The governor and legislators are battling out over how to fight the opioid crisis claiming thousands of lives yearly in Tennessee, as young and old alike overdose on addictive drugs. It’s a crisis we must solve.

But in Rutherford County we’re putting our investigative energy into gummy worms and gummy bears.

Local law enforcement officials, from District Attorney General Jennings Jones to Sheriff Mike Fitzhugh, Smyrna Police Chief Kevin Arnold and Murfreesboro Police Chief Michael Bowen, put their heads together for a months-long probe called Operation Candy Crush, in which they padlocked 23 stores and rounded up 21 people indicted for selling Schedule 6 drugs.

The only problem was the items the stores were selling across Rutherford County might have been legal. Instead of deriving from marijuana, as the sheriff’s office said in its press release, the candies and other items could have come from industrial hemp containing less than .3 percent THC, the chemical that makes people high. And, based on the action by the Tennessee General Assembly, that stuff is perfectly okay.

A March 19 hearing is set before Circuit Court Judge Royce Taylor to decide whether the candy is legal. Taylor, who signed the warrants allowing the convenience store busts, was wise enough to force the padlocks to be removed and allow stores to reopen. And the charges might be dropped before the hearing.

Defense attorneys for the store owners argued during a mid-February court hearing that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation didn’t go far enough in determining whether the items had too much THC in them, the key between hemp or marijuana derivatives.

Asked whether the candies were loaded with THC, TBI spokesman Josh DeVine said, “Our forensic scientists’ jobs are to objectively identify compounds that are present in evidence submitted to our lab and report out the schedule as indicated in the Tennessee Code Annotated to the submitting agency. We make no determination as to the legality of these compounds. Instead, the District Attorney General determines whether the law has been broken, based upon the circumstance of each case.”

Jones, however, had said in the press conference that Judge Taylor and the TBI agreed the items were illegal. The district attorney pointed out a drug such as OxyContin is legal if obtained through a prescription. Thus, someone buying these gummy bears would need a doctor’s prescription?

In that case, Walmart, Amazon and just about every store in the country could be shut down, because it’s highly unlikely anyone is showing a script to get their gummies in person or online.

Store operators are howling that they were wrongly busted and maybe they were. Store owners’ attorneys say they were considering whether to file suit against Rutherford County and the law enforcement agencies for arresting them and cutting into their business for five days.

The question, then, is: Why are people buying these things?

Smyrna Police Chief Kevin Arnold said people use the stuff to “get high.” He also said store clerks know exactly what the CBD gummies are and where they’re located.

Of course, he also said they’d lock the doors on Walmart if it were caught selling the CBD candies. Good luck with that.

So if Arnold is trying to sell me oceanfront property in the Hilltop community, I might be a little skeptical.

Then again, if the TBI, FBI and DEA are helping with your operation, as advertised, you might go along.

But do people really get high from this stuff? From firsthand experience, I have to plead ignorance. But based on what people are saying, you’d probably have to eat about a thousand of these gummies to get a buzz. You could also eat about 500 regular gummy bears and get a sugar high every day. Then, by the time you turn 25 you’d be diabetic, if not dead.

One other thing to consider is whether somebody is making a killing by marketing these CBD gummies to people who think they’re getting high when they’re really not. Some of the items were said to have marijuana leaves on the packaging. The hemp plant, though, looks just like pot, so while the packaging might be misleading it could border on false advertising.

People buy stuff thinking it’s pot when it’s not. That’s how badly some people want to get high.

It might be easier if they moved to Colorado, California, Washington or Oregon—Alaska’s too far—or about 25 other states that have medical marijuana—the smoking kind.

In Tennessee we’d rather keep pot smokers running for cover and the dealers killing each other, which is somewhat commonplace in Murfreesboro. In that case, gummy bears might be the better option, especially if they can cure what ails you.

According to WebMD, people take CBD for anxiety, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. Maybe it does relax people a little bit, and at $7 to $70 a bag, it better do something.

Backfired Busts

When they held their press conference in front of a padlocked vape store on Middle Tennessee Boulevard—on a frigid February day, no less—law enforcement officials probably thought they were going to make a big splash and show how they were clamping down on these illicit store operations.

They said they’d gotten a tip from parents whose children bought the candies and had some ill effect.

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney John Zimmermann, a hard charger against anything that remotely resembles pot, even though his own son was busted last year for dealing meth in Nashville. Questions were raised about whether the son’s name was misspelled in Metro’s system to hide the connection between him and his father and let him get a lighter-than-normal punishment.

Zimmermann also has a censure from the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility dating to 2002 for withholding evidence from a defense attorney, in addition to two other disciplinary sanctions, records show.

Maybe he didn’t give Judge Taylor enough information when he signed the warrants, which could be considered another form of withholding evidence. More than one defense attorney argued the prosecution might have misled the judge or at least didn’t make a decent argument for the warrants.

Taylor likely was embarrassed by the whole ordeal, though he didn’t show it on the stand. But the fact he ordered a separate hearing to decide whether the stuff is live or Memorex shows he had some serious concerns about the facts.

The initial fallout is embarrassment for the DA’s office and local law enforcement, especially Fitzhugh, who is up for election. Likewise, the stores wound up with a black eye and empty cash registers. Most people can’t go five days without getting paid.

On the other hand, if some were selling illegal and dangerous synthetic drugs, they deserve everything they get. But in regard to CBD gummies, they’re probably not even as harmful as cough syrup. In that case, our narcs should stick to busting cocaine, meth and fentanyl dealers and leave the candy to kids.

Competition is Fun

Just when state Sen. Bill Ketron might have started breathing easy in advance of the Rutherford County mayor’s race, he got an opponent many were expecting all along: former Rutherford County Commissioner Tina Jones, who qualified for the Republican primary on the final day. Also running is former United Way executive Randy Allen.

Tina Jones

Once an influential member of the commission, Jones has been out of the public eye for several years. But she’s entering the fray with some interesting ideas.

For one thing, she wants to lobby state legislators to get rid of standardized tests in K–12 schools so teachers can concentrate on teaching, not test-giving. She has a good point, because everyone gets too uptight about these tests. After all, they do determine whether teachers keep jobs or enter the unemployment line.

Gov. Bill Haslam and legislators claim these tests create accountability and build student achievement. What they really do, though, is force teachers to teach students what they expect will be on the test, rather than teaching them the fundamentals and encouraging them to expand their minds—without weed, gummies and LSD.

After all, students have been taking these tests for decades. Remember when the teacher said make sure you have two sharp No. 2 pencils? The difference is the tests weren’t life or death 40 to 50 years ago, and people didn’t freak out over the results. Teachers and principals could look at them and see where students needed to improve, but the scores didn’t scar people’s lives and force the state takeover of schools—which is a failure on another front.

Jones might be on the right track, even if she never gets the state to drop the tests completely. But at least it’s a start.

She also has some pretty strong opinions against Nashville’s proposed mass transit plan, which calls for spending $5.4 billion over several years through a series of tax increases to send out more buses, build rail lines and run a train underground.

Set for a referendum on the matter, Davidson County is in the midst of a public relations war about the transit plan. When your mayor is fighting to stay in office amid investigations into her affair with the former head of her security detail, you’re fighting an uphill battle, one that has about as much to do with Middle Tennessee as it does with Nashville.

Anyone who drives to Nashville during rush hour might be willing to fork out any amount of money for another alternative—such as a high-speed rail. It’s something Middle Tennessee should have taken on 25 years ago. At the time, it was considered too expensive, and it always will be—until enough people say “just do it.”

Jones is interested in reversible lanes, more buses and other less expensive ideas. But to make those work, a new mindset is going to have to take hold . . . one in which people are willing to get out of their cars and sit beside someone else on a bus? Good Lord, most people haven’t ridden the bus since seventh grade, and they’re probably not going to do it now.