Read the whole article because it’s hilarious.
Not saying drugs haven’t ruined lives, but the war on drugs has ruined far more.
I think pretty much every kid I knew who went through D.A.R.E. in middle school (including me) ended up smoking a lot of weed in high school.
D.A.R.E. shirts were a status symbol, but not for the reason they would have liked.
Everyone who grew up with that was finally exposed to a drug setting–a party, some acquaintance, something. They watched these people do the drug and maybe participated out of curiosity and suddenly realized that the whole DARE thing was just a bunch of propaganda that had nothing to do with reality.
Holy shit, they pulled the emergency release on one of those MRI machines. I think that adds a zero or two to the cost of bringing back online.
I’m just an XRay tech. But I would expect at least one whole day, for a pair of engineers to get it running again and re-certified. $20-50K for their time, plus missed revenue from the lost day. Best case could total $100K easy. Way more, if the damage is more than cosmetic.
You’re not counting the materials costs. I doubt that medical grade helium is cheap.
True. I don’t know how much that is. But liquid helium shouldn’t be “medical grade” really. It’s just a coolant for the superconducting magnets, same as any industrial use.
Yeah, I think I remember something like 10-20k to refill the cooling on an MRI, and that is just topping it off as some is slowly lost. The helium is just used to cool it. Helium is helium, so no such thing as medical vs not. The cost to repair this thing is going to be absurd. They are making better machines now have little to no loss, but I don’t think those are super prevalent yet.
At one point, an officer walked into an MRI room, past a sign warning that metal was prohibited inside, with his rifle “dangling… in his right hand, with an unsecured strap,” the lawsuit said.
Honestly this might be a case where his laziness saved his life. If he’d been strapped in properly depending on where that strap goes he could’ve taken a nasty ride. And that would have been priceless to watch.
Officers allegedly raided the diagnostic center, located in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, thinking it was a front for an illegal cannabis cultivation facility, pointing to higher-than-usual energy use and the “distinct odor” of cannabis plants, according to the lawsuit.
MRI machine probably draws quite a bit
The real takeaway here is that they bullshitted smelling an odor of cannabis when there was none as an excuse to justify starting the raid in the first place. Some officer(s) lied on a form somewhere.
I don’t know if there is any single takeaway here, this story is just fucking ridiculous on every single level.
- They bullshited themselves into a search warrant based on typical cannabis “investigation methods”.
- In a state where recreational cannabis use is legal.
- Persisted in the search even after their main argument for it, high energy usage indicating a grow-op, fell away when it was clear it was indeed a medical facility.
- Made the motherfucking “Gun flies to MRI” TV trope a certified reality. This is a thing that verifiably happened now.
- Instead of getting help, used a sealed (!) emergency shutdown button…
- …which damaged the machine. And released thousands of dollars worth of helium gas.
- Forgot their loaded magazine on the ground.
This can’t be real. I’m fucking dying over here. Please let there be bodycam footage of the cop speaking in a high pitched voice after. (I know the helium was probably not released into the room, but one can hope I guess)
Didn’t they recently rule that cops can no longer use the “I smelled weed” excuse as reasonable suspicion/probable cause? Maybe that was just one state.
Seems doubly ridiculous that this happened in California
And if it did smell like weed near the MRI place, you know what I’d suspect? That’s a venn diagram with cancer patients in the middle.
You really want to crack down on cancer patients?
Or an employee regularly smokes a joint in the alley. Article says there was one employee in the office during the raid.
“Doctors are just a bunch of overeducated assholes who think they are smarter than everyone else. What could they possibly be doing with all that electricity?”
- LAPD probably
The icing on the donut:
The officer then grabbed his rifle and left the room, leaving behind a magazine filled with bullets on the office floor, according to the lawsuit.
At all points. It was a gang that started wearing was given badges, not a ‘serve and protect’ force that (d)evolved into a gang.
Well I can only speak for where I grew up (not CA) in the 90s, and police were far less militarized back then.
They may have always been racist pieces of shit, but things are definitely much worse than they were back then.
