There’s an old joke about the guy who plants a vegetable garden only for the homeowners association to cite him for "unauthorized agriculture." He points to his neighbor’s perfectly manicured lawn and says, "You’re punishing me for growing tomatoes while they’re wasting water on grass nobody even walks on?" The HOA, of course, remains unmoved. Replace the HOA with federal agents, the tomatoes with cannabis, and the lawn with the opioid crisis, and you’ve got a rough sketch of last week’s events in Ventura County.

Federal immigration authorities decided to make a statement at Glass House Farms, one of the largest licensed cannabis cultivators in California. The operation, billed as an immigration sweep, involved tear gas, less lethal ammunition, and a crowd of protesters who quite understandably questioned the logic of targeting a business that, by all accounts, plays by the rules. The spectacle of armed agents descending on a state-legal enterprise while cartels continue to operate with relative impunity is the kind of irony that doesn’t so much wink at you as it does stare blankly, waiting for you to catch up.

The farm’s sin, it seems, was employing workers whose immigration status attracted federal scrutiny. Never mind that California’s cannabis industry, legalized by voters in 2016, relies heavily on labor from immigrant communities. Never mind that Glass House pays hundreds of millions in state taxes or that its founder, a former cop, is by all metrics a poster child for compliance. None of that matters when the federal government decides it’s time to send a message. And the message, dreadfully unclear as it is, appears to be this: even when you follow the rules, the rules can change beneath your feet.

What makes this particularly galling isn’t just the heavy-handedness of the operation, though watching footage of protesters coughing through tear gas hardly inspires confidence in the "measured response" playbook. It’s the sheer misallocation of resources. The same agencies struggling to stem the flow of fentanyl across the border somehow found the bandwidth to shut down a farm that, again, operates legally under state law. The cognitive dissonance would be impressive if it weren’t so damn frustrating.

Of course, the real victims here are the workers. Reports suggest at least 14 people were injured in the chaos, with ambulances ferrying them away while federal agents maintained their perimeter. These aren’t shadowy figures in the underground economy. They’re people who showed up to their jobs at a regulated business, only to find themselves caught in a political crossfire they never signed up for. If the goal was to undermine confidence in the legal cannabis market, mission accomplished. Why bother jumping through bureaucratic hoops if the feds can still treat you like a criminal?

The protest that erupted in response was inevitable. Nearly 500 people gathered, not to defend illegal activity, but to question why a business contributing to California’s economy was being treated like a cartel stronghold. The optics, to put it mildly, are not great. Imagine the DEA raiding a Kroger pharmacy for overprescribing opioids while ignoring the Purdue Pharmas of the world. It’s not just wrong. It’s performative.

There’s a broader conversation here about federal versus state priorities, about the contradictions inherent in a country where cannabis is both a multibillion-dollar industry and a Schedule I drug. But those conversations tend to get lost when the tear gas canisters start flying. What’s left is a mess, a lot of bruised bodies, and a lingering sense that somewhere along the way, the priorities got twisted. Maybe next time, the feds could start with the actual criminals and work their way down to the tomato growers.