I’m going to present a number of excerpts from the following article. You should read the whole thing. Federal judge: Drinking tea, shopping at a gardening store is probable cause for a SWAT raid on your home
This is a description of the SWAT raid.
In April 2012, a Kansas SWAT team raided the home of Robert and Addie Harte, their 7-year-old daughter and their 13-year-old son. The couple, both former CIA analysts, awoke to pounding at the door. When Robert Harte answered, SWAT agents flooded the home. He was told to lie on the floor. When Addie Harte came out to see what was going on, she saw her husband on his stomach as SWAT cop stood over him with a gun. The family was then held at gunpoint for more than two hours while the police searched their home. Though they claimed to be looking for evidence of a major marijuana growing operation, they later stated that they knew within about 20 minutes that they wouldn’t find any such operation. So they switched to search for evidence of “personal use.” They found no evidence of any criminal activity.
What did they find evidence of?
More than half a year later, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department began investigating the Hartes as part of “Operation Constant Gardener,” basically a PR stunt in which the agency conducts multiple pot raids on April 20, or “4/20.” On several occasions, the Sheriff’s Department sent deputies out to sort through the family’s garbage. (The police don’t need a warrant to sift through your trash.) The deputies repeatedly found “saturated plant material” that they thought could possibly be marijuana. On two occasions, a drug testing field kit inexplicably indicated the presence of THC, the active drug in marijuana. It was on the basis of those tests and Harte’s patronage of a gardening store that the police obtained the warrant for the SWAT raid.
The search for more “evidence” was triggered by the father and son visiting a hydroponics store. The son was doing a school project.
So how good is this field testing for drugs?
Lab tests would later reveal that the “saturated plant material” was actually loose-leaf tea, which Addie Harte drinks on a regular basis. Why did the field tests come up positive for pot? As I wrote back in February, it’s almost as if these tests come up positive whenever the police need them to. A partial list of substances that the tests have mistaken for illegal drugs would include sage, chocolate chip cookies, motor oil, spearmint, soap, tortilla dough, deodorant, billiard’s chalk, patchouli, flour, eucalyptus, breath mints, Jolly Ranchers and vitamins.
The test for cocaine is even better than planting drugs on a suspect, at least for probable cause.
As a lab-coated and rubber glove wearing researcher from the South Carolina Center for Biotechnology dumped a sample of oregano into a field test kit, Mintwood Media’s Adam Eidinger produced a positive test result for cocaine with another kit simply by exposing it to the atmosphere. “This is just air,” Eidinger said, opening up a test and waving it as the reagent turned orange, indicating a positive result.
The Drug War. It is not just a job. It is an industry.
Comments
7 responses to “Drug Tests and SWAT Raids – Coming To A Home Near You”
conservatism is evil. stop playing with snakes and they will stop biting you. conservatives have won many election by claiming their democrat opponent was to soft on drugs so the democrats who haven’t been defeated acquiesce to the war on drugs. this is why I support bernie and not hillary in the primary ;but will vote for her holding my nose similar to jews voting for hindenberg because his opponent was hitler.
Yeah! It’s those darned evil conservatives’ fault!
road kill is right for a change!
You have been had Cap. It is a link to Joe Biden.
Just heard on my local radio station, regarding New Year parties: “Please drink responsibly. Please smoke responsibly, too.”
Make of that what you will. (Note that the station I listen to is not liberal. Not much conservative either.)
The Harte’s case is reason number 8,374,225 why the drug war needs to end.
If we had competent civil servants on police forces, in DA offices, and on the bench, steps would have been taken by now to ban the use of field test kits as they are known to have so many false positives. Yet cases like the Harte’s are not uncommon and continue to occur despite the widespread knowledge that false positives are all too common.
I have to conclude that the people who run and work in our criminal justice systems don’t give a flying fuck about justice or decency or morality. They are organic robots collecting a check and once they retire, a pension. They don’t care whose lives they disturb or who they hurt. Just keep the pay benefits coming. Assholes.
I’ve seen field drug detection devices that are literally nothing more than a dowsing rod. Really, there was a telescoping antenna sticking out of an empty box that would move towards drugs.
(one thing dowsing is nearly 100% accurate at detecting is gullible idiocy)
Meanwhile, Massachusetts is freeing hundreds of prisoners because the state lab was falsifying results.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/04/us-massachusetts-forensic-lab-chemist-charged
And also, drug residue is pervasive, especially on money, and mass spectrographs, gas chromatographs and similar technologies can detect drug residue down to parts per million, maybe billion. And there is no such thing as an effective lower limit for a possession charge. They don’t even need false results, virtually anything can be found positive at high enough sensitivity. What a scam it all is.