North Carolina Grandma's Pot Plant and the War On Drugs

Pictured are marchers in London from the Million Marijuana March .

Dateline: Drug Central, Betty’s Yard, Guilford County, North Carolina.

Here is but one typical story, which made the news this week. There are no action scenes. You won’t read of a Scar face-like character diving into a mountain of cocaine. Meet 71 year old Betty Holt Walker, the desperado grandmother who was arrested and faces charges of manufacturing marijuana and felony possession of marijuana.The long arm of the law in the form of a sheriff’s deputy saw the plant as he drove past her home earlier in the month.

The single plant was chest-high. Betty said she’d found the first plant in her garden and repotted it. She stated it was a special plant to keep animals out of her yard. I get the impression she wasn’t trying to hide it, unless the lawn in her front yard is chest high. This warranted an investigation. It was found that there were five smaller plants behind a shed, as well as marijuana stems and seeds, and a water bong made from a soda bottle inside of the house. What to you bet that Betty Walker spends more time in jail than Lindsay Lohan’s 82 hours, and in a federal prison at that? Oh - It was added that a daughter who lives in the home was unaware of the plants and not charged. Make what you will of that. To read more of Betty's story click here AP News 8/23/08

For a good read, see what former detectives and police who spent countless years trying to enforce this fruitless and expensive war have to say about it on the LEAP website. Here is but a snippet of the tone of their feelings concerning this idiocy.

COPS SAY LEGALIZE DRUGS! Ask us why!

After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled making building prisons the fastest growing industry in the United States. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more guaranteeing those prisons will be bursting at their seams. Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs. Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before. We would suggest that this scenario must be the very definition of a failed public policy. This madness must cease! To Read LEAP