randomWalks

Over the next few months, Boje spent a good deal of time at McCormick's Bel Air mansion, dubbed the cannabis castle"(it had a moat, along with 4,000 pot plants), making sketches for the book. One night on her way home she was snared by officers from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. They claimed they had been watching her through binoculars as she lined the bridge across the cannabis castle's moat with pot plants and watered them.

Although she had nothing in her possession, over the next 72 hours she was strip-searched 15 times while two cops leered at her and told her what they were going to do with her once they put her "inside for good." When she mentioned Proposition 215, they laughed and told her that growing medical marijuana might be legal under California state law, but under federal law it was no different from peddling smack. The DEA was a federal agency, and the legal principle of supremacy meant that in a battle between state and federal law, the latter would win.