This time the pot smoker actually isn’t the only person responsible. Apparently 30-year-old Emanuel Lawrence was enabled by his old lady who worked all day and went to school at night while Lawrence “watched the kids” which he did by getting high and playing video games for hours at a time. Since he’s unemployed I assume she paid for his weed, which contributed to the death of one of their children.

From CBS4:

The incident occurred on November 19th at their home on the 10000 block of Winding Lakes Road. Lawrence lived there with his girlfriend, their 7-month-old baby and their other child who is 3.

Police say Lawrence, who is unemployed, had stayed up late the night before smoking marijuana and playing X-Box. The mother woke up Lawrence and told him to feed the children. He fed the children and brought them back into the bed with him, Gerity said.

Seven and a half hours went by before he woke up only to discover he had rolled over on the baby and suffocated her.

Police say that’s when he put the baby back in the crib and went to a friend’s house to call 911.

I’m sure if pot was legal this would have never happened.

h/t Trench

Some of you may remember the story of Diane Schuler, the high and drunk woman who crashed her minivan full of children into another carload of people, killing herself and several other people including her daughter and three of her nieces. As I pointed out when first covering this awful story, studies have shown chronic marijuana users are more likely to be involved in car accidents than sober people and “acute” use raises the chances of being involved in an accident significantly. In this case, the stoned woman was driving the wrong way on a parkway when she caused the accident.

I mention this story (yet again) because I have frequently been told by potheads that they are excellent drivers, which is asinine and indicative of the selfishness of drug users who are always willing to endanger other people’s lives to party. Now Diane Schuler’s sister-in-law has confirmed what people have known all along, she was an immature party girl who thought getting high was more important than her responsibility to her children and other drivers on the road:

The sister-in-law of Taconic Parkway wrong-way driver Diane Schuler has told police Schuler smoked pot every day, according to a lawyer for victims of the crash.

The admission runs contrary to high-profile reports by Diane’s husband, Daniel Schuler, who has said his wife didn’t drink or use drugs.

Police have said Diane was high and drunk on July 26 when she drove her minivan the wrong way on the Taconic and crashed in Westchester County, killing herself, her 2-year-old daughter, her three nieces and three men from Yonkers.

The new evidence was revealed during a meeting on Friday with police and representatives from the district attorney’s office to go over evidence, including security footage of the children eating breakfast at a McDonald’s and Diane Schuler pumping gas, according to Irving Anolik, lawyer for the families of victims Michael and Guy Bastardi.

Anolik said Joan Schuler, sister of Daniel, “told them that she knew for a fact that the deceased, Diane Schuler, used marijuana daily because of the fact that she didn’t believe in doctors and that this was the best medicine in the world, as far as she was concerned.”

Anolik said he was “annoyed” and his clients were “outraged” at prior reports by Daniel Schuler and his attorney that Diane Schuler was clean of drugs and alcohol.

Yes, pot is “medicine” according to many pot smokers, but there’s nothing healthy about drinking and drugging as reports on Schuler’s behavior clearly indicate:

 Schuler stopped her red minivan loaded with kids on Route 17 at approximately 11:45 a.m. on July 26, the police report says.

“[The witnesses] noticed an adult female outside of the vehicle with brown hair, wearing blue, knee-length shorts, bent over with her hands on her knees, as if throwing up,” the report stated.

Afterward, the red van was seen “zigzagging in and out of traffic.”

Just north of the Ramapo rest stop, the witnesses “saw this same van pulled over” and the female “again with her hands on her knees.”

At 1:35 p.m. — driving the wrong way down the Taconic Parkway in Westchester — Schuler rammed her minivan into a Chevy Trailblazer.

Schuler, her daughter, Erin, 2, and her three nieces — Emma Hance, 8, Alyson Hance, 7, and Katie Hance, 5 — died in the crash. Killed in the Trailblazer were Michael Bastardi, 81, his son Guy Bastardi, 49, and Daniel Longo, 74.

An autopsy showed Schuler had a blood-alcohol level of 0.19. There also was evidence of a high level of THC in her blood, indicating she had smoked marijuana.

Mike Bastardi Jr., whose father, brother and family friend died in the crash, called the latest revelations “outrageous.”

“She threw up twice and kept drinking and smoking pot,” he alleged.

Yeah, that sounds pretty selfish. People in their latter 30s who still smoke pot even though they have children often are. Diane Schuler spent her life partying the way she did when she was a teenager and eight people payed the price for her inability to grow up and get sober with their lives.

But I’m sure legalizing pot would have prevented this right?

Legalization advocates claim that a legal pot market would be a magical thing. Criminal drug dealers would fade away in vampiric agony at the sight of this Libertarian sunrise which would usher in a new dawn of responsible drug use. But in California where there is a legal pot market (the “medical” marijuana industry) organized crime has been taking advantage the legal market and committing other crimes to do so. This is the latest example:

 Federal prosecutors announced 18 indictments Thursday in a pot cultivation and mortgage fraud scheme that purchased homes in Elk Grove and Sacramento and converted them into bustling “grow houses” for tens of thousands of marijuana plants.

Nine people are in custody. Authorities are searching for other indicted suspects who may have fled from the Bay Area to China.

The individuals were charged with orchestrating bogus real estate transactions to buy 51 houses in the Central Valley, then establish indoor pot-growing operations using sophisticated lighting and irrigation and stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of electricity.

“They came into our cookie-cutter residential neighborhoods and created cookie-cutter marijuana factories,” said Gordon Taylor, assistant special agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Sacramento.

The indictments stemmed from the discovery of massive indoor growing operations in 2006 and 2007 in Elk Grove, Sacramento, Stockton, Lathrop, Tracy, Modesto and the Alameda County town of Mountain House.

Three people were indicted on charges of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, in connection with pot operations at 15 houses in Elk Grove and six in Sacramento.

One suspect in the local grows, Guo Ying “Ivan” Lu, 29, of Milpitas is in custody. Two others, Siming Zhu, 32, and Dennis Hou Huan Yang, 28, both of San Francisco, remain at large.

This crop of indictments follows 17 previous actions in the pot-growing case. Fifteen people pleaded guilty in those earlier indictments and two fled after authorities seized 24,200 marijuana plants from the indoor growing operations. The high-grade pot was worth $96 million and its potency “was the highest we’ve ever seen in this area,” Taylor said.

With the new sealed indictments, authorities said they climbed the ladder of an intricate organized crime operation based in San Francisco.

One of the newly indicted suspects being sought in the case, Dickson Wing Kei Hung, 35, is a real estate agent from San Francisco. He was indicted on charges of marijuana conspiracy and mail fraud for allegedly setting up phony mortgage loans to buy houses for the operations.

Sacramento U.S. Attorney Larry Brown said the scheme began to unravel in late 2006 when neighbors started noticing unkempt lawns and strange activity at houses where no one was living.

[…]

He said Hung and associates recruited “individuals with good credit ratings” to sign mortgage loan applications for homes they never intended to occupy. But he said the loan applications were augmented with bogus employment and exaggerated salary information.

He said some buyers “knew they were being used to grow marijuana. But others had no idea.” None of the people who posed as buyers have been charged to date, O’Briant said.

Many of the grow houses were rigged to steal electricity and at least 52 of the houses are already in foreclosure.What do you medical marijuana users say to that?

Via the Hot Air headlines, where the air is full of pot smoke

Oh, if only we legalized marijuana then all those decent pot smokers criminalized by our puritanical sobriety loving ways wouldn’t be forced to use drugs to lure children into sexual relationships, or at least that what a bunch of Libertarians tried to tell me in the comments of a Hot Air story yesterday.

Once it’s legal this could never happen right tokers?

A Monroe County man already accused of drug trafficking has been arrested on charges he gave drugs and money to a 15-year-old girl in exchange for sex.

Julio Santiago, 28, of Tobyhanna, was held in the Monroe County Correctional Facility on $100,000 bail after his arrest for involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a minor, aggravated indecent sexual assault, statutory sexual assault and related charges.

The new charges were filed on Friday as Mr. Santiago appeared before Magisterial District Judge Anthony Fluegel for his preliminary hearing on drug-trafficking charges. Those charges were bound over to Monroe County Court.

According to Pocono Mountain Regional Police, Mr. Santiago admitted having a sexual relationship with the 15-year-old girl while selling drugs out of his home at Pocono Country Place.

Mr. Santiago allegedly gave the teenager drugs and money to engage in sexual activity, which he videotaped on at least one occasion.

But since he wouldn’t be a dealer he would no longer be the kind of person who gave drugs to a child and videotaped himself sexually exploiting her right? Bah! Drug users and dealers are scum and will continue their criminality if drugs are legalized. This person would still-have given drugs to children to have sex with them, and the only way to avoid that (which I’ve seen literally advocated by people) is to make it legal for children to get high. The thinking being if we legally got kids high they wouldn’t be sexually exploited I guess.

When are we going to admit that a large chunk of the drug culture is about sexual exploitation? Men who can’t pick up women on their own merits get women (and often children) high because it’s the only way for them to have sex. That’s the truth about weed, and someone needs to say it.You ladies want to end up trying to collect child support from a stoner who works in Starbucks and lives with his parents go ahead and get high with your “friends” but don’t say I didn’t warn you.