Blog Post

AEIdeas

Just in case you are still undecided about whether the US War on Drugs is good for the country, maybe this case of what happened to an innocent Kansas family will convince you that America’s longest, most expensive, immoral, senseless and cruel war has gone too far – when law enforcement agencies conduct paramilitary SWAT raids on innocent, law-abiding citizens (former CIA agents) who were “guilty” only of growing hydroponic tomatoes and drinking loose-leaf Teavana brand tea. The scary part is that this could happen to anybody.

The Washington Post explains what happened in a recent article titled “‘We’ll never be the same’: How a hydroponic tomato garden inspired cops to raid a family’s home“:

The police report would claim it all kicked off at 7:38 a.m., but Bob Harte later thought it had to be earlier. His 7:20 a.m. alarm had just yanked him awake. Got to get the kids — a boy in seventh grade, a girl in kindergarten — ready for school. Then he heard, like a starter’s pistol setting everything into motion, the first pounding on the front door of his home in Leawood, Kan., a bedroom suburb south of Kansas City. It was thunderous. It didn’t stop. Should I get up? Bob thought. Should I not? Sounded like the house was coming down, he would recall later. Wearing only gym shorts, the stocky 51-year-old left his wife in bed and shuffled downstairs. The solid front door had a small window carved at eye-level, one-foot-square. As he approached, Bob saw the porch was clogged with police officers. Immediately after opening the door, seven members of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) pressed into the house brandishing guns and a battering ram. Bob found himself flat on floor, hands behind his head, his eyes locked on the boots of the officer standing over him with an AR-15 assault rifle. “Are there kids?” the officers were yelling. “Where are the kids?” “And I’m laying there staring at this guy’s boots fearing for my kids’ lives, trying to tell them where my children are,” Harte recalled later in a deposition on July 9, 2015. “They are sending these guys with their guns drawn running upstairs to bust into my children’s house, bedroom, wake them out of bed.” Harte’s wife, Addie, bolted downstairs with the children. Their son put his hands up when he saw the guns. The family of four were eventually placed on a couch as police continued to search the property. The officers would only say they were searching for narcotics. Addie had a thought: It’s because of the hydroponic garden, she told her husband, they are looking for pot weeds. No way, Harte said, correctly reasoning marijuana wasn’t a narcotic. And all this for pot weeds? But after two hours of fruitless search, the officers showed the Hartes a warrant. Indeed, the hunt was for marijuana. Addie and Bob were flabbergasted — all this for pot weeds? “You take the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all the rights you expect to have — when they come in like that, the only right you have is not to get shot if you cooperate,” Harte told The Washington Post this week. “They open that door, your life is on the line.” The April 20, 2012, raid would not furnish JCSO with the desired arrests and publicity (a news conference had already been planned for the afternoon). But it would cause considerable embarrassment. Not only were the Hartes upstanding citizens with clean records, they were also both former Central Intelligence Agency officers. And they were not marijuana growers. Rather, the quick-trigger suspicion of law enforcement had snagged on — it would later turn out — tea leaves and a struggling tomato plant. The Hartes would eventually file a federal lawsuit against the county, city, and officers involved. And although a federal judge later threw out their claim, this week a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled that the family could move forward in court. The decision has larger implications for Fourth Amendment litigation and legislation targeting badly behaving police officers. The scorching judicial pronouncement blasted authorities for laziness and possible fabrication, the kind of overzealous police work that’s become a sometimes deadly facet of the drug war. And despite the sustained effort of the Obama administration to power down the law enforcement’s more quixotic battles with illicit substances, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has promised to reprioritize marijuana investigations. The Hartes case is a textbook reminder how that can be dangerous. “Our family will never be the same,” Addie told The Post. “If this can happen to us, everybody in the country needs to be afraid,” Bob added. “The Fourth Amendment was not there when we needed it. We want to restore that for future generations,” said Bob about the family’s pending lawsuit.

This story reminds me of similar Drug War-inspired mistreatment of an innocent, peaceful, law-abiding New Mexico woman several years ago, summarized nicely by Jacob Sullum in his December 2013 article in Reason “Drug Warriors Kidnap and Sexually Assault a Woman After Getting Permission From a Dog.”

First, the details of that nightmare:

The agents strip-searched the plaintiff, examining her anus and vagina with a flashlight. Finding nothing, they took her to the University Medical Center of El Paso, where they forced her to take a laxative and produce a bowel movement in their presence. Again they found no evidence of contraband. At this point one of their accomplices, a physician named Christopher Cabanillas, ordered an X-ray, which likewise found nothing suspicious. Then the plaintiff “endured a forced gynecological exam” and rectal probing at the hands of another doctor, Michael Parsa. Still nothing. Finally, Cabanillas ordered a CT scan of the plaintiff’s abdomen and pelvis, which found no sign of illegal drugs. “After the CT scan,” the complaint says, “a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent presented Ms. Doe with a choice: she could either sign a medical consent form, despite the fact that she had not consented, in which case CBP would pay for the cost of the searches; or if she refused to sign the consent form, she would be billed for the cost of the searches.” She refused, and later the hospital sent her a bill for $5,000, apparently the going rate for sexual assault and gratuitous radiological bombardment.

Next, Jacob Sullum’s concluding comments:

This kind of abuse tends to draw attention only when the victim is “innocent,” meaning he or she is not in fact smuggling drugs. But how can any society call itself civilized when it allows human beings to be treated this way in the name of locating arbitrarily proscribed substances? Having arrogated to itself the authority to regulate what people put into their own bodies, the government ends up forcibly delving into those bodies in search of the chemicals it has anathematized. To enforce politicians’ pharmacological prejudices, the government’s agents and their medical accomplices become kidnappers and rapists. There is nothing noble or decent about this immoral crusade, and anyone associated with it ought to be ashamed of himself.

That Drug War-motivated nightmare happened shortly after a New Mexico man was anally raped by law enforcement officials and their medical accomplices in a futile search for drugs that escalated through multiple cavity searches, enemas, and X-rays, and ended up with a forced colonoscopy. I wrote about that tragedy on CD in a post titled “America’s cruel Drug War now includes forced anal probing of innocent victims by law enforcement agencies.”

Ken White wrote a long post about that case of anal rape in New Mexico titled “What Is The Quantum of Proof Necessary for Police to Rape and Torture you in New Mexico?” and he ended with these words of warning:

The government will continue to act like that until we decide, collectively, that a government that would rape and torture a man to find a fistful of drugs is not worthy of our allegiance, obedience, or respect. The government will continue to act like that until we say “enough.”

Bottom Line: Enough.