Jacob Sullum on Baby-Burning Drug Warriors
When Alecia Phonesavanh heard her 19-month-old son, Bounkham, screaming, she thought he was simply frightened by the armed men who had burst into the house in the middle of the night. Then she saw the charred remains of the portable playpen where the toddler had been sleeping, and she knew something horrible had happened. Bounkham "Bou Bou" Phonesavanh, who is in a medically induced coma at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, may never wake up, says Jacob Sullum, but the appalling injuries he suffered during a police raid in Habersham County, Georgia, last week should awaken the country to the moral obscenity that is the war on drugs.