Imagine you’re 18 years old and a police officer offers you a chunk of weed, asks you to smoke it in front of him and promises not to arrest you for doing so.

It’s not a drug-induced fantasy. It’s the subject of a lawsuit.

“Occupy” protesters in Minneapolis were used as “guinea pigs” in a government drug research program, their lawyer told a federal magistrate judge this week.

The hearing follows a February lawsuit filed by a half-dozen protesters in their late teens and early 20s who allege that police officers approached them at an Occupy Minneapolis demonstration, gave them large amounts of “powerful marijuana,” and then drove them to a government warehouse near an airport for observation.

The plaintiffs, who are suing state and local law enforcement agencies in Minnesota, say they later realized they had been subjects of the state’s “Drug Recognition Evaluator Training Program.” One of the participants was given at least 10 pipe bowls worth of marijuana, according to the lawsuit, which claims that police violated their privacy and First Amendment rights.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/07/24/state-accused-of-using-occupy-protesters-as-guinea-pigs/

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