The Bipolar DEA

"Sweetin’s stance on the issue has seemed to soften a bit."

I'm not a grower. I know a lot about the issue, but personally, I don't have the patience or the money to do it. Even more than that, I live in a state with a severe lack of medical marijuana laws. Growing would get me jail time, no questions asked.

What the marijuana grower fears above all else, including dust mites, is the Drug Enforcement Agency. Men dressed in black, with bulletproof vests and assault rifles can bust into your home in the middle of the night, drag you out of bed and...well, I guess after that it's a matter of how abusive the agents decide to be. The bottom line is your going to jail, and your house will be ransacked as a little bonus.

Last week a man in Colorado went through exactly that.

"Chris Bartkowicz was conducting a medical marijuana growing operation in his suburban Denver basement and was so confident that he was complying with state law that he decided to talk to the media, boasting to Denver’s NBC affiliate about the size and success of his operation, saying that he’s “living the dream.”

The next day his dream ended when DEA agents entered his home, placed him under arrest and carried off dozens of black bags full of marijuana plants and growing lights. While some details of this case remain unclear, Jeffrey Sweetin, the DEA special agent in charge of the Denver office, left little ambiguity as to his position. “It’s not medicine,” Sweetin said. “It’s still a violation of federal law [and] we’re still going to continue to investigate and arrest people.”

Keep in mind that CO is second only to California in the size and scope of medical marijuana operations in this country. In the meantime:

"Meanwhile, Chris Bartkowicz has been formally charged with “possession with intent to manufacture, distribute or dispense 224 marijuana plants ” — a crime that could put him behind bars for five to forty years and cost him up to $2 million in fines."

A man's life ruined. Utterly. Because he was legally growing weed in his basement. And the power of the DEA grows.

"Sweetin went on to tell the Denver Post that “the time is coming when we go into a dispensary, we find out what their profit is, we seize the building and we arrest everybody.”"

But wait. The agency with all this power can't seem to make up it's mind:

"Sweetin’s stance on the issue has seemed to soften a bit. He told the Denver Westword yesterday that the DEA is “not declaring war on dispensaries.” He went on to say, with an apparent laugh, “If we were declaring war on dispensaries, they would not be hard to find. You can’t swing a dead cat around here without hitting thirty of them.” Apparently someone with the Obama administration has updated Mr. Sweetin with its new policy."

If that last sentence is true, then that's good news. But how could the DEA not know the new policy? We all knew it, that's for sure. That news hit the internet like a tidal wave. Every stoner with a computer was busy telling other stoners.

The bottom line is this: Until marijuana prohibition comes to an end, scores of lives are ruined, everyday. Even where growers think they are safe, the federal government can crush them at will.

The time is now.

The Pothead Pundit