MARIJUANA EXPERIMENT COSTS DEKALB OFFICERS THEIR JOBS

When two DeKalb County police officers asked a local lawyer to smoke a joint
in front of other officers to demonstrate the effects of marijuana on a
driver, there's only one question that comes to mind.

What were they thinking?

Maybe they weren't concerned because it was less than an ounce of pot and
the demonstration, according to DeKalb police, was in the controlled
environment of the DeKalb County Jail. Maybe they were thinking of similar
demonstrations in which willing subjects have been asked to drink until they
became intoxicated to show what a 0.08 blood-alcohol level really means.

Except for one big difference. "Drinking is legal," DeKalb Police Chief
Bobby Burgess said. "Smoking dope is not."

Officers D.L. Nix and Norman McGrath -- both assigned to the department's
Strategic Traffic Accident Reduction team -- used marijuana confiscated
during an arrest by a fellow officer to stage the field demonstration for
other officers at the Georgia Police Academy, Burgess said. They enlisted a
local lawyer as a guinea pig, police said. The field exercise's supervisor,
an Atlanta police officer, apparently didn't try to stop the demonstration.

Some of the attending police officers subsequently complained. So did the
director of the Georgia Police Academy when he found out.

No criminal charges have been filed against any of the participants. But
after the DeKalb police internal affairs division began investigating the
allegations against Nix and McGrath, Nix apologized and resigned. Two weeks
later, on Aug. 24, McGrath was fired, Burgess said.