(Watch for about 45 seconds)

Speaking at a forfeiture conference on September 10, 2014, Pete Connelly, City Attorney for Las Cruces, New Mexico, detailed his plan that would let police take the homes of people caught with tiny amounts of marijuana, even in states where the plant is legal:

“I got to thinking this morning, in the paper that everybody is running around liberalizing marijuana or thinking about it. Putting it on the ballot. Taking it off the ballot. And I thought, boy, what a trap. You liberalize marijuana so somebody can sell it, they sell the marijuana out of the house, then you seize the house, which is like 10 bucks of marijuana and you [the police] get a $300,000 house. What a deal. That’s really exciting. They get what they want, and you get what you want. And the title of that article in the [Wall Street] Journal was ‘What’s Yours Is Theirs.’ I want to turn it around as ‘What’s Theirs is Yours.’”

It sounds terrifying (and it should be). But this can already happen due to an obscure federal program known as “equitable sharing.” Police can circumvent state laws if they collaborate with a federal agency, forfeit the property under federal law and then earn up to 80 percent of what the property is worth.

The Institute for Justice represented Tony Jalali, a landlord in Anaheim, Calif. who rented space to a medical marijuana dispensary. That dispensary sold $37 worth of cannabis to an undercover officer, who posed as a patient with a doctor’s recommendation. Jalali never bought or sold marijuana. Nor did the government charge him with a crime.

But under equitable sharing, Anaheim police teamed up with the DEA to bypass California state law, which not allows only medical marijuana, but also requires a criminal conviction to forfeit real estate. After IJ sued, the government backed down and dropped the forfeiture case. But this loophole remains unchanged, so other property owners are still vulnerable.