“.. Visitors to Monticello don’t learn how Jefferson cultivated poppies .. and his personal opium use may as well never have happened.
Thomas Jefferson was a drug criminal.
But he managed to escape the terrible sword of justice by dying a century before the DEA was created.
In 1987 agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency showed up at Monticello, Jefferson’s famous estate.
Jefferson had planted opium poppies in his medicinal garden, and opium poppies are now deemed illegal.
Now, the trouble was the folks at the Monticello Foundation, which preserves and maintains the historic site ..
.. were discovered flagrantly continuing Jefferson’s crimes.
The agents were blunt:..
The poppies had to be immediately uprooted and destroyed or else they were going to start making arrests ..
.. and Monticello Foundation personnel would perhaps face lengthy stretches in prison.
The story sounds stupid now, but it scared the hell out of the people at Monticello, who immediately started yanking the forbidden plants.
A DEA man noticed the store was selling packets of “Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Poppies.”
The seeds had to go, too.
While poppy seeds might be legal, it is never legal to plant them.
Not for any reason..”
(that was an excerpt from:..”Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature’s Best Pain Medication”..)
go to source/story>>How the DEA Scrubbed Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Poppy Garden from Public Memory | | AlterNet
