Texas Cops Mistake Mint Plants for Weed

No need to panic, folks. The people of Corpus Christi are safe from invasive mint plants — for now, at least.

Confused cops in the Texas city recently took a break from patrol to do a bit of yard work. Thinking they were onto the largest pot seizure city history, several officers feverishly worked until dusk to pull up more than 300 plants, only to learn that the plants were actually just wild mint.

A teen riding his bike through a city park alerted police to the plants, which turned out to be Horse Mint (left) — a variety of mint native to Europe and Asia.

It's easy to poke fun at the officers who sweated out an afternoon of yard work in the Texas heat for no reason at all, but I can't help but think of their wasted efforts as a symbol of our misdirected and destructive drug war.

Even if the plants had been marijuana, weren't there better things these officers could have been doing with their day? Of course. They could have been chasing down cold cases, interacting with their community, walking beats or spending an extra hour on a violent crime investigation.

Even if the mint was actually pot, destroying plants that people use to get high only serves to consolidate the illegal supply chain in the hands of people smart enough not to plant their crop in a public park. Corpus Christi's goal in this operation was a mirror of American policy — attack supply, because demand is too hard to touch. And unfortunately, both here in the U.S. and overseas, all such a strategy produces is wasted time and money.

But again, back to the befuddled Corpus Christi cops. Let's think again about the logic behind the "investigation" that led police to pull and count more than 300 large plants and transport them to the station for testing. The plants were in a public park. It's likely that the plants would have sat there undisturbed while the police collected one sample in order to confirm that it was actually pot. It wouldn't even require a lab — your neighborhood garden store would do the trick. Would it have been so hard to wait?

Here's what worries me: if these plants were discovered on private property, would the cops have rushed in and arrested someone, and only later figured out that they had nothing more than a stash of mint on their hands?

When we have police officers who are convinced that mint plants are actually weed, it's clear that reefer madness is overwhelming our law enforcement agencies. On the other hand, if we were to legalize the plant (which, let's remember, is far less dangerous than alcohol), maybe we could get police — and policymakers — out of the garden and onto some real work.

Via Grits for Breakfast and Raw Story

Photo Credit: Michael Becker