The Department of Justice is gloating today about the sentence they won against Sean Patrick Ganley, a former Special Agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assigned to the Blaine, Washington office. Ganley was sentenced to two years of probation “for illegally importing human steroids into the United States.”
The case began in April 2008, when customs inspectors at JFK Airport discovered “a package containing human growth hormone” that had come from China. The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Criminal Investigations took over from there, with an assist from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General.
The investigation revealed that Ganley “surreptitiously sent three wire transfers to China and ordered the steroids using a false telephone number and fictitious address.” Ganley resigned from ICE earlier this year and received his sentence today.
I went through a few different reactions as I read this story.
First, there was schadenfreude as I savored the idea of an ICE agent being taken down. I hate these fuckers. I go to Canada pretty frequently. They never fail to make me feel unwelcome when I come home. Just last night, the little ratfink on duty asked for my driver’s license in addition to my passport and then spent three minutes randomly keying shit into his computer. Hello government database. This even though reentry to our own country is one one of the few rights an American still has. At least they didn’t search my trunk again.
Then there was sadness as I realized Ganley was being taken down for daring to import a substance arbitrarily defined as illegal by the government. Steroids suck—ask any baseball fan who is left questioning the validity of every record set in the last twenty years. But they’re just a substance. Adults are sovereign over their own bodies and should have the right to inject steroids into them if they want, bad as it might be for their health.
Last came frustration, frustration over the fact that the FDA has a criminal investigations wing and that the DHS exists at all. Why do we allow this alphabet soup of bureaucratic bullshit to crap all over our lives? Why are we silently allowing the securitheatre amateurs TSA hacks at our airports to suddenly adopt more invasive frisking techniques in an attempt to shame us into walking through their naked scanning machines? Why don’t we say no to it?
Mondays: would that we could have just stopped with the schadenfreude.
“reentry to our own country is one of the few rights an American still has.”
What rights have been taken away from you? Not other Americans, but you specifically?
I figure having to look at me naked is plenty of punishment for the TSA fuckers.
i vote matt lubby for everything.
It’s actually news to me that human growth hormone is illegal. Perhaps I am thinking the precursor to HGH. It IS rather arbitrary–things like creatine and glutamine are endogenous and perfectly legal. So, why not HGH?
Also, spot on about the ICE agents at the border. It’s night and day between the Canadian and American sides. The Canadians can be somewhat jerkish but you can tell it’s just an occupational role they’re playing and they usually send you along gleefully with a “Welcome to Canada!” On the other side, the glee is usually in giving you a search. They seem to really take pleasure in inconveniencing border crossers–causing your 2.5 hour trip to extend by at least 30 minutes. And the level of cultural ignorance coming from their mouths is astounding (I am speaking from experience here).
Presumably said agent earned a price driven by the arbitrary definition of the substance as illegal and the associated risk. All is fair in business.
This War on Drugs is getting a bit out of hand.
Because if they didn’t do all their silly searching and a plane was hijacked, everyone would throw up their arms and wail about how our security is too relaxed. If we let a private company do the frisking instead of the gov’t, and a plane got hijacked, everyone would throw up their arms and wail about how the company was cutting costs or didn’t do enough training or [insert complaint here].
No matter how invasive or relaxed the pre-flight searching is, there will be endless complaints about it.
Steroids aren’t illegal. They’re controlled, in exactly the same way many other substances, especially medical treatments, are controlled. If you have a legitimate medical reason for taking steroids, you can take steroids.
And the “libertarian” intern’s embarrassing levels of ignorance are really getting old.
We let this alphabet soup “run our lives” because modern society is motherfucking complicated and requires a lot of expertise in a lot of different areas, and we’re all better off when not just the rich can afford this expertise. The answer to calcified evil bureaucracy isn’t the absence of government, it’s a better, more responsive, more transparent government. And yeah, drug prohibition is bullshit. Is there any good rebuttal to the success of Portugal in this regard other than “The U.S. isn’t Portugal!”
@1 — Luckily I haven’t done anything that would cause me to be held without due process, tortured, or put on a list for “targeted killings,” but that doesn’t mean others haven’t. And this is before we start talking about really basic things like gun rights, photographers’ rights, and surveillance.
@4 — Two anecdotes. First, regarding Canada, it is not all tea and cookies on their side. I have had my entire car tossed twice. One of those times, they also insisted on searching my computer hard drive without me present. And this is for a guy visiting his girlfriend who has no criminal record. Second, regarding U.S. cultural ignorance, the worst thing I’ve had so far is a guy who asked where I was working. I said interning here. He asked my why I didn’t start a weekly in Cincinnati. Really, guy? Because people who are willing to intern for free have the experience and/or budget to start a newspaper in a down economy? Really?
@7 — I think you’re right, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be disappointed in this country.
@8 — It’s pretty ignorant of you to think that the government defining “legitimate medical reasons” for consuming arbitrarily-defined substances to be a state of legality. You must have a hard time seeing beyond the literal meaning of things.
@10 next time don’t make jokes about guns. Canadians take that seriously at customs.
@10: you are from Cincinnati? my condolences. me too!
A border guard was smuggling contraband through? Color me shocked.
@11 — I don’t even smile at these people. I’d much rather not talk to them at all.
@12 — I don’t mind Cincinnati! There’s a lot more to do in Seattle and it’s a much more beautiful city, but Cincinnati is a damn fine town for that part of the country.
@14 that’s your mistake. Just be polite and friendly and stop taking meth before you go thru the border – then you’ll be fine.
@9: Thank you, you expressed my own thoughts very well.
It is quite immature to think that just because our current government does fucked up things, the entire concept of government is invalid.
And I notice U.I. hasn’t responded to you yet.
@14: i don’t mind it from a distance. now. maybe things are better, or it just seems less offensive if you’re an objectivist, or a libertarian, or a nihilist, or whatever you are.
@9, 16 — No, the fucked up thing is how you guys think that an organization that has abused you for your whole life and whose antecedents abused your ancestors for all of their lives is somehow going to get better. You love your master the 1000th time he slaps you across the face just as much as the first time. I don’t.
And this complicated world thing is ridiculous. Do you really think bureaucrats are so smart? There were smart people running the Soviet economy. They failed because it was far too complicated for any centralized actors to have access to the wealth of information available to decentralized actors–who were probably not as intelligent.
@17 — Cincinnati is just as bad as Seattle from a market anarchist perspective, just in different ways. I like it because of its interesting history and unique neighborhoods.
@18:
Uh, thanks for the strawman, dude. I don’t think that the status quo is great. It sucks in many ways. But I can recognize the difference between life in 21st century America and being a serf to some warlord.
Again: just because I recognize that some government can be better than none, doesn’t mean I think all government is great. Please try to understand this.
kthxby
@18:
The thing is, it HAS clearly gotten better. Life span, minority rights, access to education, there’s a clear generally positive trend for all these things in most western democracies. And I don’t think it just magically gets better on it’s own, I’m not that fucking naive, homes. I understand there are entrenched interests, I believe we live in a corporatocracy, and change requires mass effort. And don’t tell me I love “my master” when I was protesting Obama’s visit outside of the Hec Ed on the 21st.
And I don’t think bureaucrats are necessarily that intelligent, but I sure as hell know they employ some smart bastards at NIST, NTSB, NASA, & NSA whose work we all benefit from daily. The USSR was an opaque authoritarian regime whose desire for empire was a large contributor to it’s collapse, and I advocate for the un-that, a transparent and socially responsible government. Equating the two is really quite overly simplistic. Any group can become fascist if people let it happen, whether it be a anarchy or democracy, that doesn’t negate the fact that I know which provides more benefits to more people when the given society is governed well.
I just had to screw up the “it’s/its” there.
@19 — What a convenient way of admitting you don’t have a leg to stand on. Leave the debating to people who care about truth, yes.
@20 — And you really think reforming the government is going to take care of the defects in the current system. People call me naive.
@21 — As far as things getting better, you’re not considering the alternative. Who’s to say these things wouldn’t have happened or maybe would have happened even if sooner if we didn’t have a government of force? This is like saying the Indians should be thankful for the railroads the British gave built there.
The transparency thing–do you see government getting any more transparent in this boom time of the democratization of media? The U.S. government is more secretive than it’s ever been. It’s great that you protested Obama, but was it for DADT or was it for the fact that Guantanamo Bay lives on, Bradley Manning rots in a jail cell, and tortured people are not allowed to sue the government out of concern for secrecy? The “smart guy” working for the U.S. government would be infinitely better used and more accountable if they worked for private firms.