How a nationwide DEA dragnet in 1989 turned garden shops into crime scenes, and taught the War on Drugs to police an idea.
The first light of dawn had barely bled over the strip mall when the shutters screeched open. A dozen black-clad agents spilled out of unmarked vans. They smashed glass, padlocked doors, and hauled boxes with the dead-eyed efficiency of men who stopped asking questions a long time ago.
At 6:03 a.m. on October 26, 1989, federal task forces rolled through hydroponic and indoor-gardening shops in 46 states, a blitz the DEA proudly code-named Operation Green Merchant. The agency called it a “campaign against drug paraphernalia.”
Everyone else would remember it by its underground name: Black Thursday.
In the eyes of the state, pumps, ballasts, nutrient kits, even mail-order seed catalogs and dog-eared copies of High Times were “tools of cultivation,”—government doublespeak for evidence of conspiracy.
Operation Green Merchant—Black Thursday, whatever you call it—was about destroying what made indoor growing possible. Whether you sold the equipment, printed the ads, or supplied the seeds, your neck was officially on the line.
Inside the shops, agents flipped through customer ledgers and jotted down names like a hit list. And in dozens of towns across America, the same synchronized raids smashed through storefronts, warehouses, and garden centers.
Not cartel compounds. Not meth labs. Garden stores.
The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post tallied the damage: 191 arrests, dozens of shops stripped bare, six million in loot for Uncle Sam. Forty-eight hours flat. A coast-to-coast stick-up in the name of law and order.
The Hysteria Industrial Complex
By the late eighties, America had been huffing its own hysteria for decades. The Cold War was sputtering out, the Soviet threat fizzled, but the Great American War Machine never retired. It changed targets.
The CIA …
Read More
Author: Lucas Indrikovs / High Times
