This is a story about Boone's Farm. No, not the cheap wine that you know about.
It's an interesting story that I came across on yahoo about an older gentleman in Kentucky. It's worth a read.
With authorities closing in to seize 2,400 marijuana plants on John Robert Boone's farm two years ago, the legendary Kentucky outlaw vanished like a puff of smoke. The prolific grower has been dodging the law ever since, his folk-hero status growing with every sale of a "Run, Johnny, Run" T-shirt and click on his Facebook fan page.
Here's the facebook link.
Tracking down the fugitive who resembles a tattooed Santa Claus has proven as hard as "trying to catch a ghost" for the federal authorities canvassing tightlipped residents among the small farms in a rural area southeast of Louisville. Boone, who's trying to avoid the life sentence he would get if convicted a third time of growing pot, has plenty of sympathizers in an area where many farmers down on their luck have planted marijuana.
"That's all he's ever done, raising pot," said longtime friend Larry Hawkins, who owns a bar and restaurant called Hawk's Place. "He never hurt nobody."
Lots of people joke blithely about Willie Nelson's arrest, or weed in general. Very few of those folks have the balls to go to jail/prison for weed.
Life in prison for weed? That ain't no joke. Nor is it moral. Or smart public policy. As someone on twitter said today: "Willie Nelson busted for six ounces of pot. God, who produces the plant across the globe naturally, is still at large"
More from yahoo:
He spent more than a decade in federal prison after being convicted in the late 1980s of taking part in what federal prosecutors called the "largest domestic marijuana syndicate in American history," a string of 29 farms in Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas and Wisconsin.
The group became known as the "Cornbread Mafia" and Boone was tagged by prosecutors as their leader, earning him the nicknames "King of Pot" and "Godfather of Grass."
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Boone's rough-edged stomping grounds — dotted with small towns, corn fields and bourbon distilleries — have a colorful history of fostering illicit activities.
The area was home to moonshine runners during Prohibition, who often darted into rows of corn stalks and barns to hide from federal agents. In the early 1980s, as the economy soured and prices for tobacco and farm products dropped, parts of central Kentucky had unemployment rates nearing 14 percent. The rate in the area now is around 9 percent — similar to the national average.
"A lot of the sons of moonshine makers turned to marijuana," said Smith, a native of the area who now practices in Louisville. "That particular part of the state, that was the hometown of marijuana."
Boone himself invoked the area's hardships during the 1988 court hearing at which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
"With the poverty at home, marijuana is sometimes one of the things that puts bread on the table," Boone said. "We were working with our hands on earth God gave us."
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more on the willie nelson situation