Fire Karen Tandy!

by Will Wilkinson on August 7, 2005

This quote from DEA head Karen Tandy has me mad enough to actually blog about actual news:

Today’s arrest of Mark (sic) Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.

Radley comments:

That to me sounds like the country’s top drug cop announcing Emery’s bust was more because of his political activism than because of his law-breaking.

Sounds to me, too. And this means that, not joking, we ought to demand Karen Tandy’s head. She’s announced, straight out, that the United State government intends to use its ability to arrest people and put them in jail as a tactic for squelching political speech that conflicts with the government’s policies. It should come as a surprise to no one that the thrust of the free speech clause of the First Amendment is to ensure that government reflects the free deliberative will of the governed. The freedom to agitate for the alteration of government is a minimal condition for the legitimacy of government. Karen Tandy has not only announced that she is violating the fundamental conditions for the moral legitimacy of the power that she wields, but that she is also proud of it. She has flouted her oath to the Constitution, has wantonly abused her power, is a disgrace as a public servant and a citizen, and must be removed from office.

This isn’t about marijuana, although the triviality of such a benign substance really brings home the enormity of Tandy’s words. Every one of us believes, or may one day believe, that some government policy or other is deeply flawed (war in Iraq, abortion, take your pick). If a government official, with armed agents at her disposal, tries to justifies imprisoning a citizen on the grounds that he has sought through speech to change government policy, then that’s a threat to all of us.

Mr. President: FIRE KAREN TANDY!

I hope people are already making the stickers and the t-shirts, and blast faxing their senators. She’s really got to go.

  • Ethical issues of cannabis legalization aside, the fact that the government restricts a substance no more harmful than alcohol and makes it difficult for us to acquire and use is a violation of our basic civil rights.

    A similar story would be the cigarette tax. The tax represents a directive from the government about how we should be living our lives. The tax makes it clear that the government will make it easier for us to live our lives one way, and difficult to do it the other way.

    I believe Karen Tandy should be fired not because of any of her anti-marijuana activities, but simply because she has helped to demonize the beloved herb. I should make a post about that, but I'm feeling kinda lazy...
    Maybe I'll get around to it, and you can check it out on my cannabis love blog, http://weedneeds.wordpress.com
  • Grow Box Hydroponics Guru
    Hello!
  • Sheelah
    "Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on."

    Your own quote says money from "ILLICIT profits" are funding the legalization movement. It has nothing to do with free speech
  • John Newsome
    Gee, here it is nine months since the lart posting, and Karen Tandy's still in office.

    "Mr. President: FIRE KAREN TANDY!" Ha! Ha! Ha!
    Yeah, right away. Please!....Please!...Please, Mr. Presidnt, Pleeze!

    You liberals make me vomit.
  • Ahh so scary how our rights are being slowly taken away from us. For those that saw inconvenient truth I am sure you will recognize the from analogy. If you put a frog in hot water he will jump out. If you put him in cold water and slowly heat it up, he wont jump, he will sit there until he dies. Anyways are rights are being taken away from us at a rate in which we don't really notice until it is too late!
  • jen is a common name
    Mr. President: FIRE KAREN TANDY!

    Will, this seems to assume that Mr. President would disagree with what she said. Are you so sure about that? Or would the main objection be that she showed their anti-free speech hand?
  • Insiderman
    I guess the next big step is to apply RICO statutes to organizations favoring legal marijuana. This would allow them to confiscate from such organizations the funds received from illegal drug trade and any assets that MAY have been purchased using funds received from illegal drug trade.

    Whoops! I let their strategy out of the bag.

    On a different note, Libertarians, maybe we should wait until after we disallow publicly supported medical care and income maintenance for drug-related illness before we allow marijuana and other drug use.
  • Apex Of Our Faith
    I prefer "Draw and Quarter Karen Tandy."
  • Sigivald
    From the article Radley linked to: "His crime is apparently selling mail-order marijuana seeds to U.S. residents.".

    To me, that puts rather a different face on Amy's rejoinder, which would hold a lot more weight if he was not being arrested for commerce in the US, to US citizens. While his company is in Canada, it's shipping to the US, and Canada seems perfectly happy to extradite on such a matter, so I don't see any particularly harmful precedent.

    And I must sympathise with dww; while I like pot and think it ought to be legal, I can't complain about the DEA thinking that it'd be nice if pot activists were funded legitimately rather than by the proceeds of illegal activity (the aforementioned illicit cross-border trade in seeds).

    And it sure sounds to me like she was saying she was going to arrest people for doing illegal things like selling pot seeds in the US rather than to merely or primarily squelch speech the State doesn't like. (I'm sure the DEA would go after Amsterdam seed sellers as well if the Dutch would extradite. It's a policy I don't like, and a stupid law, but I can't claim to find it unconstitutional. That is, after all, international trade, something the Federal government has a clear right to regulate as it sees fit, stupid or not.)
  • dww:
    Off the top of my head, a major problem with your argument is that Emery has not been charged with breaking any laws in Canada, where his actions took place. It is legal in Canada to sell marijuana seeds for medicinal use, and in British Columbia, recreational use is widely tolerated. In fact, there is a cafe selling pot openly only a few blocks from Emery's Vancouver offices. So this is roughly akin to saying that American citizens who make money doing things abroad that are illegal in the U.S. should not be allowed to bring that money home and use it to fund free speech. Do you want to set a precedent that would prevent, say, people who invest their money in the Cayman Islands where financial disclosure laws are more lax should be prevented from engaging in free speech here?
  • Chuck
    Will, you sound the siren with great eloquence.

    I cannot agree with you more: the toleration of dissent is not a courtesy that the government may choose to extend; peaceful opposition is a right which the people own in whole.

    It is time for the battle to be joined.

    Karen Tandy is not worthy of office in a free country. An abuse of high office of this gravity combined with Tandy's blatant disregard for the American system of equal rights under law would ideally require that this administrator be put behind bars.

    Whether it be forfeiture of office or a harsher (more apt) penalty, this odious tyrant Tandy should have to pay dearly, and at once.

    Will the pro-freedom lobby stand up to the Drug War? Will our voices sing out the truth until they are hoarse and exhausted? Can the blogosphere claim its greatest victory since Dan Rather was exposed for a hack? In short, does anyone give a damn--enough to affect change?

    Time will tell.
  • dww
    I'm 100% in favor of legalizing marijuana, but I still think you might be a little over the top here, Will. Surely it's appropriate to insist that our political process not be affected by money obtained in illegal ways? Shame on the drug-legalization lobbyists for giving their opponents ammunition by not staying above reproach.
  • Margaret Romao Toigo
    It is outrageous that the administrator of a US government agency would flout the First Amendment so casually.

    It's good to see that this news, which all of the the US media -- save for one newspaper columnist at the Seattle Post Intelligencer -- has ignored, making its way around the blogosphere.

    If enough of us keep talking about this, people will take notice. Just ask Dan Rather, Eason Jordan and Jeff Gannon how that works.
  • In fact now that I think about it, no, don't try to get her fired. Just take that quote and paste it all over the place. People like Tandy are like manna from heaven to libertarians -- she thinks just like every other government official, but she's dumb enough to let the mask slip and let everyone see just how ugly it really is.

    Forget "fire Karen Tandy", this is your line: "The drug war is a stealth war on free speech!" It's less catchy, but far more important. Strike at the root, not the branches.
  • Holy crap. Well we already knew how these people think, but at least now we have documentary evidence. The country could use the demonstration. I can get behind firing her, but it's not as if her replacement would behave any differently.
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