Part two of my three-part series for Huffington Post is now online.

It takes a skeptical look at the new overdose/abuse figures the federal government is touting, and points out that the problems we’re seeing today with pill mills and strip-mall clinics are the result of overly protective drug control policies. And they’re the same sorts of policies opioid critics are now saying need to be expanded and strengthened in response to the latest panic.

A Highway Patrol trooper enters the scene first, gun drawn, and kicks the driver’s window of Greene’s four-door sedan. After several moments, the trooper opens the door.

The trooper, his gun still raised, then gives Greene conflicting commands. He first tells him not to move, then tells him to come forward.

A second trooper quickly cuffs Greene’s wrist and pulls him from the car, which rolls forward until an officer stops it.

Greene flops to the ground, clearly dazed as five officers rush him. A sixth officer, with Henderson police, enters the frame late and delivers five well-placed kicks to Greene’s face.

“Stop resisting mother (expletive)!” one officer yells.

Greene doesn’t scream until a second Henderson officer knees him in the midsection — and then does it three more times. Greene was later treated for fractured ribs.

Police suspected Greene was intoxicated as he weaved among lanes about 4 a.m. on Oct. 29, 2010, and finally stopped his car near Lake Mead Parkway and Boulder Highway in Henderson.

But that wasn’t the case, which they soon discovered after they searched Greene.

“Call in medical,” one officer says in the video. “We found some insulin in his pocket. … He’s semiconscious.”

“Let’s get medical out here. He’s a diabetic, he’s probably in shock,” the officer later tells dispatch.

Greene’s lawsuit said officers then forced him to stand by a patrol car in handcuffs and blow into a Breathalyzer, despite being injured. Paramedics later arrived and treated him for low blood sugar.

Greene was released without a citation, and officers apologized to him for “beating him up,” the lawsuit said.

He immediately went to a hospital, where he was treated for the broken ribs and the bruises to his hands, neck, face and scalp, the lawsuit said.

One of the harsher moments in the video comes near the end of the clip, when one officer can be heard laughing loudly.

One officer notes that Greene “was not a small guy.” An officer laughs and says, “I couldn’t take him by myself.”

Several points:

• This certainly isn’t the first time cops have mistaken diabetic shock for intoxication—and with similar results. We’ve also seen a number of incidents where cops have mistaken epileptic seizures for aggressive behavior, often resulting in a Tasering. The root problem here is the same as that with the cops who mistakenly mistake a bounding or territorial dog with an aggressive one, and then kill it. The cops get excused because they made “honest mistakes.” (Though in this case, the honest mistake ended with mistaking low blood sugar for intoxication.)  But that means they haven’t been trained properly. At some point, enough of these stories should have made the news that departments across the country would begin to implement such training. That doesn’t appear to be happening.
• Note that at one point in the video, after they’ve just beaten a helpless man, one cop asks his fellow officers if any of them are hurt.
• Not only were none of these cops criminally charged, every one of them is apparently still protecting and serving the public. The story indicates one seargeant was “disciplined,” but we aren’t allowed to know what that discipline was. The department also claims to have changed some policies in response to the incident. But we aren’t allowed to know exactly what those changes are, either.
• We also aren’t allowed to know the names of any of the officers in the video. This is inexcusable. It seems pretty clear that there’s a culture problem, here. Mistaking a diabetic for a drunk is bad enough. Beating him senseless when he clearly posed no threat is criminal. And yelling “Stop Resisting!” at a man who is clearly not resisting is indicative of a police culture in which excessive force is common enough that the officers know what to say as they’re beating someone to give them cover later. Laughing after you’ve just beaten a man, and after you’ve just discovered he was a diabetic is straight-up pathological. All of which means there’s plenty of reason to doubt this particular department’s internal review process. These officers names need to be released, so journalists and police watchdog groups outside of law enforcement can look into their histories on the job.
• Greene and his family were given a $292,500 settlement, which of course will be funded by taxpayers, not the cops who beat him senseless. This too needs to change. The cops who beat green should be forfeiting a portion of their paychecks to him for the rest of their lives. And those paychecks should preferably be compensation for work other than police work.

MORE: Digby runs off a few other incidents in which police Tasered diabetics after wrongly assuming they were intoxicated.

Three stories about regulations purported to protect consumers . . . that hurt consumers.

• In Minnesota, a classic case of cartel protectionism as the owner of a funeral home owner fights the needless regulations that help others in his business gouge grieving families. My favorite part of this story is when the head of the rent-seeking trade organization uses the phrase “entrepreneurial dynamo” . . . as an insult! He’s hard working! He’s winning customers by charging them less money! He must be stopped!
• Fox News looks at the infuriating regulatory barriers innovative tech start-ups are facing. The “Uber” ap, for example, lets you summon a black cab from your phone, track how far it is away, and pay through your phone. Great, right? Not according to the historically corrupt (allegedly!), terrified-of-transparency D.C. Cab Commission: “They’re operating illegally, and we plan to take steps against them,” says D.C. Taxi Commissioner Ron Linton. “What they’re trying to do is be both a taxi and a limousine,” Linton has said. “Under the way the law is written, it just can’t be done.” The cab/limo distinction is nonsense. It’s only important to cab and limo companies who have a financial interest in keeping them separate. There are more examples at the link.
• A federal judge has ruled against a motion to dismiss the lawsuit some independent Nashville driver services have filed against the city’s new livery regulations. My intern Jessica Greene wrote about these blatantly protectionist regulations a couple months ago. The regulations require all driver services to charge a minimum of $45 per ride, which could be double what some independent driver services were charging. And proponents of the regulations—mostly bigger driver services already charging that much—of course say the regulations are vital to “protect consumers from ‘rogue taxis.’”

And of course it’s not just consumers who get hurt. The Nashville regulations will likely put several immigrant and minority-owned private car service companies out of business. (“Companies” probably gives the wrong impression. Most of them are one guy, one car.)

I’ve noted before that the level of force the government chooses to use often is determined not by the nature of the threat so much as the message the government wants to send about the law it is enforcing. Hence, SWAT raids on medical marijuana dispensaries.

It looks like we’re also exporting that philosophy.

On January 20, dozens of New Zealand police’s elite special forces broke into Kim Dotcom’s mansionwith assault helicopters, M4A3 automatic weapons, Glock pistols, dogs, sledgehammers and even a circular chainsaw, as if they were expecting a vicious narco gang waiting inside, armed to the teeth.

What they found instead was two kids—three and four years old—a 15-month old baby, some Filipino nannies, two security guards, Dotcom’s bodyguard Wayne Tempero, Dotcom’s wife and meganerd Kim Dotcom himself, hiding in the security room you are seeing in this video.

Tempero told the story on how the Kiwi cops assaulted the Megaupload founder’s home and how they captured Kim himself to Kiwi news channel 3news. It sounds pretty scary and way out of proportion, given the nature of the alleged offense and the people involved.

The operation started at 6:45, when the thunder of the assault helicopters woke up the body guard and everyone in the house. He stepped outside to see the helicopters when a policeman in a bulletproof vest asked him to surrender. He didn’t have any weapons and he complied. He also said that he couldn’t even hear them identifying themselves as police officers because of the sound, but obviously these weren’t low-rent kidnappers.

As this was happening, the elite squads and police officers were going around the house, smashing doors and looking for Kim Dotcom with dogs. In the childhood area they found the kids and the Filipino nannies. According to Tempero, the police asked the Filipino nannies—who must be famous in New Zealand for their ferocity and skills in explosives manufacturing—if they had any bombs.

They also found the wife, who tried to give them the code to open the door to Kim Dotcom’s quarters before they attempted to slam the doors down. Dotcom had run to his secure Red Room, where he stayed for 30 minutes until he was apprehended. On the way to get him, the police smashed an old elevator door thinking it was the gate to a secret room.

Nobody in the house had a history of violence. Only two shotguns, with legal licenses, were stored in a gun locker. Neither Dotcom nor the security guards had any gun on them.

Remember, they’re enforcing copyright law, here. And as Gizmodo points out, the Kiwi heavy-handedness was almost certainly influenced and encouraged by federal law enforcement officials in the U.S. (Who in the past have had no qualms about enforcing copyright law with a SWAT team.)

(Thanks to Tim Lee for the tip.)

Just how much the federal government prioritize drug control over patient care? This much:

Federal authorities have expanded their crackdown on painkiller abuse, charging a major health care company and two CVS pharmacies in Florida with violating their licenses to sell powerful pain pills and other drugs.

The Drug Enforcement Administration linked Cardinal Health to unusually high shipments of the controlled drugs to four pharmacies.

On Friday, the DEA suspended Cardinal’s controlled substances license at its Lakeland, Fla., distribution center, which services 2,500 pharmacies in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina . . .

In its suspension order, the DEA alleges that Cardinal knew or should have known that the four retail pharmacies had purchased far more drugs than it needed to fulfill legitimate prescriptions.

The company called the DEA action a “drastic overreaction” that would disrupt delivery of critical medications to hospitals and pharmacies.

A judge has since temporarily stopped the suspension, pending a hearing.

But think about what the DEA is trying to do, here. They’re attempting to interrupt the treatment of thousands of patients served by 2,500 pharmacies because the wholesaler that supplies controlled drugs to those pharmacies is accused of inadequately policing the actions of four of those pharmacies. And the patients that would have been affected here aren’t just pain patients.

But the effect of actions like this going forward may be worse than the actions themselves. The DEA has forcibly deputized every actor in the manufacture and distribution of these drugs to police everyone else. And they risk severe civil, even criminal, repercussions if the agency determines they’ve done so with insufficient vigor. If you want to survive, you always err on the side of control.

So if you’re a wholesaler, and you have the tiniest of suspicions that a pharmacy is dispensing more of a controlled drug than the DEA thinks it should, you cut off supply, or you risk losing your license. If you’re a pharmacy, and you have the faintest hunch that a patient may not be legitimately in pain, or is getting more pain medication than he needs, or that a particular doctor is writing more prescriptions for a controlled drug than the DEA thinks he ought to, you refuse to fill the prescriptions, at risk of both losing your livelihood as a pharmacist, but also possibly your freedom. If you own a pharmacy, and you suspect one of your pharmacists is insufficiently suspicious of pain patients and pain prescriptions, you fire him, or you risk losing your business. And finally, if you’re a doctor, and you suspect any of your patients have a substance abuse problem, or that they aren’t in as much pain as they claim, you turn them down. Actually, it’s worse than that. It doesn’t really matter what you think as a doctor. What matters is what the DEA thinks of the decisions you make. So your job is not to administer the treatment you believe is appropriate, your job is to anticipate what treatment the DEA will think is appropriate, and deviate from that treatment at your peril.

At each step in the process, the incentives are structured to induce fear, suspicion, and mistrust of the other players in this mess. The interests of patients are way, way down in the ordering of priorities.

• Newt or Schrute?
• Why constitutional law professors shouldn’t be president.
• PETA’s latest exercise in self-parody.
• Corporatism vs. free markets.
• Alabama discovers the unintended consequences of angry immigration policy.
• 50 powerful images from the Civil War.
• Asset forfeiture outrage of the day: Immigration edition.

Prague.

On the one hand, my default position would be that no one should lose her job, her reputation, or her freedom over marijuana. I’d also imagine most people would be sympathetic to someone who recently lost a spouse in a car accident. It would also appear that in this case, the police found the pot after entering this particular woman’s home illegally.

On the other hand . . . according to the source in the story, if this had happened to your average resident of Tennessee, they at the very least would be subject to a criminal investigation.

But there was no investigation. Which is likely because this woman was—and still is—the director of the Tennessee state agency “whose mission is to eradicate marijuana.”

• Photography Is Not a Crime blogger Carlos Miller was recently arrested at an Occupy Miami rally. The police deleted the videos on his camera. He has since recovered them. So who at the police department will now be charged with a crime for attempting to destroy Miller’s videos?
• NYPD’s shooting of Ramarley Graham is looking more and more like a murder.
• Headline of the day.
• Arizona. Just. Arizona.
• That “Detroit Comeback” commercial from the Super Bowl wasn’t actually filmed in Detroit.
• Anonymous Obama administration official suggests the journalist who broke the “double tap” drone story probably supports al-Qaeda.
• Former prosecutor, frequent fabricator, and serial slanderer Wendy Murphy, best known for going on cable news and making shit up . . . apparently teaches journalism seminars at Poynter.
• Congressman duped by The Onion.
• Woman stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, and now faces a year in jail after driving from Mississippi to Alabama to buy cold medicine.

Prague.

A new Cato study finds 5,000 incidents from 2003-2008 in which a gun was used in self defense. But the authors point out that even that figure likely low-balls the real number.

The data set supporting this paper is derived from a collection of news stories published betweenOctober 2003 and November 2011.

There is a selection bias problem withthe method of gathering news stories. Many defensive gun uses never make the news.Sometimes that is because the person us-ing a gun in self-defense saw no need to callthe police—he or she scared off the bad guy.In some cases, the victim might not wantto explain to the police that he has a gun,perhaps because he is a felon, or perhapsbecause he lives in a jurisdiction with very restrictive gun control laws. Sometimes thepolice do get called, but the officers do notfind the circumstances sufficiently impor-tant to issue a press release. After all, “ManScares away Burglar, No Shots Fired” is notparticularly newsworthy, unless you live in a  very small town.

I found this part interesting.

For a very long time, gun control propo-nents would insist that having a gun was a mistake, because many people (especially women) would not be willing to shoot a person who was attacking them—and thecriminal would then take away the victim’sgun and use it on the victim. Oddly enough,while the authors have recorded a large num-ber of incidents where someone has their guntaken away from them, it is usually the otherway around. In 227 incidents, a criminal’sgun was taken away from him by the victim.This does not necessarily mean that the victim shot the criminal, but it does mean thatthe victim successfully disarmed the crimi-nal and then threatened the criminal withit in order to make him leave, or make himremain on the scene until the police could arrive. Often, these were situations where the victim, at the start of the attack, did not have a gun . .

. . . By comparison, the data set contains only 11 stories out of 4,699 where a criminal tooka gun away from a defender; the reverse, aswe have seen, was reported more than 20times more often.

Prague.

• New report: U.S. drones are attacking people coming to the aid, attending funerals of victims of prior drone attacks.
• Muslim man’s text message to co-workers to “blow away” competitors at a trade show leads to arrest, raid, detention of his colleagues at the U.S.-Canadian border.
• New Hampshire bill would protect the state’s legislators from “bullying.”
• NY Times hosts a symposium on unpaid internships in which four out of the five invited panelists hold the same position. Sorry, but an unpaid internship in a prestigious profession isn’t akin to working in a coal mine. While we’re at it, using Facebook also is in no way comparable to sharecropping.

The New York Times’ “Lens” blog looks at the work of Antonia Bolfo, an NYPD cop who started taking a camera along on the job, which led to a new career as a photographer. His work is great. Many more examples at the link.

The Ogden, Utah, man who killed one police officer and wounded several others during a drug raid over marijuana plants has finally recovered from his injuries enough to speak.

Matthew David Stewart, 37, said he never heard officers identify themselves or announce they were at his home to serve a search warrant. Stewart, in an interview Friday at the Weber County Jail, said his alarm clock woke him, then he heard a crash that sounded like glass breaking.

“Some parts I remember vividly,” Stewart said of the Jan. 4 shootout. “Other parts it was like I was running on instinct.

“When you’re convinced that you are getting robbed and most likely killed by a group of armed men, your instincts kick in.”

Stewart has been charged with aggravated murder for the death of Ogden police Officer Jared Francom, who was a member of the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force. He also has been charged with eight other felony counts. Weber County Attorney Dee Smith has filed notice that he intends to seek the death penalty.

Stewart spoke with a Tribune reporter Friday during one of his two weekly 25-minute visits he’s allowed via a video teleconference system at the jail . . .

Stewart said he “had no idea” he was under investigation by the strike force. He worked a night shift at the Walmart in Riverdale and was asleep as the strike force arrived between 8 and 8:30 p.m . . .

Although Stewart said he didn’t hear officers announce themselves, he didn’t answer whether he had some indication police officers had entered his home.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “All I knew for sure is they were there to rob and kill me.”

Court documents claim Stewart was in a hiding spot as the strike force was searching the house to see if anyone was inside. Stewart then emerged from the hiding spot, court documents say, and began firing a 9 mm Beretta, first shooting Officer Shawn Grogan in the face . . .

As for Francom and the injured officers, Stewart said: “I’m totally devastated that anybody had to suffer over any of this. This never should have happened.”

Stewart thinks two bullets struck him during the shootout, but he isn’t sure. He said he can’t tell what are entrance and exit wounds and he had difficulty getting answers from his doctors and nurses at the hospital where he remained until Monday.

One bullet appears to have struck Stewart in his right hip then entered his abdomen, he said. Doctors had to remove portions of his intestines. He’s using a colostomy bag.

“I’m still having a lot of trouble dealing with the colostomy,” Stewart said. “It’s a big psychological blow, but it’s also real difficult in here.”

Another bullet struck Stewart in his left leg and damaged nerves there. Stewart said he can’t stand in one place long without “blinding pain” in the leg . . .

Near the end of his visit, Stewart implied more facts of what happened Jan. 4 will emerge.

“I’ve always been a big fan of the truth,” Stewart said. “It’s tough for me to stay silent on some issues.”

He’s also looking for an attorney.

This story is starting to look remarkably similar to the Ryan Frederick case.

Details here.

• Iran is planning to execute a Canadian-born software developer because his product was used by a pornographic website. (NOTE: Per the comments, the Guardian article linked in the Reason post actually say the Iranian high court quashed the death sentence. But it has since been reinstated.)
• More on how Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 
• Judge allows Houston residents to become party to lawsuit between the city and a red light camera contractor.
• Feds end criminal investigation of Lance Armstrong, but “sources close to the investigation” continue to smear him in the press, anyway. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a criminal investigation into who is leaking grand jury testimony.
• Houston TV station bites on the vodka-soaked tampon story. Favorite quote from alleged expert on teen drinking habits: “More often than not, it’s happening in a lot of the Houston area.” More often than not? What could that possibly mean?
• Attempted puppycide.
• French court fines Google for providing a free map service, which is apparently an anti-competitive act of aggression against French companies that charge money to use their maps.

Story here.

After they killed him, they then went after his grandmother.

After a police officer fatally shot an 18-year-old man in his Bronx apartment on Thursday, the man’s grandmother, a witness to the shooting, was taken into custody and held against her will for several hours, a friend of the family said on Saturday.

An officer confronted the man, Ramarley Graham, who was in the bathroom possibly trying to flush some marijuana down the toilet. A moment later, a shot rang out, killing the teenager.

While officers had trailed Mr. Graham to the apartment thinking he was armed, no gun was found, making the grandmother, Patricia Hartley, 58, a critical witness . . .

At this juncture little is known of precisely what Ms. Hartley saw and what of that she has told detectives.

But her treatment by the police in the hours after her grandson was killed could become a sticking point in an investigation that Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said would be presented to a grand jury.

After Mr. Graham was killed, Ms. Hartley was taken to the 47th Precinct station house on Laconia Avenue and held for seven hours, according to Carlton Berkley, a friend of Ms. Hartley’s who said he had retired from the police force as a detective in the 30th Precinct in upper Manhattan. Mr. Berkley added that Ms. Hartley was forced to give a statement about what happened.

“She gave it against her will,” Mr. Berkley said. “She didn’t want to speak to the police.”

Mr. Berkley, speaking on Saturday outside the Graham family home on East 229th Street in Wakefield, said: “We’re going to fight that statement.”

But let’s not lose sight of what’s important, here. Thanks to the good work of these undercover narcotics cops, the pot Ramarley Graham allegedly flushed down the toilet just before he was killed is no longer on the streets of New York. No children will get high on that pot. And that’s really all that matters.

. . . let’s make a seven-year-old child the subject of national ridicule and torment in the latest culture war skirmish!

Sometimes, all you can do is shake your head, die a little inside, and console yourself with behind-the-scenes photos from the Puppy Bowl.

Today is the deadline to register for the International Students for Liberty conference later this month in Washington, D.C.

I’ll be speaking (details here). It’s a great event and a great organization. And a good chance to meet and network with other young libertarians.

They’re expecting nearly 1,000 students this year, up from just 100 at the first conference five years ago.

In Dallas:

According to the complaint, which made its way to Courthouse News yesterday, Cantu, a diesel mechanic, was making his lunch January 22, 2010, when he saw a few cops streaking across his yard. A deafening explosion shook the room as a flash bomb shot through the door. Nearly 20 officers crashed in.

“Get on the ground!” they allegedly ordered him. Cantu, according to the complaint, obliged and was zipcuffed. Inexplicably, the filing claims, the officers kicked and punched him until he was unconscious, lying in a pool of his own blood on the kitchen floor. Meanwhile, they searched his house and allegedly didn’t find what they were after. Cantu’s alleged butcher’s bill: a broken orbital bone, a broken nose, a concussion, traumatic brain injury, a loss of vision in his left eye and loss of hearing in his left ear. According to his complaint, the “injuries required surgical intervention and caused significant scarring and disfigurement.”

Cantu was arrested but never charged with a crime.

This one gets stranger, in that there seems to be no record of the incident anywhere. And Cantu’s lawyers didn’t respond to the Dallas Observer’s request for comment.

I saw Kathleen Edwards live for the first time Saturday night at the Exit/In here in Nashville. She was great. Dark, raunchy, and as she shows in this kiss-off, the lady can rock.

• Maiz Szalavitz takes questions from Reddit about “tough love” anti-drug boot camps for teens.
• Seems like this would be the ideal situation for the Taser. Instead, the dog-walking guy gets the Taser, and this kid gets a bullet.
• San Francisco man who was wrongly convicted and spent 18 years in prison sues over the use of perjured testimony in his case.
• Another TSA agent arrested for stealing from passengers.
• Facebook is the new heroin.
• The fruit fly chuckles at your inadequacy.
• Surveillance drone industry wants to “paint a more positive picture” of government spying on its citizens.
• Guy loses a bunch of weight, no longer diabetic. Starts a website to help others do the same. He’s now under criminal investigation for providing nutritional advice without a license. This is in North Carolina, the same state that went after a guy last year for practicing engineering without a license when he did some math for a citizens’ reports requesting a couple traffic lights.

Prague. I had my first taste of real Absinthe at this comic book-themed bar. Did the whole ritual with the fire and the sugar cube. It was disgusting.