Word: use
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ballot measure in Seattle was proposed that would have directed the police department to consider marijuana possession (for personal use) a low priority. Kerlikowske opposed the ballot initiative, but said such arrests were already a low priority and that his department was focusing its drug arrests on cocaine and heroin traffickers...
...staunch proponent of the use of Tasers as an alternative to lethal force. To demonstrate the safe use of Tasers, he agreed to be shot with one in front of police and reporters...
...According to the historian Plutarch, the Roman general Sertorius in 80 B.C. had his troops pile mounds of gypsum powder by the hillside hideaways of Spanish rebels. When kicked up by a strong northerly wind, the dust became a severe irritant, smoking the insurgents out of their caves. The use of such special agents "was very tempting," says Adrienne Mayor, a classical folklorist and author of Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological & Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World, "especially when you don't consider the enemy fully human...
...maintain "some sense of what it was to cross the line," says Mayor. Across cultures, it was customary to deplore trickery and extol the virtues of the noble warrior. The Brahmanic Laws of Manu, a code of Hindu principles first articulated in the fifth century B.C., forbade the use of arrows tipped with fire or poison. Written in India a century later, Kautilya's Arthashastra, one of the world's earliest treatises on war and realpolitik, advocates surprise night raids and offers recipes for plague-generating toxins, but it also urges princes to exercise restraint and win the hearts...
...Even in antiquity, many feared the lurking consequences of unleashing what we now call chemical weapons - indeed, the ancient Greek tale of Pandora's box offers a continuing metaphor for their use. And its moral proved true in the collapsed tunnels of Dura-Europos: among the Roman bodies, James spied one corpse set aside from the rest, which wore differing armor and carried a jade-hilted sword. This was a fallen Persian soldier, James concludes, also asphyxiated by the gas. The warrior who released the poison very likely succumbed...