WHAT'S THE BOON AFTER STATE'S BUST OF DRUG-TOTING CHURCH COURIER?

On a Monday morning in February, Joseph Butts was headed east on
Interstate 44. He was driving a 2001 Chevrolet pickup with Arizona
plates. He was stopped by a Missouri Highway Patrol officer in Franklin County.

According to the police report, the officer stopped the truck because
of erratic driving. Perhaps so. Then again, I-44 is known as a major
thoroughfare for drug traffickers, and it's possible that a pickup
with Arizona plates had caught the eye of a veteran cop. Or it could
have been a combination of things. The report mentions that the
pickup had begun to pass a tractor-trailer when the pickup suddenly
decreased its speed and fell in behind the tractor-trailer. Was that
erratic or just suspicious? Maybe the driver of the pickup had seen
the patrol car. At any rate, the highway patrolman pulled over the pickup.

Butts, who is 48 years old, seemed nervous. He told the officer that
he was headed east to look for work. The officer asked to see the
vehicle's registration. The registration showed that the truck
belonged to Humberto Obezo Parra of Nogales, Ariz. That's a town on
the Mexican border.

The officer asked Butts whether he would consent to a search of the
vehicle. Butts said he had borrowed the truck from his sister-in-law,
and she would not want people climbing over it. That did not satisfy
the officer. He called for a drug-sniffing dog.

When the dog arrived, it became excited and that gave police probable
cause to search the truck. They found 338 pounds of marijuana.

And that would have been that - just another sad story in the
never-ending War on Drugs - except that when the officers announced
their intention to put Butts under arrest, he stated that such an
arrest would be tantamount to a hate crime. He pulled out an
official-looking document that identified him as a Special Courier,
whose duties included "the transporting of religious instruments,
properties, and sacrament, for and between Member Monasteries of the
Church of Cognizance."

That church, which you can look up on the Internet, believes that
marijuana is a deity and a sacrament. It is a central part of the
members' religious observance.

Unfortunately for Butts, the Missouri Highway Patrol does not
recognize the church. Nor does the state. He was treated not as a
courier carrying 338 pounds of religious instruments to monasteries,
but as a common criminal.

Religious freedom aside, this is the kind of I-44 bust that has
always bugged me. What does the state gain? We interrupt a tiny
fraction of the dope that is flowing from somewhere west to somewhere
east, and we pay the costs of taking some guy to trial and then we
pay the costs of incarcerating him for years. Even if you believe in
this War on Drugs - and I don't - you have to wonder what's in it for
us. A used truck, I suppose.

Happily for Missouri taxpayers, the feds decided to grab jurisdiction
in this particular case. So at least the expenses would be spread out
among all the states.

And did I just say that all we'd get is a used truck? Forgive me.
We'd also get an entertaining trial. The Native American Church is
allowed to use peyote in religious ceremonies. Who's to say one
offbeat church is more "real" than another? And who's to say what's
offbeat, anyway? More folks have attended unofficial ceremonies for
the Church of Cognizance than for the Native American Church. All of
this would make for a good argument.

But shortly after Butts was arrested, the head of the church, the
Enlightened Cogniscenti himself, Danuel Quaintance, was busted in New
Mexico. He and his wife and a friend were allegedly transporting 172
pounds of religious instruments to monasteries. So the Butts case was
transferred to New Mexico to be part of a conspiracy case.

So now we don't even get a trial. I'm not sure who gets the truck.