Author Topic: Medical Marijuana Clinic firebombed  (Read 2442 times)

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Offline iJust

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Medical Marijuana Clinic firebombed
« on: May 11, 2010, 01:18:19 PM »
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/05/10 ... /?hpt=Sbin

Quote
(CNN) -- The Billings, Montana, City Council will take up the issue of regulating medical marijuana on Monday night in a meeting expected to be intense in the wake of the firebombings of two of the city's medical marijuana storefronts in the last two days.

The southern Montana city's dispensaries legally provide marijuana to medical patients who use it for maladies from glaucoma to nausea to lack of appetite. In the latest incidents, the phrase "Not in our town" was spray-painted on the businesses, police say.

Police Sgt. Kevin Iffland said Big Sky Patient Care was hit early Sunday morning and Montana Therapeutics was the target early Monday. Both had a rock thrown through the front door, followed by a Molotov cocktail. In both cases, Iffland said, the fire was put out swiftly and damage was not extensive.

Iffland said Billings police are working with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and that the two firebombs are being handled as felony arsons carrying sentences of up to 20 years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

The attacks on the storefronts come as the Billings City Council considers a moratorium on licensing new dispensaries while it works up a regulatory ordinance.

Sixty-two percent of Montanans voted in 2004 to allow caregivers to grow marijuana for qualified patients, but the state law said nothing about distribution. In that absence, municipalities and county governments began licensing the establishments on their own.

But, Iffland said, Billings was ill-prepared for the number of applications and has very little regulation in place. Billings, he said, is a town of about 100,000 and has had nearly 90 applications for medical marijuana storefronts -- and some residents are angry. He fully expected a heated council meeting.

Meanwhile, investigators are still reviewing evidence in the firebombings and are working with one of the businesses that has surveillance video but is reluctant to hand over the tape because of privacy concerns.

While the investigation is ongoing, police have stepped up patrols in the areas where the medical marijuana storefronts are located, Iffland said.

"Psychedelics often produce psychotic and even violent behavior in those that have never used them" -Timothy Leary
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
"Marijuana is an herb and a flower. God put it here. If He put it here and He wants it to grow, what gives the government the right to say that God is wrong?" -Willie Nelson

Offline Ursus

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Re: Medical Marijuana Clinic firebombed
« Reply #1 on: May 11, 2010, 01:31:44 PM »
Title and date of the above article:

Quote
Medical marijuana stores firebombed in Montana
By the CNN Wire Staff
May 11, 2010 -- Updated 0153 GMT (0953 HKT)


<snip snip>

© 2010 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
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Offline Anne Bonney

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Re: Medical Marijuana Clinic firebombed
« Reply #2 on: May 11, 2010, 03:01:17 PM »
I'm becoming more and more convinced that these types of people, along with the evangelicals, are determined to drive this country back to the mindset of the '50s.  In their selective memory they see it as the 'golden age' of 'Murica and they're the only true, real 'Muricans.   Non-believers and immigrants are infidels, abstinence only is the ONLY way and they LOVE the failed drug war cuz it allows them to tell others how to live and locks up lots of 'off color' people.

It's the same mentality as programs.......the end justifies the means.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
traight, St. Pete, early 80s
AA is a cult http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-cult.html

The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents-- because they have a tame child-creature in their house.  ~~  Frank Zappa

Offline M_Hilton

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Re: Medical Marijuana Clinic firebombed
« Reply #3 on: May 11, 2010, 08:35:28 PM »
the 1850's you mean >.>
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »

Offline try another castle

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Re: Medical Marijuana Clinic firebombed
« Reply #4 on: May 12, 2010, 08:02:09 PM »
Quote from: "M_Hilton"
the 1850's you mean >.>

Nah, the 1850s were just fine. The stamp tax act didn't go into effect until the 1930s.

I think it was used most often as a tea back then, mostly for its analgesic properties.


As for firebombing a pot club... what an overreaction. Perhaps there was some confusion? Although the word "cannabis" looks NOTHING like "OB/GYN". Maybe illiteracy is a new prerequisite for terrorists in this country.
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Offline RTP2003

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Re: Medical Marijuana Clinic firebombed
« Reply #5 on: May 12, 2010, 08:24:03 PM »
Quote from: "try another castle"
Nah, the 1850s were just fine. The stamp tax act didn't go into effect until the 1930s.

I think it was used most often as a tea back then, mostly for its analgesic properties.


.


In this country,it was used primarliy in a tincture form, though at a World's Fair in Chicago (I believe....), in the late 1800s, hashish candies were given away by the Turkish exhibitors.  A cannabis tea won't work too well, 'cause my friend delta-9 THC isn't water soluable, but is quite soluable in oils and fats.  It was used for a variety of medicinal purposes, including anagesics, and was often recommended as a treatment for menstrual cramps.  There are reports that smoking marijuana in this hemisphere dates back to the 1500s, when Turkish mercenaries in the pay of the Spanish crown planted it in Mexico, so that they could have access to it without writing home for a care package (UPS and FedEx were notoriously unreliable in those days).
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
RTP2003 fought in defense of the Old Republic

Offline Anne Bonney

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Re: Medical Marijuana Clinic firebombed
« Reply #6 on: May 13, 2010, 02:15:52 PM »
http://reason.com/archives/2010/05/11/a ... goes-viral

A Drug Raid Goes Viral
A violent drug raid posted to YouTube catches fire online. But the only thing unusual about the raid is that it was caught on video.

Radley Balko | May 11, 2010

Last week, a Columbia, Missouri, drug raid captured on video went viral. As of this morning, the video had garnered 950,000 views on YouTube. It has lit up message boards, blogs, and discussion groups around the Web, unleashing anger, resentment and even, regrettably, calls for violence against the police officers who conducted the raid. I've been writing about and researching these raids for about five years, including raids that claimed the lives of innocent children, grandmothers, college students, and bystanders. Innocent families have been terrorized by cops who raided on bad information, or who raided the wrong home due to some careless mistake. There's never been a reaction like this one.

But despite all the anger the raid has inspired, the only thing unusual thing here is that the raid was captured on video, and that the video was subsequently released to the press. Everything else was routine. Save for the outrage coming from Columbia residents themselves, therefore, the mass anger directed at the Columbia Police Department over the last week is misdirected. Raids just like the one captured in the video happen 100-150 times every day in America. Those angered by that video should probably look to their own communities. Odds are pretty good that your local police department is doing the same thing.

First, some background on the raid depicted in the video: On February 11, the Columbia, Missouri, police department's SWAT team served a drug warrant at the home of Jonathan Whitworth and Brittany Montgomery. Police say that eight days earlier they had received a tip from a confidential informant that Whitworth had a large supply of marijuana in his home. They say they first conducted a trash pull, and found marijuana residue in the family's garbage. During the raid, police shot and killed the family's pit bull. At least one bullet ricocheted, injuring the family's pet corgi. Whitworth, Montgomery, and their 7-year-old son were at home at the time. The incident was written up in the Columbia Daily Tribune, noted on a few blogs that cover drug policy (including a post I put up here at Reason), and then largely forgotten for several weeks.

On April 28, I received an email from Montgomery. She had seen my post at Reason and read an account of some of my reporting on SWAT teams published in Reader's Digest. She said she was reading to her son in his bedroom at the time of the raid. Her husband had just returned home from work. Police fired on their pets within seconds of entering the home.

"I've never felt so violated or more victimized in my life," Montgomery wrote. "It's absolutely the most helpless and hopeless feeling I could ever imagine. I can't sleep right ... and I am constantly paranoid. It's a horrible feeling ... to lose the safety and security I thought I was entitled to in my own home. Nobody protected us that night, my son and I were locked in the back of a police car for nearly four hours on a school night while they destroyed my home."

According to Montgomery, when the couple's neighbors inquired about the raid, they were told that the SWAT team had merely conducted a drill, and no shots were fired. When neighbors learned from the family that this was a lie, they began writing to the department and the Daily Tribune to demand answers. When the couple discovered the police had videotaped the raid, they requested a copy of the video. Montgomery said in her email that the copy they were initially given had no audio, and the incriminating (to the police) portions of the video had been removed.

On February 23, the Daily Tribune published its first story on the raid. The paper made its own request for the SWAT video, which the police department initially denied. On April 20, Jonathan Whitworth pleaded guilty to a single charge of possession of drug paraphernalia. He wasn't even charged for the minor amount of marijuana in his home (marijuana for personal use has been decriminalized in Columbia). He was issued a $300 fine. On April 27, the Daily Tribune made a formal request for the video, which it received on April 30, with full audio and with no visuals removed. The paper posted the video with an accompanying article on May 3. On May 5, I posted it here at Reason, and the video went viral.

The police department has since conceded it was unaware that there were pets or a child in the home at the time of the raid. A spokesman for the Columbia Police Department initially said police had to conduct the raid immediately before the drug supply could be moved, a statement later shown to be false when police revealed the raid was conducted more than a week after the initial tip.

According to surveys of police departments conducted by University of Eastern Kentucky criminologist Peter Kraska, we've seen about a 1,500 percent increase in SWAT deployments in this country since the early 1980s. The vast majority of that increase has been to serve search warrants on people suspected of nonviolent drug crimes. SWAT teams are inherently violent. In some ways they're an infliction of punishment before conviction. This is why they should only be used in situations where the suspect presents an immediate threat to others. In that case, SWAT teams use violence to defuse an already violent situation. When they're used to serve drug warrants for consensual crimes, however, SWAT tactics create violence where no violence was present before. Even when everything goes right in such a raid, breaking into the home of someone merely suspected of a nonviolent, consensual crime is an inappropriate use of force in a free society.

The overwhelmingly negative reaction to the video is interesting. Clearly, a very large majority of the people who have seen it are disturbed by it. But this has been going on for 30 years. We've reached the point where police have no qualms about a using heavily armed police force trained in military tactics to serve a search warrant on a suspected nonviolent marijuana offender. And we didn't get here by accident. The war on drugs has been escalating and militarizing for a generation. What's most disturbing about that video isn't the violence depicted in it, but that  such violence has become routine.

As horrifying as the video from Columbia, Missouri, is, no human beings were killed. The police got the correct address, and they found the man they were looking for. In many other cases, such raids transpire based on little more than a tip from an anonymous or confidential informant. Nor is it unusual for raids just as violent as the one depicted in the video to turn up little in the way of drugs or weapons. (Whitworth wasn't exactly an outstanding citizen—he had a prior drug and DWI conviction. But he had no history of violence, and there were no weapons in the home.) Surveys conducted by newspapers around the country after one of these raids goes bad have found that police only find weapons of any kind somewhere between 10-20 percent of the time. The percentage of raids that turn up a significant amount of drugs tends to vary, but a large percentage only result in misdemeanor charges at worst.

Shooting the family's dogs isn't unusual, either. To be fair, that's in part because some drug dealers do in fact obtain vicious dogs to guard their supply. But there are other, safer ways to deal with these dogs than shooting them. In the Columbia case, a bullet fired at one dog ricocheted and struck another dog. The bullet could just as easily have struck a person. In the case of Tarika Wilson, a Lima, Ohio, SWAT officer mistook the sounds of a colleague shooting a drug dealer's dogs for hostile gunfire. He then opened fire into a bedroom, killing a 23-year-old mother and shooting the hand off of the one-year-old child in her arms.

The Columbia raid wasn't even a "no-knock" raid. The police clearly announced themselves before entering. The Supreme Court has ruled that police must knock and announce themselves before entering a home to serve a search warrant. If they want to enter without knocking, they have to show specific evidence that the suspect could be dangerous or is likely to dispose of contraband if police abide by the knock-and-announce rule. As is evident in the Columbia video, from the perspective of the people inside the home that requirement is largely ceremonial. If you were in a backroom of that house, or asleep, it isn't at all difficult to see how you'd have no idea if the armed men in your home were police officers. The first sounds you heard would have been gunfire.

But because this was a knock-and-announce raid, the police didn't need to show that Whitworth had a violent background or may have had guns in the home to use the violent tactics in the video. They didn't need to show that Whitworth posed any sort of threat at all, other than the fact he was suspected of dealing marijuana. Though SWAT teams are frequently defended as necessary tools reserved for the most dangerous of drug offenders, the reality is that in many communities, all search warrants are served with forced entry and paramilitary tactics.

The militarization of America's police departments has taken place over a generation, due to a number of bad policy decisions from politicians and government officials, ranging from federal grants for drug fighting to a Pentagon giveaway program that makes military equipment available to local police departments for free or at steep discounts. Mostly, though, it's due to the ill-considered "war" imagery our politicians continue to invoke when they refer to drug prohibition. Repeat the mantra that we're at war with illicit drugs often enough, and the cops on the front lines of that war will naturally begin to think of themselves as soldiers. And that's particularly true when you outfit them in war equipment, weaponry, and armor. This is dangerous, because the objectives of cops and soldiers are very different. One is charged with annihilating a foreign enemy. The other is charged with keeping the peace.

Page: 1 2  > Continued at link above.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
traight, St. Pete, early 80s
AA is a cult http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-cult.html

The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents-- because they have a tame child-creature in their house.  ~~  Frank Zappa

Offline Anne Bonney

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Police Chief's response - "I hate the internet"
« Reply #7 on: May 13, 2010, 02:17:19 PM »
http://www.theagitator.com/2010/05/12/c ... gitator%29



Columbia, Missouri Police Chief Ken Burton is apparently frustrated. At another press conference yesterday, a reporter asked the chief what he has learned from the international attention generated by the YouTube video of his department’s SWAT team conducting a drug raid last February.

His reply: “I hate the Internet.”

I’ll bet he does. For two-and-a-half months, Burton and his department were quiet about the raid. That’s likely because, as I wrote yesterday, the raid was really no different from the tens of thousands of similar raids conducted every year, and that are probably conducted by his own department a couple of times per week. Within days of the video hitting the web, Burton was forced to hold several press conferences, and has now laid out several reforms to the way SWAT raids will be conducted in Columbia in the future. I suppose it’s possible those reforms were brewing all along, and the timing of him announcing them after the video went viral was mere coincidence. It seems at least plausible, though, that the dread “Internet” sparked some actual policy changes, here.

Unfortunately the changes—while small steps in the right direction—still miss the point. Burton says his department will no longer conduct SWAT raids at night. They won’t conduct raids in homes where children are present. Suspects will be under constant surveillance until the raid is carried out. And raids will be conducted within a shorter period of time from when police get the initial tip about a suspected drug dealer. But the Columbia Police Department will still conduct volatile, violent, highly aggressive forced-entry raids on people suspected of consensual, nonviolent drug crimes. That is what’s wrong with the YouTube video. Changing the time of day of the raid doesn’t change the wildly disproportionate use of force.

Burton and his department have also criticized web commentary on the video, citing both death threats aimed at members of the SWAT team and an abundance of what Burton calls “misinformation” about the raid.

He’s right. I saw both. In particular, the description that accompanied the YouTube video (which today topped 1 million views) described the pit bull the police killed as crated when it was shot. It wasn’t. (I should disclose that I passed on this bit of incorrect information to several people while discussing the raid before discovering it was incorrect, though I didn’t put it in print). And death threats, even from keyboard commandos posting on Internet discussion boards, are inexcusable.

That said, Burton is deflecting. When the video first went viral, his department’s spokesperson acknowledged that the police didn’t know a seven-year-old boy was in the home, but explained that the department has to carry out drug raids quickly before dealers can move their supply. That was, as Burton would put it, “misinformation.” You might even call it a lie. At the very least, it was another example of a police spokesperson reflexively defending the department before knowing all the facts. Eight days passed between the time the police were tipped off to the alleged marijuana stash and the time they conducted the raid.

As I reported yesterday, according to Brittany Montgomery, the mother and wife in the home at the time of the raid, the police initially gave the family a copy of the video in which the audio and portions of incriminating video had been removed. That sounds like “misinformation,” too. Montgomery also wrote that when her neighbors inquired with the department about the raid, they were initially told it was a drill, and that no shots were fired. That too was “misinformation.” (The department didn’t return my call, so I haven’t been able to get their response to these two allegations.)

“Misinformation” coming from police department officials acting in their official capacity is a hell of a lot more troubling than misinformation disseminated on Internet discussion boards and in blog comment threads.

As for the death threats, yes, they’re an unfortunately ugly part of often-anonymous Internet discourse. But Burton’s men were just captured on video firing off seven rounds into a home just seconds after they’d broken into it. This, despite the fact that there was nothing in the home that posed a lethal threat to them. (Yes, some pit bulls can be dangerous, but not to an armed SWAT team bedecked in full body armor.) One of those rounds missed its intended target (the pit bull) and struck an unintended target (the Corgi). According to Montgomery, there are now bullet holes in the walls of the house. There were other people in that house who weren’t suspects, people the cops weren’t aware of before they started firing their guns, including a child. That seems like a pretty reckless disregard for human life.

But Burton would have us believe that the real outrage here is the faux “if they try to come to my house and do that, I’ll kill them” Internet bravado that came in response to the video, not the very real violence actually depicted in it.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
traight, St. Pete, early 80s
AA is a cult http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-cult.html

The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents-- because they have a tame child-creature in their house.  ~~  Frank Zappa

Offline Eliscu2

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Re: Medical Marijuana Clinic firebombed
« Reply #8 on: May 14, 2010, 10:19:50 PM »
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
WELCOME TO HELL!

Offline iJust

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Re: Medical Marijuana Clinic firebombed
« Reply #9 on: December 30, 2010, 08:47:21 PM »
Quote from: "RTP2003"
Quote from: "try another castle"
Nah, the 1850s were just fine. The stamp tax act didn't go into effect until the 1930s.

I think it was used most often as a tea back then, mostly for its analgesic properties.


.


In this country,it was used primarliy in a tincture form, though at a World's Fair in Chicago (I believe....), in the late 1800s, hashish candies were given away by the Turkish exhibitors.  A cannabis tea won't work too well, 'cause my friend delta-9 THC isn't water soluable, but is quite soluable in oils and fats.  It was used for a variety of medicinal purposes, including anagesics, and was often recommended as a treatment for menstrual cramps.  There are reports that smoking marijuana in this hemisphere dates back to the 1500s, when Turkish mercenaries in the pay of the Spanish crown planted it in Mexico, so that they could have access to it without writing home for a care package (UPS and FedEx were notoriously unreliable in those days).
Pot can be put into butter.  Butter can be mixed into milk.  Milk can be mixed into tea.  Voila.  Tastes good too.

We need a pot recepie forum on Fornits.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
"Marijuana is an herb and a flower. God put it here. If He put it here and He wants it to grow, what gives the government the right to say that God is wrong?" -Willie Nelson