Dry Poppies Bring Woes and Sting Drug Laws

By CAREY GOLDBERG

SEATTLE The case was enough to set any garden club atwitter. A Seattle
man, Jim Hogshire, had been charged with possessing flowers.

Well, not just any flowers; a police raid on his apartment turned up dried
poppy pods, and poppies of a certain species are classified under federal
law as controlled substances because they can be used to produce opium.

But what turned Hogshire's case into a celebrated cause, one that prompted
a cover article in last month's Harper's magazine and public support from
national drug policy reformers, was that the pods he had could be bought in
most any florist's shop or craft store, where they are sold for dried
flower arrangements.

In their fresh form, the illegal poppies, known as Papaver somniferum,
grace gardens all over the country with vibrant reds, deep purples and
lavenders. Bouquets of the prohibited poppies can sometimes even be bought
in supermarkets.

Hogshire's arrest, in March 1996, raised the issue that all those poppy
growers and sellers are technically flouting the law; and though the police
are extremely unlikely to crack down, they would be within the law if they
did.

Last week, the case ended well for the defendant. Hogshire, 39, who
originally faced felony charges that could have sent him to prison for
years, went free Thursday after a pleabargain in King County Superior
Court that reduced the charge against him to a nondrug misdemeanor and
required him to pay $100, serve 100 hours of community service time and
remain on probation for a year. The poppy charge itself was dropped, but
lawyers involved in the case said that did not mean that it could not be
invoked in another instance.

"These poppies are everywhere but everyone who's got them is potentially a
felon," said Tim Ford, Hogshire's lawyer. Ford added, however, that it was
virtually unheard of for anyone to be arrested for simple poppy possession
without an effort to manufacture opiates.

The rarity of poppy prosecution is the other reason Hogshire's case
attracted attention: he and his lawyer argued that he was singled out for
arrest because he had written extensively on illicit drugs and their
properties.

He wrote a book called "Opium for the Masses" (Loompanics Unlimited, 1994),
which includes howto sections on producing and ingesting opium, and
publishes a smallcirculation magazine called PillsaGoGo, which covers
pharmaceuticals and includes features like a description of the effects of
taking massive doses of cough syrups.

The police based their search warrant in part on those writings. And one
officer asked, " 'With what you write, weren't you expecting this?,' "
Hogshire said.

"What happened to me was designed to silence me," he said, "and to some
extent it did a good job of that because for the next year or more I was
wrapped up with this case."

Gary Ernsdorff, the King County deputy prosecuting attorney who took over
Hogshire's case after the charges were filed, said that Hogshire's writings
were certainly not the reason he was arrested but that it did influence
prosecutors.

"They obviously showed that he wasn't a mere gardener," Ernsdorff said,
"but as far as elevating him to some special status where we pursued
charges against him, I would say no." Rather, he said, "it was more of a
public safety issue."

Police found several legally registered weapons in Hogshire's apartment,
along with what they described as a Thermit grenade but what Hogshire said
was merely for fireworks.

The charge he ultimately pleaded to was for "attempted possession of an
improvised device," which usually refers to homemade bombs. Ernsdorff said
the county had agreed to the plea bargain because it anticipated problems
proving that the pods Hogshire possessed were indeed of the illegal variety
and that the improvised device had been meant for illuse.

Hogshire asserted that the poppy pods he possessed were not even of the
species that is illegal; there are hundreds of other species, he said, and
the "cops on the beat" who arrested him focused on the pods only because it
said "Poppies" on the box they were in.

"I didn't happen to have Papaver somniferum," he said, "but this does show
the arbitrary nature of the war on some drugs: Why this plant and not that
one? Why is it OK to make Jimson Weed tea and have a hallucination and
that's totally legal, but you can't do the same with peyote?"

To opponents of the drug war, the case showed how drug policy could clash
with other American values.

"The guy was being persecuted because of the fact that he wrote a book!"
said Arnold Trebach, founder of the Drug Policy Foundation, a Washington,
D.C., group that seeks alternatives to the drug war. "A book! In America!
Have we totally lost our sense of who we are?"

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company