Glenn Nielsen Weblog

Patricia Durr-Pojar has a gash beneath her right eye, with stitches and a bandage over it.

Her son, Curtis Pojar, has bruises on his back and a contusion under his left eye. Durr-Pojar spent Thursday and Friday nights in a local emergency room — first, to have the cut under her eye treated, for a CT scan of her head and X-rays on her knees. The next night she went back to get a knee splint and crutches.

"I've had lots of knee surgery, and they slammed me down so hard on my knees," she said.

"They" are members of COMET — the Combined Ozark Multi-Jurisdictional Enforcement Team — who broke into her home Thursday night to execute a search warrant for a reported meth lab.

They found none after breaking windows, doors and screens and knocking Durr-Pojar and Pojar to the floor and handcuffing both of them.

Read the Article from the News Leader.

This is an example of how local police forces have become militarized and use excessive force while performing a no-knock-raid.

I recently ran across the great work Radley Balko of the CATO Institute had done documenting the abuse of military tactics by local SWAT teams.

The War On Drugs has been a dismal failure:

• The war on drugs has done little to reduce drug usage.
• It along with the War On Terror have been the excuses used to further infringe on our civil liberties.
• The harm to society from crime due to the black market in drugs causes more damage than the tragedy of individuals who abuse drugs.
• It leads to corruption of some police.
• We have the highest percentage of our citizens in prison of any western nation.
• Law abiding citizens have been harmed and sometimes killed during these SWAT raids.
• Laws for fighting the drug war allow police to seize property without due process of law.

This insane war on drugs must be stopped and those who end up causing harm to society from their abuse of drugs treated humanely with drug treatment while making restitution for any harm they may have caused.