DEA outlaws money

The failed Drug War just keeps getting sillier and sillier, doesn't it?

A truck driver from Texas is suing the DEA and New Mexico state troopers because they seized money from him during a checkpoint at a weigh station. At this checkpoint, state police opted to search his truck for "needles or cash in excess of $10,000." The trucker told the cops he had no needles but did have money. (The money represented most of his savings, because he didn't want it in a bank.) When the cops found the cash they promptly turned it over to the DEA. The Border Patrol brang in the drug dogs to sniff out the truck, but no drugs were ever found. The DEA photographed and fingerprinted the trucker and let him go after he was detained for almost 6 hours. Although he was never charged with a crime, the DEA refused to give him back his money.

What the DEA did is rightly called theft. This is the highway robbery of the new millennium.

Since when is carrying money a crime? Confiscating cash from a trucker is like seizing credit cards for having too high of a balance. And you know they're not gonna do that, because it usually isn't the poor who have credit cards. That's because the poor usually don't even qualify for a credit card. In other words, the DEA made up a law against something just to criminalize being poor or working-class.

After the DEA stole the driver's money, they told him he'd have to prove the money didn't come from drug sales, and that the process of recovering the cash would take a year. Um. Uh. Isn't there supposed to be something in the Constitution about innocent until proven guilty? The burden of proof is supposed to be on the DEA, not the trucker. Since that money is his savings, he needs it right now to pay his bills - not a year from now.

We've been told that the practice of arbitrarily confiscating money isn't entirely new. About 20 years ago, some sheriff in Georgia (maybe it was Rosco P. Coltrane) seized a large sum of cash from a grandmother who was on her way to buy some items for her granddaughter's wedding.

The War on Drugs really is a nifty little racket for the ruling party to Make Money, isn't it?

(Source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5081398.html)