In what will surely go into the annals of history as one of the most sterling examples of intelligent police work, a Kansas SWAT team raided the home of Bob and Addie Harte. They kept the Hartes and their two young children pinned to the couch for over two hours while they turned over every inch of their home looking for narcotics.

I know you will be as shocked as I was to hear that they didn’t find anything. We’ve come to expect a high level of accuracy and diligence from the law enforcement community and I find it nearly laughable that they would jump to a SWAT raid without some pretty damning evidence.

The raid happened about 2 years ago. Here’s how the timeline went:

On August 9th, 2011, Bob Harte is spotted inside a hydroponics store in Kansas City, MO. He had taken his son to the store to get supplies for a school science project. A full seven months later, the state police for some reason (probably wanting to pad their coffers a bit) decide to pass this “hot” tip to the local sheriff’s office. That brings us up to about April 2012. From this dynamite tip, the sheriff’s office discreetly rummages through the Hartes’ trash on three separate occasions, all in April. Each time they found what they described as “wet plant material.” Then they decided that the Hartes were such a threat that a SWAT raid was necessary to keep the lid on this criminal empire.

For those keeping track at home, the Hartes were seen in a legal hydroponics store and seven months later some unidentified “wet plant material” was found in their trash. That’s it. I know I write for a cannabis blog, but I think that unbreakable chain of evidence certainly justified this enormous use of force. The sheriff’s office claimed that the field test(s) they administered on the suspicious “wet plant material” determined it was marijuana.

The truth of the issue is that Addie Harte is a heavy consumer of loose leaf tea. It was the spent wet loose tea leaves that the sheriff was finding in the trash. A simple smell test could probably tell you that it was tea, but they sought no outside verification and trusted their field tests implicitly. I think they knew it wasn’t cannabis but already had the raid penciled in and funded so they didn’t want to look like jackasses. Mission accomplished!

As the source article puts it, “Such tests are notoriously unreliable, confusing chocolate with hashish, soy milk with GHB, and soap with cocaine, among other hilarious errors that result in fruitless searches, mistaken arrests, and false imprisonment. But the cops did not bother to confirm their field results with a more reliable lab test before charging into the Hartes’ home, three days after their third surreptitious trash inspection… Field tests have been known to misidentify various possible tea ingredients, including spearmint, peppermint, lavender, vanilla, anise, and chicory, as marijuana.”

After the dust settled (and the Hartes showed their neighbors the notice saying that nothing was confiscated) they grew curious as to why they were raided. In another move that will certainly blow your minds, the sheriff’s office who carried out the raid was completely unwilling to share their records or reasoning for such action. It took the Hartes hiring a lawyer and spending $25,000 to get access to the records.

Just when I think I have heard the most ridiculous use of police resources in this failed war on cannabis, they grab a shovel and dig down a little more. Even if the Hartes had been found with marijuana, do they really seem like they would necessitate a SWAT raid?

As Addie Harte tells it, “You shouldn’t have to have $25,000, even $5,000. You shouldn’t have to have that kind of money to find out why people came raiding your house like some sort of police state.”

Spread the word please, let’s keep the egg on their faces as long as we can.