I started to draft a "Stupid Fucking Credulous Hack" post when I read the headline:

Marijuana seizures quadruple in L.A. County
The county climbs to the No. 5 spot in the state's annual eradication campaign, with more than 340,000 plants destroyed.

It looked like another dispatch from the front lines in the The Glorious War On Pot. And it read like one too:

Los Angeles County, which has seen a whirlwind expansion in medical marijuana dispensaries this year, has notched another marijuana milestone. The county has moved to No. 5 for the amount seized in the state's annual eradication campaign, with 340,187 pot plants uprooted—more than a fourfold increase. Statewide, the 27-year-old effort, known as the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, found and destroyed almost 4.5 million plants in 41 counties, up from 2.9 million seized in each of the two prior years' growing season. The amount has climbed steadily since 1996, when California voters approved the nation's first medical marijuana law.

State officials put the wholesale value of this year's eradicated marijuana at $17.8 billion.... State officials said the increase in seizures statewide probably reflects more effective law enforcement operations, as well as increased marijuana production. "I do think it's expanding," said George Anderson, director of the state Division of Law Enforcement.

Chris Jackson of the state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement said his team spent about 15 days working in Los Angeles County with the Sheriff's Department and U.S. Forest Service. One particular three-day stretch amazed him, he said. Within an eight-mile radius of their outpost on Angeles Crest Highway, he said, agents uncovered and destroyed a dozen gardens and about 150,000 plants.

This is where War on Pot stories typically end: record-breaking seizures, hundreds of thousands of plants destroyed, and "officials" fellating themselves for a job well down while tossing around incomprehensibly huge numbers—$17.8 billion!—that were pulled out of their asses five minutes before the press conference started. This story in the LA Times had all the elements of a stupid fucking credulous hack job. But then reporter John Hoeffel goes on to do what so many other reporters have described as impossible: he goes and gets a quote from someone on the other side of this story:

Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, ridiculed the effort. "Let me guess, they set a record number of plant seizures and marijuana has now been eradicated from California?" he quipped.

Mirken said the campaign has caused growers to move from private lands into wilderness areas. "This is an annual exercise in futility. Not only does it not do anything meaningful, it actually makes the problem worse," he said.

Wow! Other daily reporters that we've called out on their stupid fucking credulous drug war hackery have insisted that they couldn't possibly include a quote from an opponent of marijuana prohibition because they were writing law-enforcement stories, you see, and not stories about drug policy, and I would be capable of understanding the distinction if I had actually studied journamalism at college instead of the rear ends of the taller guys in the dance program. But LA Times reporter John Hoeffel shows that it can be done: a reporter at a daily paper can include a quote from a proponent of marijuana legalization in a story about marijuana eradication efforts. It's not impossible! Thanks for showing your stupid fucking credulous colleagues how it's done, John!

And Sloggers: please let John Hoeffel know you appreciate his fair and balanced reporting on the drug war by sending him an email. Please CC me.