Originally published at: Cops use drug-sniffing dogs to detect abortion pills - Boing Boing
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A reminder to undecided idiots and third-party that there are indeed vast a d glaring differences between the Dem and GOP candidates, and that voting for the wrong one has consequences for everyone.
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Experts question why a police dog would alert on abortion medication. One theory is unconscious “cueing” by handlers, where dogs respond to subtle human behaviors rather than actual scents.
That’s how drug-sniffing dogs work normally (e.g. when brought out for traffic stops) so I’m surprised that experts would even question it. The handler knew there were pills, so caused the dog to alert on something it wasn’t trained to detect. Though it’s clearly only a matter of time before dogs are trained to detect abortion pills, too.
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Taking for granted that the K9 is sniffing for “illegal pharmaceuticals” successfully, I believe that the K9 is detecting some of the common inert ingredients that are part of the pill manufacturing for nearly all medications including most OTC items, and has nothing to do with the active ingredients.
I would love to see the K9 ability tested as a double-blind test, especially in a court room in front of the jurors. (Punchline, none of the test items were “illegal”.)
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Because it is like something from The Handmaid’s Tale, because Margaret Atwood deliberately put it there as something that has happened, and will keep happening unless it is stopped.
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According to the report, in Jackson, Mississippi, a police officer and his K-9 partner were called to a post office after an employee reported someone putting pills into pink envelopes.
Do we know what the pills actually are? I mean if a post office employee is watching you stuff a hundred envelopes with pills I would be a little suspect of that situation as well.
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What’s that Lassie?
[woof]
There’s pills in the envelopes at the sorting office?
[woof]
Which envelopes?
[woof]
All of them, eh? We’d better get down there to open them, then.
FFS, is there any way this can be brought to trial and the judge enforce a blind test? “So, officer, there are 10 envelopes here, please can your dog tell me which three have the abortion pills in them? No? Judgement for the plaintiff, with damages.”
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Just a reminder that your cat will never turn you in -
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I suspect that they knew exactly who was sending these pills out, and the dog was just being used as a probable cause generator to make the legal issue of searching this person’s mail go away.
I suspect that because that’s how police dogs always work.
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If the defense can prove this, then that “evidence” becomes inadmissible due to the evidence now being part of the “fruit from the poisonous tree.”
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Or this is a bullshit story that the xianists made up to scare people from sending or receiving abortion pills by mail because magic abortion pill detecting dogs will detect their abortion pills through magic.
This. Who TF stuffs a bunch of envelopes with pills in front of witnesses? Anyone sending abortion pills by mail like this knows this is borderline to fully illegal, and isn’t going to stuff pills into envelopes in public like a third grade valentines party.
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“The investigation found that “nearly 100 pregnant people did not receive little pink packages containing the medicine they requested” due to this operation.”
This makes me so angry my head is spinning. Potentially up to 100 people who may now be forced to have children they don’t want to have risking poverty, death, future health problems, loss of employment or education, being trapped in abusive relationships, etc etc.
Fuck these inbred scumbags.
Tl:dr ACAB
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The dog was alerting for narcotics, so it’s already discredited. (Their justification was that these commercially produced pharmaceuticals must have somehow become contaminated with trace amounts of narcotics that only the dog could detect. How convenient.)
The problem is, what’s going on is so much worse than a search for illegal pills, or random mail opening:
A postal worker, seeing someone mailing possible abortion pills (but just as easily could have been: contraceptives/sex toys/gay literature/etc.) which isn’t, in itself, illegal, but they don’t like it, calls in a drug-sniffing dog. The dog alerts for “narcotics,” purely because the handler was told there were pills in the packages, but the alert becomes the justification for a warrant to have all the packages from that sender seized. It’s both indiscriminate (in that you can target anything being mailed, regardless of what’s in the package), but also highly discriminatory (in that one can select only the specific packages you want to stop) It’s perfect for the fascists trying to enact project 2025, but they don’t even have to change any laws to do it.
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After the woof warrant nonsense to open them, the pretext to seize them was that they were illegally imported Indian generics. That does sound like it’s within the USPS mandate, but I wonder what they’ll do when they open a package with US-sourced pills, possibly with a prescription?
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I suspect that, at that point, it’ll be up to the recipient to untangle things, and if they’re living in a state where abortion is illegal…
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