HIT & RUN BLOG Burning Man Attorney Threatens Bureau of Indian Affairs Over Traffic Stops

In the week or so leading up the official beginning of the annual Burning Man festival, which is in full swing as of yesterday, agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) started a program of enhanced traffic law enforcement in the name of the U.S. Department of the Interior's opioid reduction task force. More specifically, they started vigorously stopping cars in Nixon, Nevada, a town that nearly all of Burning Man's attendees pass through on the 447. That state road is the only paved and drivable route from Reno to the Black Rock playa where the event is held.

A Reno Gazette-Journal report quotes BIA spokeswoman Nedra Darling insisting these efforts had nothing to do with Burning Man. They are, she claims, just one more in a continual series of efforts that in previous iterations "seized $4.79 million in drugs from tribal reservations in Arizona in May and more than $2.5 million in drugs from tribal reservations in New Mexico in April." They just happened to coincide with the event's launch, she says.

https://reason.com/blog/2018/08/27/burning-man-attorney-threatens-bureau-of