This was a bust and buy operation.
Officials in Albuquerque, N.M., were forced to pay a medical marijuana patient $3,100 after police destroyed her pot crop.
“You can’t just go into somebody’s house, and destroy their property, and come back and say, ‘Oops, my bad,’” Toni Armijo told KOAT-TV after the settlement.
The woman said she was considering further legal action against the town over the weed-whacking officers.
The incident occurred in August 2010, when a neighbor of Armijo — concerned that the woman was suicidal — asked police to check on her.
Cops arrived to find the woman was gone. But her marijuana plants were front and center inside the house, sprouting beneath a grow light.
The officers pulled the pot from her pots and held the weed as evidence. By the time Armijo convinced police that she was licensed to grow medical marijuana, her crop — stuffed inside a paper bag — was ruined.
“Everything was gone,” she told the television station. “It was complete destruction.”
Albuquerque city Risk Manager Peter Ennen said it was a routine settlement distinguished only by the drug element.
“It’s something out of the ordinary that it’s a claim for medical marijuana plants,” Ennen told KOAT-TV
