There’s a scene in True Lies where Helen, who’s just discovered Harry is a spy, is asking him under truth serum about his career.
HELEN: Have you ever killed anyone?
HARRY: Yeah, but they were all bad.
That line always gets a laugh because, well, as long as you’re just killing bad people, it’s okay, right?
Back a few years, Sen. Joe Biden was attempting to get tough on drug crime, so he crafted the RAVE (Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy) Act to try to reduce the use of Escstasy and other drugs at raves and similar venues. Basically it did that by making event organizers and venue owners responsible for illicit drug use at their events, if they “knowingly and intentionally” made a venue available for “for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance” — responsible as in $250k or more in civil penalties, up to $500k criminal fine, and up to 20 years in the slammer. The most obvious target, raves, were considered per se by Biden and the DEA as havens for drug abuse, and so it was anticipated (and even crowed by RAVE Act supporters) that this would basically ban raves, since obviously if anyone was caught taking Ecstasy or other drugs there, it was with the tacit consent (knowledge and intent) of the event organizer.
Critics argued that, whoa, all those presumptive knowledge/intent clauses could let the DEA or other law enforcement exercise unreasonable powers, threatening all sorts of dire consequences to people they disliked, no matter what precautions were taken by those people to avoid drugs getting into an event. Just holding the event could be considered intent and knowledge. The criticism was enough that the RAVE Act was never brought up for a vote. But Biden managed to get the legislation slipped in, sans hearing, in conference committee for the AMBER Alert Bill earlier this year.
So why, one wonders, is Biden now so concerned about how his own legislation is being enforced? During confirmation hearings for the new DEA director, Karen Tandy, Biden brought up a case where the manager of an Eagles Lodge in Billings, MT, was intimidated by the local DEA when the facility was going to be leased for a fund-raising concert sponsored by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. The agent basically said that if anyone on the site lit up a joint, the Lodge would be responsible for having had “knowledge and intent.”
The threat of these penalties “freaked me out,” the Eagles Lodge manager told the Drug Reform Coordination Network. She said the DEA agent “didn’t tell us we couldn’t have the event, but he showed me the law and told us what could happen if we did. I talked to our trustees, they talked to our lawyers, and our lawyers said not to risk it, so we canceled.”
Biden pronounced himself “troubled” by this application of his law. He pressed Tandy to explain how she planned to “reassure people who may be skeptical of my legislation that it will not be enforced in a manner that has a chilling effect on free speech.”
I.e., in forcing the cancellation of a political fund-raising event, and in threatening (tacitly, if not explicitly) other such fund-raising events where there is the possiblity that drug use might occur.
*Snort*
That’s the problem with badly written, broadly sweeping laws. You can’t pass them, assuming they will just be applied to “bad” people, or the targets you have in mind. If laws can be abused by law enforcement, they will be, sooner or later, occasionally or systematically. That’s not always a sufficient reason to not pass needed legislation, but it’s certainly a reason to give one pause — and for Biden to now come back and suggest that the fault is not with the legislation he put together and slipped past normal hearings, but instead with the DEA’s enforcement of said law, is disingenuous at best.
The DEA, trying to put a good face on things, has announced new internal procedures to try to prevent enforcement of the law in such a way that would possibly harm businesses where “incidental” drug use occurs. But not only is that just a procedure, not law (which means it can be changed, or even ignored, at any time), but it adds another layer of uncertainty to “knowingly and intentionally” — what will be considered “incidental”? It doesn’t even matter if the DEA is actually going to go after someone — the issue of a chilling effect is whether someone is concerned that they might be gone after if they pursue a particular course, and so decide not to tempt fate.
The question is not whether drugs should be legalized or decriminalized or not. The question is whether this particular law, which lets the DEA infer knowledge and intent from acts that are, themselves, not explicitly criminal, is a crappy one — even if they only promise to enforce it against “bad” people. That they have to promise procedures to keep the law from being enforced against “good” people — to be judged by them — is answer enough to that question.
(via InstaPundit)