I've been growing medical marijuana for years. Look up cannabidiol for a clue on one of the diffs. ( eg: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/medical/cannabid.htm ) I had two patches to test a new dwarf variety; one under the canopy hidden in the woods, another in full sun close to the house. In the first week of October 2008, a tresspasser came on the property, stole the pot growing in the woods, then called the cops to bust me for the patch that was too close to the house to steal.

Which made the search illegal, because nobody had the right to tresspass to see what I was growing on the property. Because it was a dwarf strain, it was not visible from the road. None of it was over 6 foot, mostly about 3, some not even 2 ft tall.

A chopper was sent over 1st, and it flew over the house 7 times, but had to get so low to see the pot that the propwash blew leaves down off the trees, and knocked down my Jerusalem artichokes, which grew over 6 foot tall, further obscuring the view, and blocking it from the road. This was, in effect, a footprint on the property without a search warrant.

When the search warrant did arrive, it had only the address. They had not done, as you'd think, any investigation of me, which you'd want to do in order to bust a commercial pot growing operation. They did not know who I was.

Had I been running a commercial pot operation, surveillance would have revealed an entire dealer network. But, they were only interested in seizing the property. Just as in a speed trap, only in it for the money.

When I pointed out how the new dwarf varieties were going to result in vastly more marijuana being grown, one officer grinned and said:"All the more for us!" Apparently not considering how much more it was for school kids also.

I was more familiar than most with proper procedure since this was the 8th time in my life since 1969 that my home was searched, and the 4th that they did not know who I was. One time the police busted in on a halloween party and they arrested me for drugs guests dropped on the floor. Nothing else was found in the house, and the judge threw that case out of court. The other 6 times, including on 7/31/1998, they found nothing illegal.

Then, on Oct 31,2009, they came again. Ostensibly to investigate a dog shooting. As if they'd send two SUVs & 6 officers. They found marijuana growing. What I did not reveal, which I will if this goes to trial, was that this grew wild; my point being that this new dwarf line is so well adapted, and I'd expected to present it at the previously, but postponed trial date of Oct 20. Nevertheless, it was so small that despite their search of the property they didnt find it all, and I still have some to present at trial, proving my point about the line being hard to find. Is this string of searches just some kind of statistical fluke, or is this an indication of a lack of due process? I've never been able to ask whoever it was who testified to a judge about why my home should be searched. It looks a lot like the network of informers the Communists used where we see also that the accused can never confront the accusers, and where these confidential informants do so out of personal reasons.

The 1998 search resulted when a game & fish agent snooped in my barn when nobody was around and saw all the lab equipment and chemicals stored there. Since the neighbor cut trees and bulldozed them and cut a new road on this property while I was in jail, we know who was behind the 10/10/2008 search.

Title 5 of the criminal code, subchapter 2, sect 5-64-2.1 Lists 8 criteria for determining a substance is subject to abuse. Item #3 refers to The state of current scientific knowledge regarding the substance. While the US government has done extensive work trying to determine abuse, other regions have gone on to look more broadly at what is, or is not, in various genetic lines, and what effects substances in those cannabis strains have. The American legal system has not kept abreast of this work, and its attitudes are sadly out of date.

Moreover, marijuana is just one of an increasingly wide variety of important medicinal herbs I've been growing & drying over the years and then often processing for salves & tinctures. On October 10, they took all my solvents, scales, filters, and other lab equipment. On July 31, 1998, they also seized all my lab equipment, which made for sensational photos on the front page of the Marshall Mountain Wave of agents in hazmat suits, and even though they found no controlled substances, they did not, despite my request, return any of it.

On seeing the report in the Aug 8, 1998 Marshall Mountain Wave, I went to the editor to ask her to print a correct report of my property, which she had labeled as The biggest meth lab ever found in NW Arkansas. Since she would not print a true report, I used my PC printer to run off 200 copies of what was really taken and distributed them to country stores around Searcy County. Sheriff Sutterfield, who was prominently displayed in the newspaper as having organized the bust withdrew his re-election campaign.

Since I've had personal property seized by law enforcement in Florida, Louisianna, and now Arkansas, I cant say that the personnel in Van Buren county are less professional; they were, in all my personal interactions with them, always polite.

But. Besides being uninformed of the medicinal uses of marijuana, they are not up on several well known new dwarf strains of marijuana. The seeds can be ordered online. This presents real problems for landowners since their land can be seized because of pot growing along a fence line that does not reach the top of the fence. While choppers wont be able to spot it, anyone driving by mite. And of course, anyone wanting to make trouble has merely to sow some seed and then wait a couple months for it to appear and then call the cops.

The new lines were also developed to grow indoors under less light, so it also does very well under the forest canopy in the woods, where again, choppers cant see it, but growers wanting to use your property would know where to look at harvest time. This requires great diligence by landowners to be sure pot is not grown on their land, and then, if there, to prove all the money and assets owners had were acquired from legal sources. In this case, you are guilty til proven innocent.

Then too, ongoing genetic engineering has resulted in reports of DNA code to produce psychoactive compounds being spliced into other plants just as is done for other purposes. So- weeds that dont even look like pot will be propagated, again possibly on your land. The legality remains in doubt, but for sure lots of lawyers will make lots of money off landowners as a result.

Surfing Dutch & other foreign seed sources shows us varieties that are 15 or more times more potent, or other lines that have greater medicinal value. Also, with just a single seed that produced one desired plant, hundreds of clones can be made that will have all the same properties, but also the very same DNA. This means that the medicinal marijuana market can be separated out from the recreational.

Moreover, cannabis compounds are only one of a wide variety of powerful psychoactive substances being reported on the net. Anthropologists in recent years have gone with shamen and witches into rituals and used their sacred potions- which derive from a variety of previously unknown sources. And these are now being sold on the net, every bit as powerful as other illegal drugs, but completely legal.

I myself have sampled several of them as part of my professional herbalism. And as a result, the nite of Oct 10, they sent a squad car to get me from the jail because the chemist with the search party did not know what he was dealing with. This is indicative of how the legal system has not kept up with the science, as called for in the laws on controlled substances. I had a couple dozen different herbs growing, dried, in tinctures, or undergoing some kind of processing, and nobody else knew what it all was.

But for sure, what it was, was expensive. The chopper arrived in the morning, and at midnite, when I was brought back from the jail, the team was still there trying to figure out what they all had. The chopper, pilots, several squadcars, Arkansas State Drug control agents, Van Buren County deputies, the chemist & his chem lab van were all there at taxpayer expense for an operation that had nothing to do with the illegal recreational drug market. This kind of thing is also overloading the crime labs. They no longer have the time to do all the tests they need, even if they knew how. Tests dont even exist for some of the compounds that are available online.

Had they simply sent out an agent, I could have supplied samples for DNA analysis, so they could satisfy themselves that none of what I produced was available in the local marijuana market. Individual marijuana plants are just as unique in their sets of DNA markets as individual people are. So, from my arrest, it was over six months before there was a pretrial hearing at which I was supposed to be presented with the crime lab evidence against me. And it'll be several more months before there is a trail. Which is clearly in violation of the US constitional mandate for a speedy trial. As the variety of compounds available online increases, this is only going to get worse.

Many businesses have been driven into bankruptcy by civil litigation in the USA. This could be done with recreational drugs as well- if they were legal. After the section on controlled substances above, the law already is that drug use is grounds for families to sue for damages; they could recover the costs of drug treatment, tutoring minor users, recovering the cost of welfare while a user is in a drug treatment program, and/or the counseling services of their churches.

This has never been done. By the time the legal system is done seizing assets, charging fines & court costs, and the dealer has paid his defense attorney, there are no significant assets left for families, child protection services, or welfare agencies to sue for. As it is now, the families and taxpayers pick up the tab for trying to deal with the effects of drug abuse.

Were these substances legal, the state could require vendors to be bonded just as pharmacists are, and the insurance money would be quickly available to deal with these chronic social problems. Moreover, a legal distribution chain, from the producers to the wholesalers would have even more assets to sue for. Now that we have DNA analysis, we can tell where any given sample taken from a user comes from; and as soon as any user resulted in civil action, the vendors would no longer sell to him so addiction would be nipped in the bud.

As with other recreational drugs, there are regular and moderate adult users who manage their consumption without damage to their ability to keep a job and meet their family or social responsibilities. This customer base provides the assets drug dealers now use to expand their business in other areas and substances that have had more serious social consequences. Like drug wars and streetgangs. In a legal recreational drug market, the dangerous sociopaths would not be able to get the insurance or bonding, nor would weapons be an effective method of trying to expand a share of the drug market.

With computers now, it'd be simple for every vendor to access a database to be sure no customer was unable to meet his responsibilities or maintain his health or that of his family. Civil lawsuits could do what criminal courts could not. Moreover, with a legal recreational drug market, it'd be easy to collect data on the effects of drug use, which is now hidden from the public eye. With the data in hand, it'd be reasonable to setup a taxation system to recover the social damages of drug use. It'd be logically consistent to include alcohol; the user with a DUI or DWI would be banned from purchasing. Since alcohol is also an organic product, traces of the DNA of the original source could be identified, and those sources who were not diligent in distribution could be sued.

DNA could be used to sort out recreational pot from hemp; as a result, farmers would regain what was once a very profitable fibre crop. It turns out that hemp still has very valuable medicinal uses, and that the pollen from hemp would so permeate an area that it'd become difficult to propagate recreational pot. Seed from previous years would have so much hemp DNA it'd be useless to smoke.