California Sheriff: “Part of me wants marijuana legalized”

(NPR) Retired Humboldt County Sheriff’s Lt. Steve Cobine says cultivating cannabis is now a big business in state forests and private timberlands.

This year, CAMP [Campaign Against Marijuana Planting] hauled in 4.5 million plants from around California. But Cobine admits that’s a tiny percentage of what’s really out there.

“We’re just keeping a lid on it so it doesn’t go crazy,” Cobine says.

Instead of burning the confiscated plants like they used to do, Sheriff’s Sgt. Wayne Hanson says they bury them in undisclosed locations.

“Basically, [a] marijuana plant’s 90 percent water,” he says. “So we dig a hole 10 feet down, throw a bunch of soil on it, and it’s basically destroyed then, just by the compression of the earth.”

As they haul off a truckload of confiscated plants, Hanson makes a somewhat surprising admission.

“Part of me wants marijuana legalized,” he says, “’cause it would take away the wealth and the greed and the violence.”

But he says it would have to be legalized in all of the U.S., not just California. “Cause if it gets legalized in California, you’d have all the riffraff coming to California to make money to sell to the other 49 states,” he says.

Does anyone else see the irony in clandestine growers digging up the earth to plant some cannabis, only to have sheriff’s deputies pull it up and dig up more earth to bury it?

We’ve reported previously about the futility of CAMP and other marijuana eradication programs.  Retired Sheriff Cobine admits that 4.5 million plants is just a tiny percentage, which suggests to us there are hundreds of millions of cannabis plants being grown in California.

Imagine if they weren’t “keeping a lid on it”!

Not only are the authorities barely scratching the surface of California’s clandestine cannabis cultivation operations, but most of what they seize isn’t even meant for consumers or tended by humans; it’s 98%-99% “feral hemp”, a.k.a. “ditchweed”, the wild-growing cannabis with very low THC content.  Plus, when they rip up the crops, they often transport them off of mountainsides by loading them into large open bundles that are dangled from a helicopter, with the downward-rushing air of the chopper blowing hemp seeds all over the landscape below.  (Nothing like planting the seeds of your next season’s eradication campaign… talk about job security!)

Thus, as California struggles with a crippling budget crisis and makes cuts higher education, public health, and other programs, possibly for years to come, somehow the Golden State finds the money for fuel, maintenance, and operation of helicopters and overtime pay for police to pull weeds and dig holes.  There’s $1.4 billion on the table in potential tax revenue from re-legalized cannabis, but California law enforcement would rather continue an eradication program that keeps illegal growers’ profits high, forces them farther into our public lands, motivates them to produce more potent cannabis, produces environmental damage and waste, burns through taxpayer money and rejects new tax revenue.  In other words, while California tuitions rise and public services drop, California is spending taxpayer dollars to subsidize a program they readily admit has no chance at actually eradicating cannabis but will promote “wealth and greed and violence”.

Sheriff Hanson, the part of you that wants to see marijuana legalized is called the neo-cortex.  It’s that part of the brain that processes rational thought.

However, sheriff, you’ve got it backwards on re-legalization.  Marijuana prohibition was enacted state-by-state and it will be repealed state-by-state.  The federal government is moving much slower than the states on the issue.  When California re-legalizes, the benefits they reap in tax revenues, new industry*, new jobs, reduced crime, criminal justice savings, and tourism will quickly spur neighboring states into following their lead.  If there is an interim period when California is the only source of legal marijuana in the US, at least the “riffraff” will be rushing in to purchase legal and taxed California marijuana, keeping the dollars in the US economy, rather than benefiting the Mexican drug gangs.

*Lest we forget, legalized marijuana automatically means legalized hemp and the huge benefits of that industry.

So Where Did All The Ditchweed Go?

Who among us doesn’t like to brag after a job well done? It’s human nature, right?

I mean, even the DEA enjoys boasting about their so-called ‘accomplishments.’ They even have their own (taxpayer funded) museum.

Given this fact, it’s both curious and notable that the DEA has suddenly ceased publicizing data regarding how many millions of feral hemp plants (aka ‘ditchweed’) law enforcement eradicate each year.

In previous years, upwards of 98 percent of all the pot seized by law enforcement was categorized as ‘ditchweed’ — a term the DEA uses to define “wild, scattered marijuana plants [with] no evidence of planting, fertilizing, or tending.”

For instance, in 2005 the DEA reported that cops destroyed some 219 million feral hemp plants versus only four million cultivated marijuana plants. DEA data for the year 2004 tells a similar story. Of the estimated 265 million marijuana plants destroyed by law enforcement that year, more than 262 million (roughly 99 percent) were classified as ‘ditchweed.’ In 2006, roughly 84 million plants seized by law enforcement (and more than 94 percent of all the marijuana eradicated) were ‘ditchweed.’

So, how much ditchweed did police confiscate in 2007? That would be anyone’s guess.

Upon referencing Table 4.38 (Number of marijuana plants eradicated and seized, arrests made, weapons seized, and value of assets seized under the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program, by State, 2007) in the latest version of the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, visitors will discover that the column that previously reported on ‘ditchweed’ seizures (in prior years’ tables, it was seventh column from the left) is now conspicuously missing.

So why would the DEA abruptly want to cease taking credit for destroying hundreds of millions of pounds of marijuana each year? Perhaps it’s because unlike cultivated marijuana, feral hemp contains virtually no detectable levels of THC — the primary psychoactive component in cannabis — and does not contribute to the black market marijuana trade.

Or perhaps it’s because the public was finally beginning to smarten up to the fact that they’ve been paying their police millions of dollars each year to do nothing more than pull a few weeds.