THE KILLING OF RACHEL HOFFMAN AND THE TRAGEDY THAT IS POT PROHIBITION

Rachel Hoffman is dead. Rachel Hoffman, like many young adults,
occasionally smoked marijuana. But Rachel Hoffman is not dead as a
result of smoking marijuana; she is dead as a result of marijuana prohibition.

Under prohibition, Rachel faced up to five years in a Florida prison
for possessing a small amount of marijuana. (Under state law,
violators face up to a $5,000 fine and five years in prison for
possession of more than 20 grams of pot.)

Under prohibition, the police in Rachel's community viewed the
23-year-old recent college graduate as nothing more than a criminal
and threatened her with jail time unless she cooperated with them as
an untrained, unsupervised confidential informant. Her assignment:
Meet with two men she'd never met and purchase a large quantity of
cocaine, ecstasy and a handgun. Rachel rendezvoused with the two men;
they shot and killed her.

Under prohibition, the law enforcement officers responsible for
brazenly and arrogantly placing Rachel in harm's way have failed to
publicly express any remorse -- because, after all, under prohibition
Rachel Hoffman was no longer a human being deserving of such sympathies.

Speaking on camera to ABC News' "20/20" last week, Tallahassee Police
Chief Dennis Jones attempted to justify his department's callous and
irresponsible behavior, stating, "My job as a police chief is to find
these criminals in our community and to take them off the streets
(and) to make the proper arrest."

But in Rachel Hoffman's case, she was not taken "off the streets,"
and police made no such arrest -- probably because, deep down, even
they know that people like Rachel pose no imminent threat to the
public. Instead, the officers on the scene secretly cut a deal with
Rachel: They told her that they would not file charges if she agreed
to go undercover.

Rachel became the bait; the Tallahassee police force went trolling for sharks.

In the weeks preceding Rachel's murder, police told her to remain
tight-lipped about their backroom agreement -- and with good reason.
The cops' on-the-spot deal with Rachel flagrantly violated
Tallahassee Police Department protocol, which mandated that such an
arrangement must first gain formal approval from the state
prosecutor's office. Knowing that the office would likely not sign
off on their deal -- Rachel was already enrolled in a drug court
program from a prior pot possession charge, and cooperating with the
TPD as a drug informant would be in violation of her probation -- the
police simply decided to move forward with their informal arrangement
and not tell anybody.

"(In) hindsight, would it have been a good idea to let the state
attorney know? Yes," Jones feebly told "20/20." Damn right it would
have been; Rachel Hoffman would still be alive.

But don't expect Jones or any of the other officers who violated the
department's code of conduct -- violations that resulted in the death
of another human being -- to face repercussions for their actions.
Obeying the rules is merely "a good idea" for those assigned with
enforcing them. On the other hand, for people like Rachel, violating
those rules can be a death sentence.

Of course, to those of us who work in marijuana law reform, we
witness firsthand every day the adverse consequences wrought by
marijuana prohibition -- a policy that has led to the arrest of
nearly 10 million young people since 1990. To us, the sad tale of
Rachel Hoffman marks neither the beginning nor the end of our ongoing
efforts to bring needed "reefer sanity" to America's criminal justice
system. It is simply another chapter in the ongoing and tragic saga
that is marijuana prohibition.