Ethics

Locked Up for Breath Mints

By Ed Brayton

Here is another perfect example of how the war on drugs destroys lives without anything remotely resembling due process. A man in Florida was pulled over for having expired tags on his license plate. He was chewing a breath mint when the officer came to the car and the officer thought it might be crack cocaine. His field test allegedly showed a positive result, so the man was arrested, taken to jail and held in jail for three months pending results of a more definitive test.

Need I say that what he was chewing actually was a breath mint and the crime lab agreed?

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on August 24, 2009 (boomark / email).