Apparently on 4/20 at the university of colorado there is a tradition to smoke out at 4:20 on some field. Apparently the campus police don’t like this much but instead of going there and stopping the pot smoking they instead decided to let them smoke pot and use surveilance cameras to take pictures of them. Now they have put those pictures on the web and are asking (and apparently getting) people to identify the photographed pot smokers. I’m not sure if the police would have a good legal case for marijuanna usage (wearing hemp t-shirts and smoking something doesn’t entail MJ use) but usually the accused don’t know enough not to confess.

There is absolutely NO justification of this behavior by the police, NONE WHATSOEVER Let’s say you actually believe in the war on drugs and buy into all that crap about how marijuanna is so much worse than alcohol and is harming our youth. In this case you believe it is justifiable to arrest people and otherwise inflict harm on them (denying financial aid as a result of drug conviction etc.. etc..) because you are saving youth from the ‘life deystroying’ effects of drugs.

If you really believe this and know people are going to be smoking at a particular time and place you have a responsibility to go STOP them so they won’t damage themselves and no one will try pot for the first time at this location. Remember it isn’t like these are hardened drug dealers or something these are college students, the very people the war on drugs is supposed to be saving from drugs. Not stopping the drug use and then getting people to inform on them afterwards is just vindictive cultural warfare.

This sort of tactic won’t deter people from smoking pot. Most pot smoking happens indoors or other places they don’t have security cameras. If they just didn’t want the field being used for pot smoking on 4/20 then they could have stuck a cop in a lawn chair out there. The only motivation for this is to strike a blow against a pro-pot culture these police officers don’t like.

I hope enough people are upset about this that the police are getting deluged with calls full of false information or that just waste their time.

Thanks to concurringopinions for the pointer