A story of police incompetence resulting in an innocent man killed.
“At that point, according to the complaint, the officers “finally announced themselves, and Kimberly Dotson told them that someone had shot her husband and requested their help.” She “did not realize even at that moment that the three police officers had killed her husband,” which she did not learn “until she was finally told eight hours later at the police station where she was detained.”
After the shooting, the lawsuit says, “the officers involved did not disclose to investigators that they were at the wrong address, which was the error leading to the tragic result and without which it would not have occurred.” The mistake “was discovered by other officers who arrived at the scene.””
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“In Garcia’s view, the late-night visit at the wrong house that resulted in Dotson’s death did not amount to such recklessness. He is not alone in concluding that police cannot reasonably be expected to make sure they are in the right place when they approach or even break into someone’s home.”
“Bondi’s most obvious mistake is equating potential overdoses with actual overdoses: She assumes that 258 million opioid-naive people would each have consumed two milligrams of fentanyl in one sitting. But Bondi also erroneously assumes that seizing 3,400 kilograms of fentanyl is the same as reducing U.S. fentanyl consumption by that amount.
That is obviously not true. Prohibition allows drug traffickers to earn a hefty risk premium, which gives them a strong incentive to find ways around any barriers the government manages to erect. Given all the places where drugs can be produced and all the ways they can be smuggled, it is not possible to “cut off the flow,” as politicians have been vainly promising to do for more than a century. The most they can realistically hope to accomplish through interdiction is higher retail prices resulting from increased costs imposed on drug traffickers.
That strategy is complicated by the fact that illegal drugs acquire most of their value close to the consumer. The cost of replacing destroyed crops and seized shipments is therefore relatively small, a tiny fraction of the “street value” trumpeted by law enforcement agencies. As you get closer to the retail level, the replacement cost rises, but the amount that can be seized at one time falls.
These challenges—which are compounded in the case of fentanyl, a highly potent drug that can be transported or shipped in small packages containing many doses—explain why interdiction never seems to have a significant and lasting impact on retail prices. From 1981 to 2012, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average, inflation-adjusted retail price for a pure gram of heroin fell by 86 percent. During the same period, the average retail price for cocaine and methamphetamine fell by 75 percent and 72 percent, respectively. In 2021, the Drug Enforcement Administration reported that methamphetamine’s “purity and potency remain high while prices remain low,” that “availability of cocaine throughout the United States remains steady,” and that “availability and use of cheap and highly potent fentanyl has increased.””
“The study included 2,653 drug seizures and 1,833 opioid-related deaths from 2020 to 2023. “Within the surrounding 100, 250, and 500 meters,” RTI International researcher Alex H. Kral and his two co-authors reported in JAMA Network Open on Wednesday, “drug seizures were associated with a statistically significant increase in the relative risk for fatal opioid overdoses.””
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“Prohibition makes drug use more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and potency are highly variable and unpredictable. Ramped-up enforcement of prohibition magnifies that problem, as dramatically demonstrated by the deadly impact of restricting access to pain medication at the same time that illicit fentanyl was proliferating as a heroin booster and substitute.”
“In addition to tracking deaths attributed to COVID-19, researchers aim to account for those missed by formal diagnoses by calculating excess deaths. Excess deaths are typically defined as the number of deaths during a particular period above the usual, expected number of deaths under normal conditions.”
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“A February 2024 article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculated excess deaths between March 2020 and August 2022, concluding that around 1.2 million Americans had died of COVID-19. A January 2025 analysis in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Statistics in Society Series A calculated excess pandemic mortality in the United States for 2020 and 2021 at 920,731. Interestingly, Stanford biostatistician John Ioannidis, a skeptic of worst-case COVID-19 pandemic claims, and his colleagues calculated in a December 2023 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article that the U.S. suffered 1,220,295 excess deaths between 2020 and 2023. Notably, they also calculated that the U.S. actually experienced 3,456 fewer than expected deaths of Americans aged 14 and under during that period. Considering that all of these calculations use data from 2023 or earlier, they suggest that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current count of 1,225,281 American deaths from COVID-19 and related causes is somewhat conservative.”
“When President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Pam Bondi as attorney general, he extolled her “incredible job” in “work[ing] to stop the trafficking of deadly drugs and reduc[ing] the tragedy of Fentanyl Overdose Deaths.” Yet those deaths exploded on Bondi’s watch as Florida’s attorney general.”
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“Bondi’s fans praised her for cracking down on “pill mills,” which may have made it harder for nonmedical drug consumers (as well as bona fide patients) to obtain prescription opioids such as hydrocodone and oxycodone. But the result was increased consumption of black market alternatives, which are much more dangerous because their quality and potency are highly variable and unpredictable. That hazard was magnified by the simultaneous proliferation of illicit fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute—a development that likewise was driven by prohibition, which favors more potent drugs that are easier to conceal and smuggle.”
“Experts say they see peaks and valleys with these kinds of illnesses over the years, but there have been about 6,600 cases already in 2025, almost four times the number at this point last year.”
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“Concerned about increasing cases, experts are urging vaccination.
The US had more than 200,000 cases of whooping cough every year before the vaccine was introduced. By 1948, the vaccine was widely used, and infection rates began to drop.”
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“Boosters are recommended because protection from the vaccine can fade over time, which may be one reason for the ongoing outbreaks.
Declining vaccination rates are another reason. The percentage of US kindergartners who received the DTaP vaccine has steadily declined over the past five years, leaving thousands vulnerable to infection.
Organizers within the state say that although many people have become hesitant about vaccinations, another issue is a lack of access.”