State governments often take egregious actions at the behest of the feds. Take the recent disgraceful okra bust in Georgia, for example.
The drug warriors on the Georgia police force sent an armed SWAT team to a man’s house after helicopter cops discovered plants in his backyard. Of course, back yard plants immediately made him the suspect of a crime. Suspecting they would find marijuana, heavily armed cops invaded this man’s home.
To their dismay, they found okra instead.
But that didn’t stop them from seizing his property anyway. This embarrassing ordeal was chronicled in a Washington Post article.
Georgia police raided a retired Atlanta man’s garden last Wednesday after a helicopter crew with the Governor’s Task Force for Drug Suppression spotted suspicious-looking plants on the man’s property. A heavily-armed K9 unit arrived and discovered that the plants were, in fact, okra bushes.
What is not surprising about this ordeal is that the feds had something to do with it!
The helicopter crew that spotted the suspicious plants was apart of the Governor’s Task Force for Drug Suppression, which is bankrolled with federal dollars. The website states that it “is funded by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program (DCE/SP). These federal funds are asset forfeiture funds and administered by the Georgia Department of Public Safety.”
This type of state and federal collusion is completely unnecessary, and it jeopardizes the independence of local police forces. In this instance, rather than actually finding violent criminals and other legitimate threats to the public safety, law enforcement resources were squandered on profiling and terrorizing an okra farmer. In the day and age of recession and tighter budgets and government insolvency, is this really the best way to spend our taxpayer dollars?
Not only that, the federal War on Drugs is unconstitutional. The Constitution delegates no authority to the federal government for regulating plants in some guy’s back yard. Doubt this? Then ask yourself why it took a constitutional amendment to enact federal alcohol prohibition.
The waste and the abuse go hand-in-hand, and are the handiwork of the federal government. The feds have never shied away from taking unconstitutional power grabs or gratuitous amounts of taxpayer money, for whatever reason. When they get together and work in unison with state and local governments, bad things can happen. It becomes virtually impossible to legally resist tyranny when this is the case. Thankfully, there is a simple way to decouple the feds from their state and local counterparts.
Non-compliance measures enacted at the state level can be enough to grind federal policy down to a screeching halt. Our P.E.A.C.E. Act (formerly the Cannabis Freedom Act) makes it a crime for officials in your state and local governments to work to enforce federal marijuana prohibition. Because public support is bottoming out for the War on Drugs, there has never been a better time to get involved in the fight! The light at the end of the tunnel is growing brighter with every passing day, and we have a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make history. We can finish off some of the worst policies in American history, if we just have the courage to get involved.
