A senior citizen from Amherst, MA, recently had her beloved weed plant—which she’d been growing in her backyard among her raspberry bushes for years—seized by the Massachusetts National Guard.
“I had been nursing this baby through a drought, and I was pretty pissed to tell you the truth,” Peg Holcomb, 81, told the Boston Globe.
A representative of the Massachusetts National Guard claims the plant was spotted by a low-flying helicopter:
State Police spokesman David Procopio said the marijuana “eradication operation” was carried out in conjunction with the Massachusetts National Guard, a yearly exercise made possible by a $60,000 US Department of Justice grant.
In all, 44 plants were taken from seven properties in Hadley, Northampton, and Amherst.
“The operation utilizes a spotter from the MA National Guard Counter Drug Program in the helicopter,” Procopio said in an e-mail.
Holcomb, who wasn’t home at the time of the seizure (her adult son handed the plant over without a warrant to help his mother avoid prosecution), thinks the whole operation is bullshit. And she doesn’t even have any indica to help her calm down.
“This is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, I am a citizen of the United States of America. You have overstepped and I am not going to step aside,” she told the Globe’s Dylan McGuinness.
Later she added, “People are shaking their heads, asking what has this world come to? You can’t fly around our house and snoop in our yards.”
Let Holcomb have her goddamn weed plant! Let all of us have our goddamn weed plants!