In Austin, Texas, two young parents smoked pot, so the state took their two-year-old daughter away from them and placed her in foster care.
The father noticed that his daughter Alexandria had many bruises on her arms and legs during the first foster placement, so the agency, Texas Mentor, moved Alexandria to another foster home.
Where she died, allegedly murdered.
More, below.
Here's the Daily Mail lede:
A foster mother in Austin, Texas has been charged with beating a toddler to death after she was placed in her care because social services found her biological parents smoking pot.
There are heartbreaking photos of this beautiful blonde girl at the Daily mail site, and lots of detail.
The father's take:
She was placed into foster care for neglectful supervision because her mother and I smoked pot at the time.
That's a crime, more so in Texas than in more enlightened states, but there was no evidence that this child was actually neglected by her parents, other than this odd bit from the court records:
Alexandria's mother has a medical condition that does not allow her to be left alone with her own child and Hill's marijuana use had become so bad he almost dropped his daughter down the stairs.
Pot-smoking dad allegedly almost, but not quite, once dropped his daughter down the stairs.
The foster person employed by a contractor to the state of Texas allegedly admitted throwing Alexandria to the ground, causing head injuries that killed her.
This is apparently a bigger story for a British tabloid than for the Austin newspaper, which covered this tragedy as a police blotter brief.
It should be a much bigger story here, not the part about the tabloid murder, but the part about how the War on Drugs obviously helped kill this little girl.
Her parents were young, evidently poor, unmarried, and probably not perfect child-rearers.
But that was not enough for the state of Texas to take their daughter away.
Smoking pot was the clincher, even though abuse of marijuana is infinitesimally less likely to cause parents to injure their children than abuse of alcohol.
The War on Drugs, which is, in most instances like this, a War on Marijuana, has become a kind of racket, with police agencies, testing companies, the prison-industrial complex, foster care agencies, court-connected rehab outfits, etc., scamming billions -- mostly from taxpayers.
In an almost century-long losing conflict with the many millions of Americans who like to smoke pot.