The Times-Picayune in New Orleans featured a story on September 29th, 2008, about rogue cops planting evidence on innocent people and making a bust. Most of the cops are later busted on unrelated charges, ranging from identity theft, to drugs, to unlawful use of state property or possession of stolen property.
I'm really not going to get into it.
What I am going to say is that this particular mess highlights the difficulties of prohibition model, criminal law enforcement style for a public health issue. The truth is that any cop, at any time, can successfully plant drugs. There generally is no civilian or objective oversight when searches take place. With one bit of sleight of hand, those responsible for carrying out the law perpetrate it's breaking, and innocents suffer.
When botched raids aren't killing innocent people, they're still setting innocents up for a fall.
This is another example of how prohibition fails, in every aspect, to serve the public welfare. In the very least, we need oversight for these raids, but quite honestly, giving up the law enforcement approach for domestic intervention on drug use issues is probably the end result of any approach that wants to be successful.
