Especially marijuana.
From Wonkblog at The Washington Post,
By Christopher Ingraham August 11 at 7:30 AM
Police officers in Mason City, Iowa, get a look at the department's new mine resistant-ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle on loan from the Department of Defense on Monday, April 14, 2014. (AP Photo/The Globe Gazette, Arian Schuessler)
If you're going to wage war on drugs, you need to be outfitted like a warrior.
That seems to be the rationale behind hundreds of police department requests for armored trucks submitted to the Pentagon between 2012 and 2014. The requests, unearthed in a FOIA request by Mother Jones magazine, shed light on how the war on drugs has directly contributed to the militarization of local police forces in recent years.
Police departments can request surplus military gear from the Pentagon through the Department of Defense's 1033 program, which doles outhundreds of millions of dollars in military goods to cops each year. Theequipment includes everything from underwear to office equipment to armored combat vehicles. After Ferguson, when images of local cops training assault rifles on peaceful protestors from atop armored trucks flooded the airwaves, the program has come under increasing scrutiny.
The Mother Jones investigation focuses on requests for armored combat vehicles, arguably the most iconic piece of police military equipment in the post-Ferguson era. Among the requests Mother Jones obtained, the most frequently-cited rationale for needing an armored vehicle was drugs: "Fully a quarter of the 465 requests projected using the vehicles for drug enforcement," the investigation found. By contrast, police departments rarely cited hostage situations, terrorist attacks or armed gunmen as rationale for obtaining the trucks.
At least seven departments explicitly cited marijuana in their vehicle requests, tying pot with methamphetamines for the drug that shows up most often in the documents. In 2012, Sheriff Tom Bosenko of Shasta County, Calif.,requested two armored tactical vehicles to be "used during apprehension of suspects in both Marijuana eradications and during high risk search warrant service for drug offenders."
In 2013, the Sheriff of Sumter County, Fl., requested one armored vehicle partly because his office had located "several marijuana grows both indoors and outdoors" in Sumter County. Here's how other departments wanted to wage war on pot from the gun turret of an armored truck:
