The story
In August 2018 the Latvian State Police opened a criminal case against a pensioner in the east of the country, pulled 363 plants out of her kitchen garden and took them away. The plants were hemp. They contained no narcotic. Latvian newspapers gave Dzidra Bruzgule a name that stuck: the hemp woman.
A garden in Dekšāre
Bruzgule lived in Dekšāre parish, in what was then the Viļāni district, and grew hemp beside her house. Hemp is an old Latvian crop; it once stood beside flax as one of the country’s main plants, and farmers had begun sowing it again in 2009.
The police saw cannabis. They started criminal proceedings, uprooted and confiscated the plants and sent them to a laboratory.
What the laboratory found
The analysis found no narcotic substances. The proceedings were closed. The police acknowledged their mistake and apologised.
A biologist, Andrejs Svilāns, told reporters that drug varieties of cannabis would be very hard to grow outdoors in Latvia at all. The association of industrial hemp growers said it knew of no case in which hemp with a raised level of THC had been grown in an open field in the country.
Twenty-seven euros, then fifteen hundred
| Asked | Awarded | |
|---|---|---|
| Damages for the plants | 4,000 euros | 27 euros |
| Compensation for distress (January 2021) | 3,000 euros | 1,500 euros |
Bruzgule went to court twice. For the destroyed crop she was given 27 euros. In a second case, over the stress and the harm to her health, the regional administrative court in January 2021 granted half of what she claimed. That September the matter was reported to have gone on to the Supreme Court, and she had still not been paid.
The police declined to say what conclusions they had drawn, or whether anything had been changed to prevent the same happening again.
A warning given nine years earlier
When the first hundred hectares of hemp were sown in 2009, a leader of the textile industry warned farmers of exactly this: a grower could end up at a police station and spend half a year proving that the plants held nothing harmful. Latvia, he said, lacked the means to show it quickly.
The stakes for anyone whose plants are taken for the other kind are high. Growing cannabis is a crime in Latvia whatever the number of plants, and even one gram of dried marijuana is the line between a fine and a criminal case.
Why the index did not move
The case changed no rule; it showed how the existing ones are applied. Latvia’s cultivation score was already at the level of a full ban, and stays there.[1][2][3]
In the cultural atlas
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Latvia here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.