I’m still feeling drained from my just-published BusinessWeek.com column about the fallout from a government raid last March in Cincinnati against Gary Oaks and the Double O Farms cowshare owners. I originally telephoned Gary last week, more as a courtesy to confirm a brief news release by the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) that he had been found guilty of selling raw milk and unlabeled products in Ohio. I was going to summarize it on the blog. Because there have been so many of these actions in recent months, I think I was looking at it as “just another government action” against a raw milk dairy. Dangerous thinking, but it happens to media types, and actually to all of us.
Gary wasn’t home, so I spoke with his wife, Dawn, who was at first reluctant to say too much about the case. She and Gary had been lying low for so long, hoping the entire nightmare would finally be over, that she was gunshy about speaking with a media rep. She understandably didn’t want to stir the bureaucrats who had come after them so mercilessly and traumatized her husband so badly he couldn’t work for months.
But as she spoke, the words just came tumbling out. And before long, Gary had returned home, and he also seemed to welcome the opportunity to recount the entire mess, and thereby gain some closure.
It obviously turned out to be a much more significant series of events than the ODA news release suggested. More than I could include in my BusinessWeek.com column. So I’ll try to recount some of the details here over the coming days.
The first thing I should mention is that even though the Thanksgiving holiday has resurrected warm feelings between the Oaks and their shareholders, Gary hasn’t been able to let the entire episode go.
Of course, he is thankful “that this whole thing is past us." And he is grateful for all the support he and Dawn received. "All our cowshare people are sticking in there with us, and my health is getting better." It’s when he goes back in time that the difficulties crop up. "You stop and think about it…” his voice trails off. “Well maybe I don’t like to think about it.”
His faith in the law has been badly, perhaps irreparably, shaken. “I trusted and had a faith in the law, that it was looking out for people. But the way (the police and regulatory officials) treated people and talked to them, I don’t trust them any more…When you can’t trust your own government over something as simple as drinking milk, it sounds so ridiculous.”
If you read Gary’s story, I think you have to seriously wonder about how safe our rights really are.
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