A sixty-two-year-old in Maryland was growing some marijuana on his Christmas tree farm—19 plants—oh, and he had some magic mushrooms too. His farm was raided, the feds tried to take it from him (he was allowed to keep his farm after paying a 35K fine), and he was packed off for 26-weeks of rehab. Before sentencing him to 18 months of supervised probation the judge said this: "I certainly don't believe he poses a threat to the community. If anything, he poses a danger to himself."

Does he? It seems to me that the state—with its idiotic, punitive, ineffectual and unjust drug laws, to say nothing of the state's ability to coerce people who may not have drug problems into rehab programs where they have to pretend they have a drug problem to please a court that could otherwise deprive them of their property and liberty—is what posed a threat to the man known as "Santa Bob." Check out the rap sheet on this menace to society:

[Known] as "Santa Bob" to the children who flocked to his Darlington farm to buy Christmas trees each winter... Chance, who retired from teaching in 1999, has run nature camps for children as Ranger Bob, a name he also used years ago in appearances on the children's television show Romper Room. He was an early advocate of recycling, wrote a nature column for a local newspaper and taught courses on nature through the Harford County Public Library.... He was sentenced by Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge John G. Turnbull II, who handled the case after it was transferred from Harford County. Judges there recused themselves because they are acquainted with Chance, a member of the Harford school system's educators' Hall of Fame who also served as a Bel Air town commissioner in the 1970s.