This Is Your Country on Drugs Drug-War Raids

A nation is outraged, and rightly so, that a 19-month-old toddler was grenaded into a coma during a 3 a.m. no-knock police raid to execute an informant-triggered drug warrant over a $50 methamphetamine transaction. (Read all of Reason's coverage of the incident here.)

And yet this was no isolated incident, as former Reason staffer (and all-time leader in writing the headline "another isolated incident") made plain on Tuesday's episode of The Independents:

On Monday's edition of the program, one principal from another raid-gone-wrong story familiar to Reason readers came on to describe the bizarre behavior of prosecutors and law enforcement down in Alpine, Texas:

To borrow a phrase from Brezhnev, this is really existing prohibitionism, not some pointless side argument about how gobbling too many edibles makes you go fetal (it does, at least if your name rhymes with Fat Belch), or whether the president should or shouldn't pal around with Jay-Z.

I am heartened to near-giddiness that a majority of Americans are coming around to the recognition that such a status quo is indefensible, but I will always find it hard to forgive those who created and defended the prohibitionist regime, and also those—including, in living memory, at least some self-described libertarians—who attempted to wave away critics of the drug war as debauched libertines motivated primarily by self-interest. I could give a shit about ever smoking pot again in my lifetime; I just want the goddamned flash-grenades to stop.