
It’s not looking like much came of last October’s police raid of two Capitol Hemp locations in the District.
The City Paper reports that the store’s two owners, who turned themselves in to police in December, may end up getting a plea offer from prosecutors. Both face charges of selling drug paraphernalia based on the District’s murky laws on the issue.
Still, one of the owners, Adam Eidinger, doesn’t seem like he’s willing plead to anything:
“The government at the very last minute—realizing that we’re going to trial and setting a trial date—said they’re formulating a plea offer,” Eidinger says. They’ll be meeting with prosecutors on Jan. 27, but Eidinger says he’s ready to go to court. “We’re going to go all the way with a trial unless they offer us a full-on no contest.”
Eidinger is still upset and bewildered by the MPD’s decision to raid the shop. In March of 2011, police came into the shop to enforce the ban on “spice,” or K2, the fake pot that he says the shops had stopped selling three months earlier. His relationship with the police was good up until the raid, he says.
Whether or not prosecutors give him what he wants, the entire affair is certainly a head-scratching example of the odd use of police resources in fighting the war on drugs. A police affidavit justifying the raid took some creative liberties in explaining why such action was necessary; later raids on two other Adams Morgan head shops were based on similarly odd logic.
Martin Austermuhle