How a nationwide DEA dragnet in 1989 turned garden shops into crime scenes, and taught the War on Drugs to police an idea.
Update (Dec. 24, 2025): After publication, former High Times editor Steve Bloom shared additional historical context about how Operation Green Merchant impacted the magazine itself. We have updated this story accordingly.
The first light of dawn had barely bled over the strip mall when the shutters screeched open. A dozen black-clad agents spilled out of unmarked vans. They smashed glass, padlocked doors, and hauled boxes with the dead-eyed efficiency of men who stopped asking questions a long time ago.
At 6:03 a.m. on October 26, 1989, federal task forces rolled through hydroponic and indoor-gardening shops in 46 states, a blitz the DEA proudly code-named Operation Green Merchant. The agency called it a “campaign against drug paraphernalia.”
Everyone else would remember it by its underground name: Black Thursday.
In the eyes of the state, pumps, ballasts, nutrient kits, even mail-order seed catalogs and dog-eared copies of High Timeswere “tools of cultivation”—government doublespeak for evidence of conspiracy.
Operation Green Merchant—Black Thursday, whatever you call it—was about destroying what made indoor growing possible. Whether you sold the equipment, printed the ads, or supplied the seeds, your neck was officially on the line.
Inside the shops, agents flipped through customer ledgers and jotted down names like a hit list. And in dozens of towns across America, the same synchronized raids smashed through storefronts, warehouses, and garden centers.
Not cartel compounds. Not meth labs. Garden stores.
The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post tallied the damage: 191 arrests, dozens of shops stripped bare, six million in loot for Uncle Sam. Forty-eight hours flat. A coast-to-coast stick-up in the name of law and order.
Operation Green Merchant didn’t only hit hydro shops. It reached High Times itself. “HT was subpoenaed by the government and threatened with conspiracy charges,” former editor Steve Bloom told High Times, describing the moment as existential for the magazine.
Bloom says the fallout also gutted the publication’s advertising base. “The biggest damage was the mag lost 16 pages, 100 to 84, all advertising,” he said. That drop wasn’t immediate on the newsstand, but it became visible a few issues later: after holding around 100 pages through late 1989 and January 1990, High Times shrank into the mid-80s starting in February 1990 and stayed there for months, reshaping what kinds of advertisers were willing to show up in print.
The Hysteria Industrial Complex
By the late eighties, America had been huffing its own hysteria for decades. The Cold War was sputtering out, the Soviet threat fizzled, but the Great American War Machine never retired. It changed targets.
The CIA looked outward. The DEA turned inward.
And in the long shadow of Harry Anslinger, they built a new domestic enemy to keep the money flowing. Green had replaced Red as the color of subversion. D.A.R.E vans prowled school parking lots. And Nancy Reagan’s lacquered grin flashed across television screens.
After years of helicopter sweeps and paraquat-poisoned fields, growers were forced to retreat—and for the first time, cultivation was free from terroir, season, or sun.
But freedom has a way of drawing fire.
Green Merchant became the government’s new “domestic counter-subversion” program—its very own backyard Cold War. And paranoia began to bloom in the basements and back rooms of America, spreading like bud rot. Rumors of subpoenaed customer lists. Talks of undercover agents posing as hobby gardeners.
For the first time, the community understood that in the War on Cannabis, no one was innocent.
Not the shop owners. Not the publishers. And especially not the gardeners.
Darwinism With a Dimmer Switch
Across basements, garages, and storage units, a new generation of growers locked the doors, blacked out the windows, and built their own climates from scratch. The sun had become a liability. The DEA had turned the sky into a surveillance grid. So growers built a new world underground—in-house.
For the first time, cannabis was thriving anywhere someone could pay the electric bill.
Magazines like Sinsemilla Tips became field manuals for indoor cultivation, while High Times roared in public as the swaggering uncle of the culture. Hydro stores popped up with names like Worm’s Way, and Superior Growers Supply.
The future was bright. Artificially bright.
Because behind beige government doors, agents were building a blacklist. What the growers called community, the feds called conspiracy. What growers called innovation, the DEA called probable cause.
Thirty-five years ago, and again in 2025, a PO box full of seed orders smells a little too much like civil disobedience.
Blueprint for a Witch Hunt
They called it Operation Green Merchant, because everything in the eighties needed a cool code name—the sleeker, the better. The plan was brilliant in its own authoritative way: kill the infrastructure, snuff out the culture.
If they couldn’t stop people from smoking it, they’d stop them from growing it.
So from 1989 to 1992, agents poured through years of High Times and Sinsemilla Tips, gawking at ads like perverts with a lingerie catalog. They ordered equipment. Made friends. Took notes. Checked shipping data through UPS. Pulled postal logs. Built charts. Drew arrows. Connected dots that weren’t dots at all.
By the time the warrants were signed, every hydro store in America had become a potential front, every UPS driver a potential snitch, every advertisement a potential confession. But in reality, it was a dragnet of half-truths and full boar cruelty carried out against small business owners and hobby horticulturalists who thought they found a loophole—a legal gray area.
What they found instead was the blunt end of American justice. The billy club of bureaucracy, swinging for the knees.
When the Sky Fell on Aisle 7
In Michigan, Florida, Oregon, Texas—seemingly everywhere—agents moved with synchronized precision, a nationwide symphony of shuttered businesses and bad actors. Agents didn’t find much cannabis. That wasn’t the point.
A DEA spokesperson bragged to UPI that Green Merchant was “the first coordinated strike against the indoor cultivation industry,” as if gardeners were enemy combatants and shop lights were surface-to-air missiles.
Across the country, where people genuinely believed they were running legal hydro shops, the raids hit like a firing squad.
One of them was Bill Ross, owner of East Coast Hydroponics in Staten Island. Four DEA agents walked into his shop with a federal warrant after visiting his sister’s house, for the simple reason that she’d once signed for a bag of fertilizer he sent by UPS.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, goddamn it,” Ross told reporters later. “I guess they’d visited my store at some point and I’d told them how to grow tomatoes. Supposedly, another DEA man from out of town told these guys that tomatoes are a word for dope. Now they’ve got my records, my customers are uncomfortable being here, and I’m losing business. This all happened because I advertised in High Times… This is not the America I love.”
Most shop owners were never charged with a crime. And the truth is, the government didn’t need convictions. They had civil forfeiture.
Take everything. Leave nothing. Call it “justice served.”
God bless America.
The Human Cost of a Manufactured Enemy
When the dust settled, the headlines moved on, but the people left behind were stuck in the wreckage. Mortgage bills. Court dates. Letters stamped in steel-blue ink:
U.S. DISTRICT COURT—PROPERTY SEIZURE NOTICE.
Tom Alexander, the man behind Sinsemilla Tips, watched his magazine, which had been the heartbeat of the hydro revolution, become radioactive overnight. As Alexander later stated to Willamette Weekly: “They went after grow shops, mainly the ones that were advertising in High Times and Sinsemilla Tips, and basically it killed our revenue stream.” By late 1990, just over a year after Black Thursday, Sinsemilla Tipswas dead.
One subpoena from the DEA, and a decade of industry-building turned to ash.
High Times felt the shock too. Advertisers pulled out. Mailing lists were treated like McCarthy-era indictments.
DEA records would later peg the full campaign’s body counts even higher—nearly 1,700 dragged off, 3,800 grow operations dismantled, and roughly $35 million in “assets” between 1988 and 1992. One of the grandest domestic crusades of the drug-war era.
Meanwhile, the human toll never made it into the reports. Lost businesses, lost wages, lost lives. Those stories didn’t fit in the “success metrics.”
But resilience is a stubborn weed. Within a few years, the same “outlaws” who’d been raided were quietly rebuilding under new names with sterile branding, marketing themselves as “horticulture supply.”
No leaf logos. No coded slogans.
The great irony of Green Merchant: It didn’t kill indoor cultivation. It forced growers to perfect it.
From Battering Rams to Barcodes
Thirty-five years later, half the country is “legal.” Millions fought, marched, and voted to get us here. Yet the cannabis world still wakes up every morning to audits, compliance crackdowns, and bureaucratic chokeholds. The DEA’s filing cabinets have been replaced by seed-to-sale surveillance dashboards, and the raids have been replaced by regulatory strangulation.
Software now tracks every gram with time stamps and GPS coordinates. Instagram deletes dispensary pages without warning. Where UPS logs were once subpoenaed, statewide compliance portals now generate auto-flags and “investigative leads” in real time. Now, the seizures come with tax penalties instead of padlocks.
The industry calls it compliance.
The old guard calls it what it is: Surveillance.
California, supposedly the promised land, became a bureaucratic funhouse of taxes, zoning fights, BCC/DCC raids on “unlicensed operations”that feel suspiciously like the old smash-and-grab DEA tactics. Licenses are handed out like golden tickets, then revoked just as easily.
It’s hard not to hear echoes of Operation Green Merchant in every new layer of regulation. The spirit of the operation—control through infrastructure—is alive and kicking.
The Knife Behind the Smile
Operation Green Merchant proved something brutally simple: the U.S. government will scorch its own soil to police the idea that an ordinary citizen could grow their own medicine, their own pleasure, their own autonomy—without permission.
And yet, somehow, the culture won. Sort of.
You can walk into a dispensary now and pay with a debit card instead of a fake name. You can buy a home grow tent off Amazon with free two-day shipping. Hydro gear sits on aisle 7 at Home Depot, as casual as fertilizer and bird seed.
But in some states, you still need a badge number to touch the plant. You still need a license to breathe near it.
A permission slip to hope.
Maybe that’s why it all feels so familiar for the simple, deranged reason that the war on cannabis never really ended. America is still chewing its own tail, high on authority and low on sense. And the longer it devours itself, the better it gets at pretending otherwise.
The badge-waving, three-letter folks simply learned it goes down easier if they grin in your face and drape an arm around your shoulder before twisting the knife under your ribs.
Because now, the state doesn’t need a raid to raid you. Not anymore.
