When the "war on drugs" met a man who wanted to "live free or die"

Like Prohibition, the war on drugs has generated great evils

It’s made national news by now, and so the information I’m getting is from the Washington Post: Apparently, around 6 p.m. on April 12th, members of the New Hampshire Drug Task Force went to serve a search warrant on Cullen Mutrie of Greenland. They were ostensibly searching for steroids, and if they found any in Mutrie’s home, presumably planned to arrest him (and quite likely his live-in girlfriend), put him (them) in a cage somewhere, and file felony charges. But things didn’t quite turn out like that.

When they arrived at Mutrie’s home, they were met with armed resistance. As a result of several fired shots, the chief of Greenfield Police Department, Michael Maloney – a bureaucrat with about a week to go until retirement – was killed. Four other cops were wounded, two of them seriously. Of course, the government’s armed enforcers went predictably berserk: At least four other local police departments responded to the original raid team’s frantic cries for help, along with a New Hampshire State Police SWAT team -- and even the FBI – all toting assault rifles. Attempts were made to speak with Mutrie, but he soon went silent. Meanwhile, elsewhere, traffic was being re-routed as far away as I-95, and some government agency or other actually brought a military-style Bearcat armored vehicle to the scene.

Around 2 a.m., some cops pitched a small robot vehicle mounted with a camera through one of Multrie’s windows, trying to get a glance at what was going on inside the house. What the robot caught on video were the dead bodies of Mutrie and his girlfriend. The police and medical examiner later confirmed that both had died of gunshot wounds. At the time of this writing, it’s unclear whether their deaths came as the result of a double-suicide or a murder-suicide – according to bureaucrats, that is. I suspect there remains more than just the ghost of a chance that return fire on the part of the original cops may have had some role to play. Time will tell.

From all accounts, Cullen Mutrie was no angel. From the seven years he lived in Greenland, neighbors tell a tale of a noisy, argumentative person who routinely got into shouting matches with his girlfriend in the wee hours, often outside for all the rest of the wanting-to-sleep residents to hear. He was once arrested on domestic assault charges – although apparently never convicted. And he also had a history of steroid use. Steroids, if used regularly and in high enough doses, can lead to “’roid rage” – or, a chemically induced state of violent anger. This may explain Mutrie’s decision to defend himself with such uncompromising zeal. Then again, it might not. In fact, it might’ve just been that, like Carl Drega before him, Mutrie had just simply had enough.

This we will never know – Mutrie (and perhaps his girlfriend) – took that knowledge to their graves. But this much we can and do know: The cops who sought to invade Mutrie’s home, confiscate his property, kidnap him, cage him, and then attempt to have him kept in a cage for a much longer time – only to one day depart with indelible blemishes on his record that would affect his ability to stay gainfully employed, among other things, for the rest of his days – did so, and wished to continue doing so, all with money taken from the general public collectively under an equal threat of violence. In other words, try not paying taxes to finance such obscene shenanigans, and see if you don’t eventually end up in much the same situation as Mutrie did.

Further, there’s this: I never knew Mutrie – probably you never did either. Maybe the guy was a total jerk, maybe not. I don’t know, and never will. But I do know that even if he was an argumentative SOB who loved to take and sell steroids or whatever else, he didn’t deserve to have happen to him what I just described above. And he most certainly didn’t deserve to have it done to him at our forcefully extracted expense. Had he simply been left alone, three people would now still be alive, four others would never have had to visit the hospital, and a whole lot of our money wouldn’t have been wasted down the government rathole.

But as for Mutrie himself, we might do well to remember John Stark’s quote from 1809: “Live Free or Die.” It’s still the New Hampshire motto, although it should appear obvious by now that it is just that: a quaint saying, an anachronism from another time obscenely touted by government – the very institution that makes a mockery of it in everything it does.

And again, we’ll never know for sure, but it might’ve just been that Cullen Mutrie still thought it meant something.

Original report here




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