Please don’t smoke the daisies.

It turns out that more than 1,600 suspected marijuana plants that a special police squad ripped out of a yard in Lethbridge, Alta. this summer are a species of daisy.

The bust, which was announced with fanfare in July, has homeowner Ryan Thomas Rockman scratching his head over the confusion. Just the same he’s happy the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team (ALERT) has dropped the charge of producing a controlled substance.

“It made me look like a villain and it made them look silly,” Rockman told the Lethbridge Herald, insisting all 1,624 plants seized were Montauk daisies — a fall-blooming perennial he’s been growing for a decade.

“It baffles me, to be honest. At the same time, I don’t want to try to point the finger of blame at them either because they’re still just trying to do their mandate and make it home every day,” said Rockman, 41, who faces other drug charges in connection with the raid.

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Insp. Dan Konowalchuk, head of the combined forces special regional enforcement units, defended the officers’ actions.

“I don’t think there is anything at this point for the guys to apologize for. They acted on what they believed to be the best information they had at the time,” Konowalchuk told the Star Thursday.

“First of all, we don’t know for sure they’re daisies,” he said, even though an effort was made to identify the plant species through experts.

The test results, which came back this week, clearly prove the seized plants weren’t marijuana, even though they resembled the hallucinogenic plant.

“The guys believed they were dealing with a sub-strain of marijuana,” Konowalchuk said. “There are some similarities to the (marijuana) plant when you look directly at the plant. But are they identical? No, they’re not. (Even so) the guys thought they we dealing with a large grow operation and they responded accordingly.”

Lethbridge police went to Rockman’s home on July 30 to check on a relative who was under a court-imposed curfew. The relative wasn’t there but they found Rockman had been smoking marijuana and called in the ALERT team to search the property.

Rockman faces charges of possession for the purpose of trafficking, possession of a controlled substance (697 grams of dried marijuana and 6.3 grams of cannabis resin), and possession of proceeds of crime relating to cash found during the investigation. He is also charged with production of a controlled substance with respect to the resin.

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He is scheduled to appear in court Friday. Neither he nor his lawyer Art Larson could be reached by the Star for comment.

Konowalchuk said that if the ALERT team did err it was in not seeking advice from Alberta’s so-called Green Teams, which do nothing but investigate marijuana grow ops. In the past year alone the two teams have seized 57,000 marijuana plants, which would yield 185 kilograms of processed marijuana.

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