FIREDOGLAKE: A federally funded drug task force seized as evidence up to 200 petition signatures for marijuana legalization in Washington State in a series of early-morning raids this week. Seizing the petition signatures is bad enough. What’s worse is what the task force did on its raids of a legal marijuana dispensary and its owner’s home. Drug agents handcuffed a 14-year-old boy and pointed a gun at his head. Then they took $80 from a 9-year-old girl’s Minnie Mouse wallet that she earned for straight A’s on her report card. Now the drug agents – funded by the US Department of Justice – say they can only find two pages of the petition. But they had time to make photocopies of the petition, keeping the names and addresses of residents who 
signed. We started our own petition demanding the release of the seized signatures that we’ll deliver to the task force headquarters next week. MORE
SEATTLE WEEKLY: Christine Casey, patient coordinator of North End Club 420, tells the Weekly that detectives from the West Sound Narcotics Enforcement Team (WestNet) who came to her house in Olalla (west of Vashon Island) handcuffed her 14-year-old son for two hours and put a gun to his head. They also told the kid to say goodbye to his dad, Guy Casey, because the dispensary owner was going to prison. And as the detectives looked for cash to prove that the dispensary was illegally profiting from pot sales, Casey says, they confiscated $80 that her 9-year-old daughter had received from her family for a straight-A report card. Where did they find it? In the girl’s Mickey Mouse wallet, according to Casey. She also claims that the cops dumped out all her silverware, busted a hole in the wall, and broke appliances. She alleges, too, that the cops finger-wrote “I sell pot” in the dust covering the family’s Hummer (which the cops then seized). MORE