A federal judge has green-lighted a lawsuit brought by Occupy protesters against law enforcement agencies that allegedly gave them pot as part of officers’ Drug Recognition Expert training.
The ruling means the case is headed toward a trial which could reveal where officers got the pot they allegedly doled out to protesters in exchange for their participation in the controversial program, which was the subject of a five part report from the Minneapolis City Pages.
“In light of the clear prohibition on providing illicit drugs to citizens,” the State Patrol and other law enforcement organizations such as the Olmsted and Nobles counties sheriff’s offices “are not entitled to the protection of qualified immunity,” U.S. District Judge John Tunheim writes in his ruling.
The lawsuit alleges officers violated Occupy protesters’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights in disrupting the Occupy protests by hauling people away from places like downtown Minneapolis’s Peavey Plaza so they could get high and have their behavior monitored.
The idea was that officers could learn to quickly identify what drug or drugs a person has been using by observing links between use, behavior, and physical appearance (dilated eyes, for example), but a documentary video released by local independent media activists in the spring of 2012 and a subsequent investigation indicated the whole thing was more small town-cops wilding out in the city than it was serious research.
Law enforcement “designed and implemented a pernicious human research experiment exposing young people from minority and/or disadvantaged backgrounds to various illegal drugs in an effort use these individuals as human guinea pigs for the benefit of law enforcement,” North St. Paul attorney Nathan Hansen and New Jersey attorney Alan Milstein write in a summary of the suit.
“Not only was the experiment unethical by design, the defendants conducted their research without the informed consent of the human subjects, thus violating the most essential ethical requirements which form the basis of our laws and regulations governing human subject research.”
Read more over at the Minneapolis City Pages.