OBAMALAND: This Man Didn’t Commit a Crime, But Cops Grabbed His Property and Bank Accounts Anyway

What do you think? Is this a serious overreach of power?

Wally Kowalski, an engineer living in a farmhouse in rural southwest Michigan, came home one day last September to find his property swarming with cops. They told him that they had spotted his marijuana plants from a helicopter. Kowalski has a license to grow and distribute medical pot to several low-income people who depend on the drug. He grows the plants in a garden area enclosed by a barbed wire fence.

But whether or not Kowalski had a legal right to grow mattered little to the state police, who seized his power generator—even though it had nothing to do with his marijuana plants—and some expensive equipment. They also destroyed the plants.

Kowalski told the Mackinac Center for Public Policy that they grabbed anything likely to be sold at a police auction. He said they were positively giddy after searching his house and finding his financial papers:

“When they found my bank accounts here in my office, they let out a yell. They said, ‘Here’s the bank accounts, we got him.’ It’s like the happiest thing for them, to find my bank accounts.”

The police froze his accounts, rendering him unable to make payments on his student loans or other bills. And he could no longer complete the immigration process for his wife, a resident of Africa.

Read more: Reason