A broad coalition of law enforcement officers who have spent the past three decades waging an increasingly militarized drug war that has failed to reduce drug use doesn’t want to give up the fight.
Organizations that include sheriffs, narcotics officers and big-city police chiefs slammed Attorney General Eric Holder in a joint letter Friday, expressing “extreme disappointment” at his announcement that the Department of Justice would allow Colorado and Washington to implement state laws that legalized recreational marijuana for adults.
If there had been doubt about how meaningful Holder’s move was, the fury reflected in the police response eliminates it. The role of law enforcement is traditionally understood to be limited to enforcing laws, but police organizations have become increasingly powerful political actors, and lashed out at Holder for not consulting sufficiently before adopting the new policy.
It’s a little bit difficult to understand why they feel so strongly about this. The people of these states have spoken. Why should these cops care so much? I assume it has to do with the usual authoritarian mindset. But it’s also about money. The Feds have traditionally spent a lot of money in the war on marijuana and a fair amount of it flowed downhill through “partnerships” with the state and local authorities. And I also expect that the extremely lucrative practice of legally stealing the assets of drug suspects also results in some nice sharing of the ill-gotten loot. (It has certainly added up to some big bucks in California where medical marijuana has been legal for years.)
And the police need all this extra money to buy more para-military gear so they can do stuff like this: