No reason anymore to even feign surprise at today’s police state insanities.
At Townhall yesterday, I bemoaned the six-hour kidnapping of a 10-year-old Maryland boy and his 6-year-old sister for the terrible crime of peacefully walking home from a public park. The children were grabbed just a couple blocks from their home . . .
. . . by police, who held them for over two hours before handing them to Montgomery County Child Protective Services.
It was hours before anyone contacted the panicked parents.
There’s no law prohibiting kids from walking down a public street, but bureaucrats are threatening this poor family over just that.
So, I guess we shouldn’t be shocked that when an 11-year-old boy disagrees with what he’s being taught in school about marijuana, and explains that his mother has used cannabis oil to treat her Crohn’s disease and his mother is not a criminal, (a) he’s going to be detained and grilled by authorities and (b) his mother may soon become a criminal.
A raid on Shonda Banda’s home indeed turned up two ounces of cannabis oil. Ms. Banda could be facing felony drug charges in Kansas, where she now lives, but she used to live in Colorado, where her use of cannabis oil would be legal.
The Washington Post’s Radley Balko identifies the absurdity: “a woman could lose her custody of her child for therapeutically using a drug that’s legal for recreational use an hour to the west.”
Today she has a custody hearing over her son.
The state “protection” being afforded the children in both of these cases isn’t protecting them. It’s terrorizing them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “Police State Blues”
These “official” actions sound backwards to me.
The police harass children and parents instead of watching for potential abductors.
The 11-year old has a more mature, nuanced view of pain relief than law/law-enforcement does. The child is in school, asking intelligent questions, and learning about the management of chronic pain which sounds like good parenting to me.
Abominations both, children are the responsibility of their parents, and the relationship should be private and protected unless there is actual and proven danger or harm visited upon them.
As for the therapeutic use of cannabis oil being criminal, such is proof that God made no mistake in its creation, but the same cannot be said for the sate and its administration (as there would be no issue of she were prescribes an evenl more dangerous, and less efficacious remedy).
There is probably no more frightening Statist effort than the encroaching use of force through law enforcement. It is fully supported by schools and child protective services and is actually kidnapping children. A parent who disagrees with any number of issues can lose their child and the cost and trauma is never ending. Public Schools are a gamble. An innocent remark by a child is all that is needed. Child Protective Services,so called, care not for truth and facts.
In the late 60’s and early 70’s my Mother would kick us out and tell us not to come back until sunset. We had a wonderful childhood running around Burlingame, CA. Playing at the railroad tracks, digging up blue-glass bottles and power pole insulators, building go-karts with no brakes, running around in the Eucalyptus forests, playing out by the dam, and all other manner of fun. Nowadays, we would be jailed. What the heck happened? Well, I do know what happened. I just never realized it until my late 20’s when I pulled my head out of the sand, began looking around, asking questions, and realizing something terrible was happening to our society. And that was 25 years ago…. Now look at the mess we are in. Will Freedom be passed along to the next generation or are we going to have a hundred years of darkness like the Soviet Union?
Related, but not quite on topic: A writer with the Washington Post explains why kids are actually safer today than they were before:
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/opinion/3827271-181/theres-never-been-a-safer?menu