"THE WALL STREET JOURNAL" HIGHLIGHTS HOME GROWERS.

[Drug Policy Foundation Newsletter, July 1993].

Calling American homes "the latest battleground in the war on drugs", The Wall Street Journal ran a front page story April 21 on respectable individuals who have faced huge criminal penalties for cultivation of personal-use amounts of marijuana.

Among the people interviewed who had been busted for personal-use grows were a college psychology professor, a quality control technicians for Ely Lilly Co., a 61 year-old dentist, a maintenance man and a state highway inspector. Most explained that they were tired of the high price of the black market marijuana and said they did not like the risk involved with dealing with criminal elements to obtain cannabis.

The story also focused on a controversial tactic increasingly used by the police in hopes of finding home growers. Law enforcement agencies open their own garden supply shops and track the customers down to determine wheter there is evidence that they are growing marijuana. Two of the individuals interviewed for the Journal story were caught by such tactics. In characteristic fashion, drug agents said the stores were opened in hopes of finding major growing operations, not small-timers, but that the personal-use growers had to be prosecuted because they were, after all, breaking the law.

Without judging any of the individuals involved, the Journal raised the question of justice in the prosecution of small-time growers whose motivation seemed a rational response to two problems with black market marijuana: price and criminality. There was no suggestion that the featured individuals were depraved marijuana addicts. The article begged the question: Does personal-use cultivation really have to be illegal to serve some higher purpose?