Tea and Pot

Mint tea and nuts in our hotel room in Morocco // photo my own

After an astonishingly incompetent drug raid, the victims were awarded $150k in compensation from the police. The amount seems hardly sufficient to even cover the psychological damage of the family, including their children, incurred when armed thugs wearing shiny badges broke into their house and pointed guns at them. Throw in the property damage and the years of litigation and this amount seems grossly insufficient.

This poor family had their home raided by the police because the father had purchased some supplies from a hydroponics store to grow plants with his son for a science project. Naturally, to the police, this action means he must be a drug lord. The police rummaged through his trash and found loose tea leaves. It must be marijuana! I mean, it's greenish, it looks like a leaf or stem, it can't possibly be anything else. So they got a warrant and broke into their house, guns drawn. Thankfully they didn't use flash bangs or shoot the family dog like they seem to like to do.

This somewhat reminds me of a few years ago when we bought some bags of mint tea leaves in Morocco to bring back with us. Mint tea seems to be the standard gesture of goodwill and peace between people there and this resonated with us.

Upon returning to the United States, I was ready to put on a slide show of my vacation photos for my office. There are a lot of avid vacationers and we like to draw inspiration from each other. I thought it would be nice to brew some mint tea for the showing. So in the morning, I brought one of the bags of tea with me to work. I extended the bag to the receptionist and asked if she could make some for the presentation at lunchtime. She froze, unwilling to take the bag off my hands.

I looked at it and said "This is tea."

"Oh! I thought it was...something else," she said with a laugh, still not making a move to take it.

After standing there for a second with my hand outstretched, I said, "Okay, I'll just take it with me and keep it at my desk."

"Yes, please."

I brought the bag to my desk and handed it over to someone who I knew was a regular tea drinker and...regular...smoker. I told him what the receptionist thought it was and he got a bit of a chuckle out of it.

Stack of bags of tea leaves in Marrakech // photo my own

I can't fault her for her interpretation of what it was. Looking at it afterward, it was a plastic bag that looked like the kind of bag of pot that Kumar danced with in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, or Tony Montana's merchandise but in green, not white. Hey, I got the bag from a street vendor in Marrakesh. It wasn't exactly a bag of Lipton bought from Target.

But her naivete on pot exposed my naivete about the perception of green leaves in a bag. It was a good thing I had carried multiple things upstairs in a nontransparent bag. Some busybody may have spotted the tea and called the cops on me. They may have raided my office with guns pointed at everyone. And I would only have received a measly $150k in compensation for my rights being violated.

There is one big difference between the receptionist and the police mistaking tea for pot. For the police, they are tasked with drawing guns on people, tying them up, and throwing them in cages due to possessing these plants. They prove over and over again that they're completely incompetent from doing this and continues to incur major damage to innocent people. Maybe we shouldn't have these laws, then.