Innocent Couple Raided by Cops for Facebook Post of LEGAL Morel Mushrooms

By Matt Agorist

 Darlington, MD — It is a travesty enough when the drug war lays waste  to the rights and lives of entirely decent people who’ve harmed no one  simply because they choose to ingest a substance deemed illegal by the  state. However, because the drug war is such an immoral and barbaric  practice, entirely innocent people are also swept up in the dragnet of  tyranny and ignorance. Case in point: a couple in Maryland were raided  by cops for posting photos of legal morel mushrooms they picked and ate. 

On Friday, John Garrison and his girlfriend Hope went foraging the  mountains for some morel mushrooms. Morels are known to those in the  region as being the safest mushroom to hunt for as they are very easily  identified due to their unique look. From mid April to mid May, lovers  of nature and good food, like John and Hope will find them growing near  trees or where there used to be trees. 

Garrison was so excited that they had found a bunch of them, that he posted a photo  on Facebook of he and Hope’s bounty along with his plans to “sautee  them with brown sugar and cinnamon and see how that turns out.”  A great night of good food was set to follow an awesome day of hiking  and foraging. 

That is, however, until the wheels of the police state  drug war caught a whiff of the mushrooms. Garrison made the post that they were about to saute the mushrooms at  9:09 pm. Only hours later as he and Hope sat back with full bellies,  police showed up. “We had just finished eating the Morels we found today and heard a  knock on the door. 

A police officer and an RA were standing outside. We  let them in and as soon as the police officer walked in he asked us why  we were eating mushrooms and posting about it online. He thought he was  on the biggest bust of his career thinking we were having a magic  mushroom party before I explained to him that Morels are a native choice  edible mushroom similar to truffles,” explained Garrison. 

However, this cop—clearly unaware of the tasty morel and hell bent on  busting kids for eating mushrooms—just knew he had caught himself a  pair of hardened criminals who’d dare to expand their consciousness in  the sanctity of their own home. 

“He wasn’t convinced. So I rummaged through the trash to find a  peice (sic) of a Morel so that he would have evidence that we weren’t  taking psychedelic mushrooms. I showed him and he still wasn’t convinced  that they weren’t magic mushrooms, Which was shocking to me because  morels look nothing like a psychedelic psilocybin (sic) mushrooms and I  figured a police officer would know what illegal drugs looked like. A  second police officer showed up and I showed her the Morel and she  immediately knew it was a Morel which was a relief. They processed our  ID’s and eventually left. What an experience,” Garrison wrote on Facebook.  

Indeed, it was a troublesome experience and, had anything made police  fear for their lives during this interaction, things could have turned  out a lot worse. Equally as troubling as cops raiding your apartment over Facebook  posts for legal mushrooms is how they found out about it in the first  place. Were police simply trolling Facebook that night and saw  Garrison’s post? Or, did some “good citizen” do their due diligence and  “see something and say something”? 

Either way, both of those scenarios are undesirable and facilitated  by the state’s immoral and violent drug war. Until the dinosaurs in the prison industrial complex—who  keep the drug war alive to reap massive profits off of persecuting  people for victimless crimes—are exposed, this madness will continue and  others will not be as lucky as John and Hope. 

---

 We are the Free Thought Project — a hub for Free Thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability. All of our content was created by our team of artists and writers. Learn more about us on our website thefreethoughtproject.com.