Rifle-toting DEA agents raid Orange County marijuana store
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 10:26 am | By: Radical Russ
News: Rifle-toting DEA agents raid marijuana store | adams, orange, agents, city, going – OCRegister.com
ORANGE–A medical marijuana dispensary in the middle of a legal battle with the city of Orange was raided again by federal agents.Nature’s Wellness Collective owner Bob Adams said the dispensary was raided by approximately 14 DEA agents armed with assault rifles and accompanied by members of the Orange Police Department just after 1 p.m. Tuesday. Adams said agents took all of his medicinal marijuana supply, money from the store’s register and ATM machine, computers, cameras, smoking pipes and his city-issued business license and detained him and his three employees.
Nature’s Wellness was first raided by agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency and Orange police officers in March. Adams said the latest raid was much the same.
Kamis Day, another employee, spoke from his cell phone from a holding cell in Santa Ana: “They kicked in the door, smashed everything, handcuffed me and threw me in the back of the car. They didn’t read me my rights.”
Adams, Day and the other employees were released after about two hours and said they were not charged.
This is the continuing pattern with these DEA raids — they’re little more than a smash-and-grab robbery.
Note that the feds never charged anyone in this case. This is becoming part of the pattern, too. Strange, you’d think with so many people involved in a conspiracy to cultivate and market hundreds of pounds of marijuana, there would be an arrest or two.
But that doesn’t benefit the DEA. What they want to do in California is disrupt dispensary businesses and make photo-ops. They get to seize all that cash and they get to show piles of marijuana alongside cash and guns on the evening news. That’s good PR for their psy-ops game to intimidate and terrorize the cannabis community and to try to convince others that medical marijuana is a sham and a front for mass criminal activity.
If they make an arrest or two, however, now they have to spend the time and resources to present a case. The public is treated to a drawn-out spectacle of trials and appeals. That brings the case around to the issue of medical marijuana and real suffering patients, and the DEA then gets cast as the stormtroopers who would take a joint out of a cancer patient’s trembling hands. The dispensary owners get cast as compassionate caregivers and become martyrs. That’s bad PR for the psy-ops game.
In other words, the DEA is a little like one of Paulie Walnuts’ crews from The Sopranos. “Nice pot shop ya got here, paisan, it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it…”
