Pot Farm by Matthew Gavin Frank

Pot Farm by Matthew Gavin Frank

Author:Matthew Gavin Frank [Matthew Gavin Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press


Eight

WAS THAT HELICOPTER really flown by the California Department of Justice? I don’t know, and of course . . . As a result of incidents like last night’s and other motivations—justified, unjustified, ill-defined, and precise—Lady Wanda has been employing snipers at Weckman Farm since 1997. (I must pat myself on the back for meticulously wording my questions to her so as not to appear like an interviewer, though this self-congratulation, upon examination, is for nothing more than my ability to deceive a trusting person. Now I feel bad about myself, and revoke said pat.) Though an avid gun collector herself (her antique gun collection includes such weaponry as an 1865 Belgian cavalry snap hook and an 1891 Argentinean navy nickel-plated rifle—both fully badass), she used to be against having firearms on Weckman, believing their presence would provoke violence. After the passing of the Compassionate Use Act in 1996, Lady Wanda was the victim of a governmental and grassroots backlash. And not that grass. Ho, ho.

During 1996’s harvest, Weckman Farm was twice invaded illegally: once by CAMP, California’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, a division of the Department of Justice and Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement; once by a private vigilante militia, whose guns were neither Belgian nor Argentinean, were not from the nineteenth century, and were not safely locked behind Lucite. According to Lady Wanda, these private militias are increasing in number, staging armed raids on numerous marijuana farms both commercial and medical.

Over breakfast on our late-starting workday, the crew still digesting the last notes of Charlie’s trumpet song, Lady Wanda tells us, “Those were CAMP officials in that helicopter last night.”

I’m not sure how she knows this—the color of the copter, the style of flying? Did the starlight reflecting from her bosom illuminate their faces?

After last night’s evening gown, Lady Wanda has returned to her trusty housefrock—this one bearing carnations not unlike those adorning Hector’s Virgen de Guadalupe.

“They usually leave us alone,” she says.

During the talent show, it was Waldo, Hector’s epileptic replacement in sniperdom, who was stationed in the redwood tree. I could only speculate on his internal debate about whether to fire, like the hero of so many Schwarzenegger movies, into the blades of the CAMP helicopter, spawning a midair explosion and the rock ’n’ roll–fueled progression of Weckman Farm’s end credits.

Lady Wanda tells us that CAMP typically concentrates its efforts on commercial, nonmedical marijuana farms, but the agency has been known to stage raids without such discrimination. In 2004 alone, CAMP is said (by Lady Wanda) to have destroyed over one million marijuana plants on farms both commercial and medical. While these raids of medical marijuana farms are considered illegal within the parameters of the Compassionate Use Act, they are legitimate on the federal level, and allowed to go on without repercussion. (Unless maiming and killing still keep people up at night.)

The number of plants confiscated during the Northern California marijuana harvest has increased from approximately 350,000 in 2001 to 1,700,000 in 2006. This can speak either to



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