By John W. Whitehead
Backyard gardeners, beware: Tomato plants have become collateral damage in the government’s war on drugs, especially marijuana.
In fact, merely growing a vegetable garden on your own property, or in a greenhouse on your property, or shopping at a gardening store for gardening supplies, incredibly enough, could set you up for a drug raid sanctioned by the courts.
It’s happened.
After shopping for hydroponic tomatoes at their local gardening store, a Kansas family found themselves subjected to a SWAT team raid as part of a multi-state, annual campaign dubbed “Operation Constant Gardener,” in which police collected the license plates of hundreds of customers at the gardening store and then investigated them for possible marijuana possession.
By “investigated,” I mean that police searched through the family’s trash. Finding “wet glob vegetation” in the garbage, the cops somehow managed to convince themselves, and a judge, that it was marijuana.
In fact, it was loose-leaf tea, but those pesky details don’t usually bother the cops when they’re conducting field tests.
Indeed, field tests routinely read positive for illegal drugs even when no drugs are present. According to investigative journalist Radley Balko, “A partial list of substances that the tests have been mistaken for illegal drugs would include sage, chocolate chip cookies, motor oil, spearmint, soap, tortilla dough, deodorant, billiard’s chalk, patchouli, flour, eucalyptus, breath mints, Jolly Ranchers and vitamins.”
From there, these so-called “investigations” follow the usual script: Judge issues a warrant for a SWAT raid based on botched data, cops raid the home and terrorize the family at gunpoint, cops find no drugs, family sues over a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, and then the courts protect the cops and their botched raid on the basis of qualified immunity.
It happens all the time.
As Balko reports, “Police have broken down doors, screamed obscenities, and held innocent people at gunpoint only to discover that what they thought were marijuana plants were really sunflowers, hibiscus, ragweed, tomatoes, or elderberry bushes. (It’s happened with all five.).”
Surely, you might think, the government has enough on its hands right now, policing a novel coronavirus pandemic, instituting nationwide lockdowns, quelling civil unrests over police brutality, that it doesn’t need to waste time and resources ferreting out pot farmers.
You’d be wrong.
This government excels at make-work projects in which it assigns, at-times, unnecessary jobs to government agents to keep them busy or employed.
In this case, however, the make-work principle (translation: Making work to keep the police state busy at taxpayer expense) is being used to justify sending police and expensive military helicopters likely equipped with sophisticated surveillance and thermal imaging devices on exploratory sorties every Summer, again at taxpayer expense, in order to uncover illegal marijuana growing operations.
Often, however, what these air and ground searches end up targeting are backyard gardeners growing tomato plants.
Just recently, in fact, eyewitnesses in Virginia reported low-flying black helicopters buzzing over rural and suburban neighborhoods as part of a multi-agency operation to search for marijuana growers. Often these joint operations involve local police, state police and the Army National Guard.
One woman reported having her “tomato plants complimented by the seven cops that pulled up in my yard in unmarked SUVs, after a helicopter hovered over our house for 20 minutes this morning.” Another man reported a similar experience from a few years ago when police “showed up in unmarked SUVs with guns pulled. Then the cops on the ground argued with the helicopter because the heat signature in the ‘copter didn’t match what was growing.”
These aerial and ground sweeps have become regular occurrences across the country, part of the government’s multi-million dollar Domestic Cannabis Eradication Program.
Started in 1979 as a way to fund local efforts to crack down on marijuana growers in California and Hawaii, the Eradication Program went national in 1985, right around the time the Reagan Administration enabled the armed forces to get more involved in the domestic “war on drugs.”
Right around that same time, in the mid-1980s, the federal government started handing out grants to local police departments to assist with their local boots-on-the-ground “war on drugs,” thereby incentivizing SWAT team raids.
This is how you go from a “war on drugs” to SWAT-style raids on vegetable gardens.
Connect the dots, starting with the government’s war on marijuana, the emergence of SWAT teams, the militarization of local police forces through the federal 1033 Program, which allows the Pentagon to transfer “vast amounts of military equipment, machine guns and ammunition, helicopters, night-vision gear, armored cars, to local police departments,” and the transformation of American communities into battlefields: As always, it comes back to the make work principle, which starts with local police finding ways to justify the use of military equipment and federal funding.
SWAT teams carry out more than 80,000 no-knock raids every year. The vast majority of these raids are to serve routine drug warrants, many times for crimes no more serious than possession of marijuana.
Although growing numbers of states continue to decriminalize marijuana use and nine out of 10 Americans favor the legalization of either medical or recreational/adult-use marijuana, the government’s profit-driven “War on Drugs, waged with state and local police officers dressed in SWAT gear, armed to the hilt, and trained to act like soldiers on a battlefield, all thanks to funding provided by the U.S. government, particularly the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has not abated.
Yet, I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People,” when the war on drugs, a.k.a. the war on the American people, becomes little more than a thinly veiled attempt to keep SWAT teams employed and special interests appeased, it’s time to revisit our drug policies and laws.
“You take the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all the rights you expect to have—when they come in like that, the only right you have is not to get shot if you cooperate. They open that door, your life is on the line,” concluded Bob Harte, whose home was raided by a SWAT team simply because the family was seen shopping at a garden store, cops found loose tea in the family’s trash and mistook it for marijuana.
It didn’t matter that no drugs were found, nothing but a hydroponic tomato garden and loose tea leaves. The search and SWAT raid were reasonable, according to the courts.
There’s a lesson here for the rest of us. Bob Harte concluded: “If this can happen to us, everybody in the country needs to be afraid.”
—The Rutherford Institute