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http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/07/24/state-accused-of-using-occupy-protesters-as-guinea-pigs/
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By Jacob Gershman
Associated Press
Occupy Minnesota protesters in downtown Minneapolis in 2011.
Imagine you’re 18 years old and a police officer offers you a chunk of weed, asks you to smoke it in front of him and promises not to arrest you for doing so.
It’s not a drug-induced fantasy. It’s the subject of a lawsuit.
“Occupy” protesters in Minneapolis were used as “guinea pigs” in a government drug research program, their lawyer told a federal magistrate judge this week.
The hearing follows a February lawsuit filed by a half-dozen protesters in their late teens and early 20s who allege that police officers approached them at an Occupy Minneapolis demonstration, gave them large amounts of “powerful marijuana,” and then drove them to a government warehouse near an airport for observation.
The plaintiffs, who are suing state and local law enforcement agencies in Minnesota, say they later realized they had been subjects of the state’s “Drug Recognition Evaluator Training Program.” One of the participants was given at least 10 pipe bowls worth of marijuana, according to the lawsuit, which claims that police violated their privacy and First Amendment rights.
State and local police departments have asked a federal judge in Minnesota to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the plaintiffs voluntarily participated in the program.
“Our playing field is they used these kids as things, they used them as guinea pigs,” an attorney representing the protesters, Alan Milstein, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Franklin Noel at a hearing Monday, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported. “They used them as means to an end, and that’s wrong.”
Jason Hiveley, an attorney representing several police departments, said it wasn’t an experiment but a training evaluation. “Each Plaintiff voluntarily used marijuana and voluntarily participated in the evaluations performed by the officers enrolled in the drug recognition program,” he told Law Blog by email. “The Plaintiffs knew exactly what they were getting involved in.”
Attorneys representing Minnesota law-enforcement agencies said the program had a legitimate purpose of training officers to recognize signs of drug impairment, according to earlier court papers. The state temporarily suspended it last year after it came under a state review, and then relaunched it in June with new protocols. The field evaluations now take place in California, where possession of medical marijuana is legal.
The plaintiffs don’t know the names of the officers who allegedly supplied the protesters with drugs, Nathan Hansen, another one of their attorneys, told Law Blog. In the spring of 2012, when the incidents allegedly took place, about two dozen officers were taking part in the training, he said.
― how's life, Thursday, 25 July 2013 19:42 (twelve years ago)