According to local media and reported by Police State USA, 25 were arrested as the state government intensified their efforts to completely keep a thumb on yet another plant. Yet another harmless plant. Besides the energy drink nonsense in the convenience stores or supplements in your grandma's favorite aisle at the pharmacy, ginseng is actually a big business item in the black market, able to fetch between $500-$1,000 a pound. The plant is highly popular for its medicinal properties, which include stress relief, immunity support, and blood sugar control.
The black market popularity and profit margin has inevitably led to people stealing or illegally harvesting the plant, which inevitably led to Indiana going batshit crazy in its regulation. I could swear we are talking about marijuana here, but trust me, this is a story about a ginseng bust.
Indiana does not, apparently, fuck around when it comes to ginseng regulation, regulating how and when it can be grown, when it can be harvested, its sale, the conditions under which it can be sold, and the licensing under which an individual can sell it, and even when it is permissible to even possess ginseng. Indiana Code 14-31-3, which covers ginseng regulation and enforcement, has maximum penalties between 180 days to 1 year for violations of the law, which are Class A or B misdemeanors.
As big an uphill battle as legalization is in Indiana, it puts a lot into perspective when you realize just how much government wants to regulate, and how badly they want to make you think you need the regulation. More interesting to me is the idea that the Dept. of Natural Resources was the lead on this, reinforcing a point that I have made for years, about how it should be DNR personnel looking for pot plants in forests, rather than gassing up a helicopter and taking to the air. Just because they are getting the military's hand-me-downs (or worse yet, flat buying eight Apache attack helicopters like Brevard County, Florida recently did), they really shouldn't be spending this much time dreaming up excuses to play soldier.
Coming into the writing of this piece, I was completely unaware that there was even such a thing as a ginseng black market, nor that Indiana regulated ginseng in much the same fashion that New York City legislates lemonade stands. Neither of these items, upon learning them, surprised me much.
When our federal legislature was first laid out, it was for the purpose of meeting to take care of the nation's business, which was not going to be so much as to require a lot of extra time on the clock unless the shit was hitting the butter churn. People had businesses to run. Naturally, over time it became the kind of process where it became a four or five month full-time job, if that. Seriously. Indiana has a legislature that meets 61 days over a three month span in odd-numbered years, and 30 days over ten weeks during even-numbered years. Somehow, through that grueling schedule, they find time to maintain their other careers making far more than the $22k and change they make for all that high-stakes political poker. You know, the kind involving fucking ginseng. Don't even get me started on making $22k for a month or two a year of policy work.
-T.K.