UPDATE: All these posts asking reporters for both sides of the story on pot enforcement, insight into whether or not breaking down pot growers’ doors actually makes a dent in the pot market, a quote from someone in a group that disagrees with our war on pot… it just may be working. Or maybe it’s a fluke. Either way, as wisepunk points out in comments, Paul Shukovsky’s article has been updated:

Seattle defense attorney Jeff Steinborn, who frequently takes drug cases, said Wednesday: “Is there no real crime out there? By golly, I guess we’ll be safe from the giggles and the munchies for a while.”

Steinborn, who is a member of the national board of the marijuana legalization group NORML, decried the “amount of resources they’ve expended to enforce a law that every government study for the last 160 years says should not be.”

Keep it, Paul Shukovsky!

You’d think that since the PI’s Paul Shukovsky reported how agents “swooped down” on pot growers for “Operation Green Reaper” in April, he’d attempt to figure out what the impact of the first set of busts were. You know, why are we doing this? Is it working so far?

But, of course, if he’d even asked the agents what they sought to achieve then, he’d be forced to answer those question now. But he did neither, because he’s a stupid fucking credulous hack.

The mistake Shukovsky and other SFCHs make is to argue that this is a regular crime-n’-punishment story. Someone gets busted so outline the offense and talk to the authorities. But this isn’t like other crimes. It’s not like murder, rape, or theft—crimes with victims. The victims of pot growing, in the relatively rare cases when they exist, are people who dunnit to themselves (we don’t lock up people who eat their way to a coronary), or people got hurt because pot is illegal (when it’s sold on the dangerous black market). The latter problem is one that we created—it can go away—but crime reporters take this approach more arrests are the solution. Otherwise they’d ask, “Why are we doing this? Is it working so far?”