There were 4 adults living in the home along with 15-year old boy and a 1-year old girl. Angela Peak, grandmother of the 1-year old, was arrested. Two male residents of the home, Phillip Nischwitz and Mark A. Turner, are wanted for questioning by the police but have not been charged in this case. Nischwitz apparently fled the scene before the fire department and police arrived (things that make you go hmmmmm). The Times has a lovely picture of him on the front page of today’s paper … from the looks of it, a mug shot from a prior encounter with law enforcement.

The fire and subsequent meth lab bust occurred at 1500 Fenley … about a quarter mile east from the grounds of Edison Junior High and C.B. Smith Primary School and a quarter mile west of the grounds of L.E. Starke Primary School.  From the map it looks like the residence is about 500 feet outside the 1000-foot perimeter that could result in additional charges being filed for dealing drugs near a school.

Ugh. That’s about all I can say.

The crop was intended for use on a demonstration house being built out of “hempcrete“, a mixture of industrial hemp, cement, lime, and sand. Pine Ridge has a housing shortage of as many as 2000 units. In one extreme case, an extended family of 23 shares a single trailer!

White Plume’s crop was to be the first home-grown hemp to be used in the hempcrete housing project. The initial hemp utilized had to be imported from Canada.

None of these circumstances mattered to the feds, though.

White Plume awoke to the sounds of helicopters. He looked out the window and saw a convoy of vehicles heading for his field.

He raced down to investigate, and was met by a slew of black-clad and heavily armed figures — 36 agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the US Marshal’s office.

When White Plume rolled down the window of his pick-up to ask what was going on, he says, one US marshal pointed a gun in his face. Meanwhile, the other agents chopped down each plant near the roots and hauled them away.

This scenario is wrong in so many ways.

First, the federal government is yet again stomping on the tribal sovereignty of the First Nations and violating long-standing treaties. The Pine Ridge tribal government had passed an ordinance allowing White Plume to plant his crop, and defined industrial hemp as hemp containing less than 1% THC (a quite reasonable definition, IMO). Testing proved that White Plume’s hemp easily made that grade. Unfortunately for White Plume, U.S. federal law and the D.E.A. make no such distinction.

If you’ll recall your American history, Pine Ridge was the location of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 as well as the AIM takeover and 71-day federal siege of the town in 1973. As if centuries of genocide and ethnic cleansing weren’t enough for America’s First Nations, our government apparently feels the need to kick them while they’re down and erode what little sovereignty they have left.

Second, Pine Ridge is an incredibly impoverished place with high rates of unemployment, drug & alcool abuse. Census data shows that almost 69% of Pine Ridge families live below the poverty line. This was a chance for Alex White Plume to lift himself out of that poverty through hard work and innovation.

You know … the American Dream???

Hat Tip: Tasiyagnunpa for Stumbling the story from Mother Jones.

What? You didn’t see that article? It talked about well-paying chemical engineering jobs …

Ohhhhh …

Wait …

That was methamphetamine production being outsourced to Mexico.

The article seems quite congratulatory toward local law enforcement regarding the decrease in meth labs in Central Illinois from 2005 to 2006. Of course the article does acknowledge that local production losses have been largely offset by foreign imports from Mexico. The article also labels local producers as “village idiots” while describing the foreign operatives as well-organized and difficult to contain.

Great … we’ve shut down the local idiots while honing the large-scale Mexican meth producers into well-oiled and efficient criminal machines. Meanwhile, the availability of meth in this country remains pretty much the same.

What a victory.