Another Casualty of the Failed War on Drugs

This month, MSN reported on a young college student in North Dakota, exploited by local police and used as a confidential informant to make drug buys from hardcore drug dealers, after he was caught selling $80 worth of marijuana on campus.

After the third drug buy, he disappeared and two months later, his body was found in a river. You can read the story here.

Yes, we sacrifice the lives of 20 year old college students so that we can continue to flail away in the decades-old failed so-called war on drugs, more accurately termed America's prison-industrial complex.

You don't have to travel far away to North Dakota to see these horrors. The UNH Police Department (not the Durham Police but the actual police department assigned to the college) uses undergraduate college students as confidential informants, telling them that they won't tell their parents, or the school, about a marijuana arrest if they agree to become a confidential informant. The students, scared that they will lose on campus housing or be in trouble with their parents, go along with it, despite the obvious dangers of wearing a wire and participating in amateur sting operations against drug dealers.

Why do we allow our taxpayer dollars to turn young, vulnerable college students into a tool for exploitation by law enforcement?

It's an absolute travesty and a tragedy waiting to happen.