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A Massachusetts laboratory has been closed amid allegations that tens of thousands of drug samples were mishandled. The Massachusetts governor released figures showing the manager conducted an "unusually high volume" of testing between 2004 and 2011, and now thousands of criminal convictions and pending cases remain in the balance.

Who knows how many other states have this same problem. The drug war has given too much power to too many people, one of the reasons it continues and one of the reasons it must be stopped. A lab technician shouldn’t be able to decide who goes to jail for a non-violent offense (or any offense, for that matter).

Obviously oversight is a key, but that misses the bigger picture. The war on drugs is handing a tremendous amount of power to individuals who abuse that power and were never ready to assume it in the first place.

Besides, the less labs have to focus on non-violent drug offenders, the more they can focus on important results, and the more efficient the oversight will be. Yet another way an end to the drug war will help society and even help the government that props it up.

In this video, KopBuster and former narcotics officer Barry Cooper details how police use SWAT tactics and overreach their bounds when raiding homes.

Police have a tremendous power and drug laws open up too many opportunities for them to use it.

Police officers are human and they make mistakes, but when you are packing the kind of firepower that a SWAT team does, a “mistake” quickly becomes a slaughter.

Marijuana laws in particular lead to many of the events shown in the video below. A good man murdered, a family grieving and wondering why. Forever scarred because a plant is illegal and police have tremendous power to enforce its prohibition.

This story is a few months old, even though the video is very new. Even so, stories like this need to be shared everywhere. More people need to know that the drug war isn’t just a failure, it is an active evil in our society that does great damage to individuals and families.

Police shouldn’t be at war with the public, they should be protecting us. Law Enforcement loses the respect of the public through their attempted enforcement of prohibition. Without the public’s respect, there is no trust.

Heavy marijuana use is associated with cognitive decline in about 5% of teens, according to a new study, which suggests that the heaviest users could lose 8 IQ points. In the report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, research conducted in New Zealand showed that teens who started smoking marijuana before age 18 and were diagnosed as being addicted to cannabis by age 38 experienced an IQ drop in early adulthood. But users who began smoking after age 18 - even if they used heavily— did not show a significant decline.

A couple things can be taken from this study, including heavy adult marijuana users showing no decline in IQ. And let’s assume for a moment that this study is right, and those under 18 shouldn’t use marijuana. If true, this is one of the biggest reasons to legalize marijuana for adults.

What is easier for kids to get, alcohol sold at a store or marijuana sold out of some shady dude’s basement? The answer is obvious. The more regulation placed around a product, the less able kids are to get it. Leaving marijuana in the black market makes it more accessible to those under 18, because drug dealers don’t check I.D.

You can’t be fighting for kids to stay off marijuana and approve of keeping it illegal; they are two different lines of logic.