When Adam* got home one evening in the fall of last year, it looked as if his house had been ransacked. All the doors had been broken down, his bed was destroyed and his drawers were tossed around the room. His housemates told him what had happened. In the early evening, the police, wearing ski masks, had banged on the back door and charged in.

Adam said there were at least six police officers and a few search dogs. "It was like out of a movie, where they bang on your door and come in screaming with their guns out," he said. He had entered the aftermath of a drug bust.

According to Adam, the police found a few ounces of marijuana and some paraphernalia in the rooms of the six people who lived there. His housemate Tim said the police also found scales for weighing the marijuana. "They searched the entire house, like everything down to looking inside (our) refrigerator and inside cans of coffee. They looked inside the walls," Adam said. "They did thousands of dollars worth of damage."

Then the police left. Adam and his housemates hadn't been arrested or charged with anything.

They waited.

On April 13, nearly half a year later, the Livingston and Washtenaw Narcotics Enforcement Team and the Ann Arbor Police Department went public with their success in the arrest of a ring of drug dealers, including 22 University students, one alum and one person living with a group of students. LAWNET is a multi-jurisdictional taskforce made up of officers from the state police force, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and police departments from within Washtenaw and Livingston counties. LAWNET Lt. Garth Burnside described the investigation as a cooperative effort between state and city authorities.

During a six-month investigation process, the police searched 13 off-campus houses, the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity and Bursley Residence Hall. They confiscated more than 34 pounds of marijuana, five guns and smaller amounts of prescription medications, hallucinogenic mushrooms and cocaine. They shut down four growing operations of what they classified as highly potent marijuana. Charges were issued for marijuana possession, intent to deliver, cultivation and maintaining a drug house. Headlines ran across The Ann Arbor News: "Major Marijuana Raids in Ann Arbor. All 24 suspects' names were in the paper.

There is no question that LAWNET and the Ann Arbor Police Department managed to seize a significant volume of marijuana in this investigation, and the discovery of growing operations and firearms also indicates the suspension of a serious and potentially violent drug operation. But the number of names released by the authorities was misleading - many of the students were involved in a much smaller capacity. Without specifying the degree of involvement from each suspect, the authorities marked the reputations of these individuals and gained more publicity for themselves.

The beginnings

Adam started smoking marijuana in high school. By last year, he and his friends were smoking every day and sometimes more than once a day. But he said he never considered himself a drug dealer. He said at most he was giving his friends small amounts of marijuana if they wanted it.

The police report said the authorities had searched through the trash on the curb outside of his house and found plastic bags with a couple of grams of marijuana, according to Adam and his housemate. From these findings they obtained a warrant and searched the house. Adam was charged with possession with intent to deliver and maintaining a drug house.

Burnside described a drug house as a place where people meet to abuse substances. He said an individual can be charged with this "if you have a house in which you allow people to come over and use drugs."

But Adam denied this charge, saying his house wasn't quite a central location for obtaining pot. "This was basically just your typical college kids sitting around smoking pot," he said.

After a couple of court dates, the charges against Adam were dropped, and he is currently serving a six-month probation sentence. Provided that he completes his probation, the charges will not remain on his record. But with his name printed both in The Ann Arbor News and his hometown newspaper, Adam received more publicity than he wanted. He worries about future employers finding the articles on the Internet and assuming that he was involved in a drug ring with firearms and highly potent marijuana cultivation.

"I've never even seen a gun in my life. They talked about people growing pot - none of us were growing pot," he said, referring to himself and his housemates. "That's a totally different ballgame."