Reprinted from Thom Hartmann Blog
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If you've shopped at a gardening supply store in the last year, and if you happen to live with someone who drinks tea, guess what?
Your local sheriff could just send a SWAT team into your house.
It's not a far-fetched scenario, in fact it actually happened, here in America, just three short years ago.
The investigation began when a state trooper stationed at a gardening supply store (yes, they had the gardening store staked out!) spotted Robert Harte and his son purchasing supplies to grow hydroponic tomatoes.
According to the Washington Post, having seen the Harte's buying hydroponic growing accessories, the Johnson County Sheriff's Department started investigating the Harte family.
They searched the family's trash and found "saturated plant material" that supposedly tested positive for THC, the active chemical in marijuana.
But the reality was, Mrs. Harte is a tea drinker, and that wet plant matter was nothing more than used tea leaves, and the SWAT raid turned up nothing.
Just last week, a federal judge dismissed the family's lawsuit against the police, and said that the sheriffs had probable cause -- based on the garden store purchase and old tea leaves.
But the Hartes aren't the average targets of this kind of drug sting, and one sheriff actually boasted after the raid that the operation was so unusual because they'd shut down a drug operation that was run by an "average family" in a "good neighborhood" -- all coded language for "middle class white people."
Aside from the fact that the Hartes weren't actually doing ANYTHING illegal, the sheriff unwittingly showed just how exceptional it was that the family was a target at all.
Because the war on drugs has never been about drugs.
No, the war on drugs, since it's very beginning, has been about controlling political power -- by breaking up black communities and the dissident left.
And we know that because the people who have been involved, the architects and the leaders in the war on drugs, have admitted it -- even bragged about it!
Before he died, Nixon counsel and former Assistant to the President John Ehrlichman told author Dan Baum that:
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