Jeremy Daw is a lawyer and author of Weed the People: From Founding Fiber to Forbidden Fruit. Recently his home was raided by the Berkeley Police Department Drug Task Force, after they’d received a tip from a neighbor that he was growing marijuana in his backyard. Daw had a letter from his doctor recommending cannabis for his medical condition, but he did not post a copy of the letter next to his pot plants. When the police asked for it, Daw refused to retrieve it:
“My recommendation,” I told the officers, “is upstairs.”
“Go get it,” ordered Klebbe.
That’s when the red flags blew up into alarm bells. At that moment I, as the subject of a criminal investigation, still enjoyed some Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure. I had met the officers on my porch and hadn’t given them permission to enter my apartment. Under the US Constitution, they had to respect that. But if I obeyed the officer’s order and went back upstairs, the Supreme Court has ruled that by doing so I would have expanded the area which the cops could have constitutionally searched, under the reasoning that I might take the opportunity to destroy evidence out of their sight. If I went back upstairs all four cops could follow me in, handcuff my friend who had come over to toke up, and ransack my place. “I can’t do that,” I replied.
Daw was arrested and placed in a squad car while the police searched his home. They found his doctor’s letter and let him go. The police sergeant got mad at Daw for “wasting his officers’ time.” A few days later, Daw’s landlord called him and told him the sergeant had called her and warned her that if she allowed Daw to grow weed on her property she could lose her house, so she told him to stop growing the plants:
[I]f she didn’t have my plants removed right away, [Sgt.] Chu explained, then black gang members from Oakland would come onto her property to steal my plants and shoot anyone who tried to resist. And if that happened, Chu assured the bewildered old woman, she would be held responsible and her property – including the building where I lived – would be seized.
I was shocked. The story was not only blatantly racist; it had no legal basis whatsoever. I told her so, but she wouldn’t listen. A lawyer friend, she said, had confirmed the story. Where, I demanded to know, did her friend go to school? I graduated from Harvard Law School, I shouted in my arrogance. I pleaded with her to listen to me.
But she would have none of it. “I simply can’t believe,” she told me, “that a cop would lie.”
Daw, who is a pro-cannabis activist and editor of The Leaf Online says he realizes his experience was just a tiny taste of what has happened to “hundreds of thousands of NYC residents stopped and frisked by the cops,” who are usually black or hispanic and are treated far worse by the justice system. He said the encounter has “re-energized my activism against the cruelly disastrous drug war.”
Image: “Potted pot.” Shutterstock