Whoever designed these patches was tripping balls.
There’s a long history of colorful patches like this in the military.
These just happen to be the most awesome, man.
Problematic that the DEA is not the military, but still shows signs of military culture?
yeah, yeah, preaching to the choir…
It’s a shame the don’t have a patch for the Clandestine Laboratory Investigation Team.
The ones for various clandestine operations – as glimpsed in “I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed by Me”, previously highlighted on BoingBoing – are also pretty entertaining. I know some police organizations also issue challenge coins.
Are there also response coins?
What’s a challenge coin? Is that the same idea as an Alcoholics Anonymous “N days sober” chip?
(“100 Lives Ruined”? “500 Lives’ Savings Seized Without Due Process”?)
I was going for Interdiction. Thanks a lot Kevin Smith. I AM THE CLET COMMANDER doesn’t have the same ring.
The military ones tend to look a bit less like they were sketched out on a teenage boy’s note book.
I believe those are officially referred to as “beers”
Do they have a patch for their program of “Aggressively harassing people for using substances which aren’t illegal, but we think should be”?
Sorry, a challenge coin is a military (mostly Navy?) thing. To commemorate certain operations they mint coins (often also painted) and distribute them to participants.
For example, a guy I worked with in a university lab had been in a few Navy Demonstration and Shakedown Operations (DASOs), and had a coin for each of them. A DASO is sort of a basic competence drill for a naval crew, happening about every 6 months or so. Based on that, I have to assume the bar for issuing challenge coins is pretty low.
On a separate occasion, it was pointed out that the more challenge coins you see mounted in a person’s office, the less time that person actually spends on a ship. Office jockeys and civilians seem to care about them a lot more than sailors.
EDIT: oh right, Wikipedia exists… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_coin
Where can I order the full set?
Their fraudulent scheduling of cannabis has let to the most destructive policy since slavery. We need to disband this corrupt inept agency.
It’s pretty much the opposite of a sobriety chip.
Hm, don’t all the patches fit under that category?
In some sense. I do think that prohibiting certain molecules from existing is asinine. But what bothers me even more about the DEA is their philosophy of wanting to decide what drugs they get to enforce. They rely entirely upon circular logic, saying that certain substances cannot be used responsibly, because they are classified as such, and any use is automatically abuse. But when they complain about things which aren’t controlled substances, they use a modified version of the same rationale - that people are getting away with using something because the DEA thinks it obviously should be illegal. They always complain that anything they can’t enforce is somehow skirting legality. I’d rather people would just decide what substances they prohibit and be done with it.
They aren’t prohibiting them from existing. They’re prohibiting you from having them or making them outside of your body.
I’m pretty sure that’s Congress, not the DEA.
This is not how it works in practice. They also go out of their way to destroy any which happen to be laying around, in case a person might use them later. They also like giving people grief over some they haven’t prohibited.
Who am I talking to? Since when are you concerned about practice instead of theory? This is crazy.
“Any” what? Illegal drugs? Sure, that’s their job…which is defined by the laws that Congress passes.
It isn’t that I’m sympathetic. My late father was a convicted class C felon because he grew and sold pot for a couple of decades and eventually had a SWAT team come through his back door.
Since always? It’s the whole point. This seems to cause a lot of cognitive dissonance with people.
Oh, I thought you were saying that they are merely “controlled substances”, not that they were illegal.
That’s quite a violent incursion for such a victimless crime. It’s only a matter of time before they kick in my door and ask me where I hide the “Pranayama” I’ve been giving to the locals…
