooper puts on a pair of latex gloves, tugs on the bras and feels up the underboob of the first lady, then reaches down the crack of her ass to insert a finger into her anus, then turns her around to reach down the front of her pants to slip two fingers into her vagina. Then the female officer repeats the process with the other lady, without changing gloves.
Why? Because marijuana is contraband. Medical marijuana doesn’t fix this. Decriminalization doesn’t fix this. Only legalization makes the possession of marijuana the possession of something that is not contraband.
When one of the ladies, in shock, expresses the outrage she feels over being sexually assaulted by people with guns for allegedly littering, the male trooper actually says, “It’s because someone’s a daily [pot] smoker in that car, you can attribute it to that.”
When they started the “Don’t Mess With Texas” anti-littering campaign, I do not think this was what they had in mind. What was the government’s interest here, protecting other drivers in case one of them whipped out a blunt from her ladyparts and lit it up while driving? That they may have been drug mules trying to smuggle… well, how much marijuana do you suppose they could have been carrying up there, anyway?
The women are, of course, suing the shit out of the state troopers involved. It also turns out that one of the ladies’ legally prescribed bottles of hydrocodone was missing, last handled by the police during the search. The women never gave consent to be searched and when questioning the searches were told, “don’t worry about that.” And the state troopers have been ignoring consistent complaints about this kind of punitive strip searching activity.
