Author Archives: Jay Butchko
What Happens If Police Go to Your House to Search for Drugs, but They Find Evidence of Other Crimes?
Pursuant to the Fourth Amendment, police cannot search your residence or other private property of yours unless there is a compelling reason to do so. In order to search your property legally, they must obtain a search warrant, and to do this, they must convince a judge that the search will yield specific items… Read More »
Directed Verdicts in Florida Drug Cases
In criminal cases, jurors must decide whether the defendant is innocent or guilty of the charges at hand, and the law includes several safeguards to prevent outside factors from influencing the jurors’ decisions. Jury selection is often a protracted process as prosecutors and defense lawyers examine potential jurors to determine whether they are capable… Read More »
Is Scopolamine Illegal?
The five drug schedules of the Controlled Substances Act only tell you how lawmakers think that the risks and benefits of a drug compare to each other; they are not based on a mathematical formula, such as Schedule I being reserved for drugs where a tiny dose can be lethal. For example, MDMA is… Read More »
The Fallibility of Memory Is Not the Only Problem With Eyewitness Testimony
These days, people seem aware that all humans have biases, although the circumstances surrounding when a person works this fact into conversation reveal a lot about that person’s own biases. On the one hand, the court system has safeguards in place to prevent the biases of the judge and jury from standing in the… Read More »
FDA Votes Against Approving MDMA
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must approve every ingredient before it can be used as an ingredient in a food or pharmaceutical drug. It is the regulatory body that decides, among other things, which food dyes are legally considered edible, thereby determining which radiant hues can be present in the candies in your… Read More »
MDMA Remains a Schedule I Controlled Substance for Now
In Florida, it is not hard to find people who hold unorthodox scientific views or who are generally skeptical of biomedical research. You probably know someone who thinks that common food ingredients are the source of all their physical and emotional discomfort or someone who believes that weed cures every disease that is worth… Read More »
How Many Degrees of Separation Are You From a Life Sentence for Drug Conspiracy?
Florida law makes a lot of threats, and Floridians happily ignore them. Lawmakers threaten to impose life sentences for drug trafficking, while Floridians go on injecting, ingesting, and inhaling with little regard for which drugs are on which schedule of controlled substances, and which drugs are even present in the powders and pills they… Read More »
Who’s Afraid of Tuci?
The gossip about the legal problems surrounding Sean Combs, the recording artist and entrepreneur who has variously been known by the stage names Puff Daddy and Diddy, just keeps getting more complicated. This spring, an associate of Combs, Brendan Paul, was arrested at an airport in Miami and accused of transporting drugs at Combs’s… Read More »
Broward Men Face Criminal Charges After Throwing Backpack Full of Drugs Out the Window on Alligator Alley
If you want to ditch a backpack full of stuff you aren’t supposed to have, there are worse places to do it than Alligator Alley at night. An isolated stretch of road, surrounded by alligator-infested marshes connecting Florida’s Gold Coast to the Paradise Coast, is one of the few places in Florida you can… Read More »
Take a Deep Breath and Turn Yourself In
Florida has a lot of scary things. The ordinary afternoon thunderstorms are so terrifying that any reasonable person would head for the hills long before Florida appears in the cone projecting the path of a tropical storm or hurricane. Nutria and iguanas are everywhere, and even the ducks that hang around Florida’s numerous man… Read More »
