Operation Green Merchant was a nationwide investigation and operation targeting businesses advertising specialized horticultural equipment that was supposedly used to grow cannabis in the 1990s.[1][2][3]
The DEA had decided to investigate the advertising inside the High Times and Sinsemilla Tips with the goal of shutting down the blooming indoor marijuana industry using United Parcel Service records to trace deliveries of indoor growing equipment and seeds.
The three key targets of Green Merchant were the High Times magazine, Sinsemilla Tips magazine and the Holland's Seed Bank owned by Nevil Schoenmakers.[4]
On October 26, 1989, the DEA along with other local, state and federal agents, raided hydroponics and garden stores and business in 46 states, seizing assets and more than 100 arrests.[5] Operation Green Merchant, which lasted from 1988 to 1992, resulted in 1,698 arrests, 3,794 indoor growing operations seized, and $35 million in drug assets seized.[6]
^Isikoff, Michael (July 17, 1990). "Justice Dept. Probing Drug Counterculture Magazine". San Francisco Chronicle. p. A9. DEA officials later confirmed that the list of specialty stores raided was culled from advertisers in High Times as well as in Sinsemilla Tips, a competing Oregon-based journal published by marijuana activist Tom Alexander. Alexander's indoor-gardening store, located in the same building as his magazine, was among those shut down by the raids.
