COMMERCE CITY, Colo. (CBS4) ? The Army has made an unusual and unwanted discovery at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal northeast of Commerce City.

They are in charge of cleaning up the arsenal, a job that includes reseeding some areas. When their seed started to grow, they realized it was marijuana.

It isn’t commercial grade, but it’s still an illegal drug. It’s called ditch weed or feral hemp, the kind that grows in the wild in some places.

The Army blames the supplier for the snafu. It says it bought the mulch for its ground cover from a supplier in Kansas where the low-grade weed is common. Some of it apparently got mixed in with the grass.

Ditchweed like this is of such low THC percentage that smoking a field of it wouldn’t even get you a light buzz.  This feral hemp grows all over the Midwest, remnants of the 1940s “Hemp for Victory” program, where our farmers were allowed to grow industrial hemp for the war effort when Philippine and Chinese sources of hemp were taken over by the Japanese.

I’d also note that whenever you hear of a task force, especially in the Midwest, crowing about how much illegal marijuana they’ve eradicated with a street value of one bazillion dollars, remember that 96%-98% of what they’ve ripped out of the ground is this non-psychoactive feral hemp.  That’s your taxpayer dollars in action, spent to send men with guns in helicopters to pull weeds in the wilderness.

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My favorite Local Portland Lock-Picking Logic-Impaired Prohibitionist is at it again.  This time, the peril of stoned drivers!  John’s in full-blown reefer madness mode from the opening graf:

Ask yourself, do marijuana users, who can be found in the wee hours of the morning, staring at the “white noise” of a blank TV screen – off the air for hours, be competent drivers? Every druggie has laughed about having found themselves in that position.

What is this television channel in the 21st century that goes “off the air”?  John, it’s called the digital transition – your old Magnavox console with the built in 8-track and turntable won’t pick up our fancy-schmancy hi-def 24-hour digital channels, dagnabbit!

John provides a cut-n-paste of a study that says pot smokers are 3 to 7 times more likely to cause an accident.  He’s kind enough to provide footnotes to these esteemed scientist’s work.  But John’s been hammered in his comments section, by me and quite a few well-educated people, pointing out every flaw in his argument and every deficit in his scientific claims.  There is a simple explanation: John’s scientists are pure as the driven snow and our scientists are “druggies” with a self-serving agenda bankrolled by evil world dominating billionaires.

[I]n fact, those who leave comments, claim it’s just the opposite.Of course they’re users, trying to tell you that they’re fine to drive, … and they’ll refer to “studies”, proving just the opposite of what is only common sense, that using marijuana doesn’t impair drivers … so where’s the truth?  [T]here are seemingly competent scientists who are also users, and will evidently produce ‘studies’ to further their agendas, and/or those who pay them, and don’t forget; behind the scenes, there are also wealthy men and organizations willing to bankroll anything to further their goal of legalization.

And the next claim will make Dr. Earleywine and every other scientist who’s ever tried to get a grant to study the medicinal properties of cannabis fall out of their chair:

These scientists, … they’re also a concern, for those attempting to find the truth. Truth is, they’re under pressure: 1) if academics - they need to be a published author, (being published in the scientific and research field means more respect and impacts tenure issues) … 2) how better to get more grant money than to produce something controversial?

Oh, yeah, the money is just flowing for controversial marijuana studies.  Can’t you just stick to the standard reefer madness lines like “This ain’t your father’s Woodstock Weed”?

Understand also that the marijuana of this generation is not the same as their parents smoked!

Pot then, had a THC content of 1 – 3%. Now, the THC content is surging up to 25%. (That too will be covered in future articles.) One can expect an increase of physiological and psychological problems  with higher dosages.

Sure, the flower children were all smoking barely-above industrial hemp ditchweed.  That explains Laugh In, “be-ins”, massive afros, bellbottoms, and the Grateful Dead. all that lousy weak pot our parents were smoking.

I could cite the studies that show heavily-stoned drivers drive no worse than a .05 BAC driver, or that we tend to drive slower and leave more room, but also tend to wander a bit in the lane.  John would just say those are druggie scientists.  It doesn’t matter because nobody’s advocating for people to be allowed to drive stoned.  Making marijuana legal is not going to increase any smoking and driving, because the idiots who would do that are doing that now.  When marijuana is legal, police will still be able to bust drivers who demonstate impairment or poor driving.

So many of these prohibitionist fears are based on the notion that making marijuana legal will mean suddenly people will start smoking it. Out of nowhere we’ll have increased healthcare costs, lost productivity, impaired drivers, psychotic teenagers, and rampant crime.  You can only buy into that if you don’t know that 22 million people are smoking pot this year, 14 million monthly, 3 million weekly.  If the projected harms of legalized marijuana exist, we would have seen them by now because so many people have been smoking marijuana for so long!

Don’t smoke and drive, don’t drive impaired.  It’s all we ask of beer drinkers and they are far more dangerous drivers.

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(Press-Democrat)UKIAH — State marijuana eradication teams are arriving on the North Coast today, two weeks earlier than usual.

The early start is expected to yield yet another record confiscation of pot plants, Gregory said. Local officials already are reporting higher seizures this year.

Statewide last year, federal, state and local officers who make up CAMP seized 2.9 million plants worth an estimated $11.6 billion. A separate federal effort last year bumped up the number of plants seized in California to 5.2 million.

The ever increasing numbers have confounded even marijuana advocates.

The price of marijuana has remained stable at about $300 an ounce, indicating there’s been little or no change in local supply and demand, said Dale Gieringer, of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

He said immigration crackdowns along the Mexican border have induced Mexican nationals to grow pot in California for distribution elsewhere in the United States rather than try to smuggle marijuana across the border.

Yet another waste of effort paid for by the taxpayers of California while tens of thousands of prisoners will be set free because there isn’t enough money in the budget to house them all.  If you are eliminating $11.6 billion worth of marijuana from the market and it doesn’t cause the market price to budge one cent, that should tell you that your efforts are futile.

However, don’t let the 2.9 million plants = $11.6 billion fool you.  Most – 96%-98%, depending on year – of the marijuana eradicated by the government is feral hemp, a ditchweed with such low THC content it won’t get you high.

Cannabis Culture called US NORML Executive Director Allen St Pierre and discovered the unthinkable: the US federal government is responsible for growing more outdoor weed than even the most green-thumbed gang of ganja lovers.

“In past years, hemp stock makes up almost 96% of the cannabis eradicated,” explained St Pierre. “It’s actually ditch-weed left over from the World War II crop that the US government grew for the war effort. They often claim it’s recreational, but it isn’t.”

Ironically, says St Pierre, the government is still hemp’s best farmer today.

“They will come for these crops with two or three helicopters, hauling large, rubber mesh bags with two and half to four tons of material that has largely gone to seed. On the way to the burn pit, 10 or 20 miles away, thousands of seeds drop out of the bags, and police literally seed their own jobs for the next year. Then they burn the hemp and take pictures for the media, claiming to have taken millions of joints off the streets. It’s a big dog and pony show.”

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“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963

Today our nation honors what would’ve been this week the eightieth birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of these United States.  I was sixty-four days old when an assassin’s bullet cut down Dr. King in the prime of his life.  Today I am six-hundred forty days older than Dr. King when he was killed.  Tomorrow I will see something few people my age and older thought we’d ever see, yet something Dr. King had dreamed from the start.

There remains a grave injustice to be battled, the most unjust of laws to be disobeyed, a law that by its definition is not rooted in eternal law and natural law: the man made code that declares nature itself to be illegal, the prohibition on cannabis.  Yet when I mention marijuana law reform in the context of the great civil rights struggles in America, so many are quick to dismiss me with snickers of derision.  ”You just want pot legal so you can get high!” is a common refrain.

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Efforts to eradicate marijuana a positive for community

Officers take to the skies near the end of every summer and search some of [West Virginia's] most remote areas looking for fields where local ne’er-do-wells grow fields of marijuana.

The effort by law enforcement results in the destruction of numerous plots of the plant.

We applaud the effort by police to enforce the laws of the land no matter how difficult it might be.

Officers face booby traps and potential confrontations while on seek and destroy marijuana missions. It is more valuable to our communities to spend the money on eradication efforts than it is to allow people to grow this plant, enslave our children with addiction, and allow such dirty money to find its way into our local economy.

If we can get more of our pot farmers in jail, perhaps marijuana’s image in the community might suffer and usage could finally begin to decline.

We hope the all-too-frequent experience of finding a pot field, but never finding the cultivator does not dampen the spirits of our law enforcement community.

Our officers are fighting to defend the laws established to protect this nation.

Let’s do our part to help them accomplish this.

Anyone with information about marijuana growing in or around your neighborhood, please call your local detachment of the West Virginia State Police and let them know about it.

Let’s take a look at the fine job done by our drug warriors in West Virginia.  There happens to be this fantastic repository of the government’s marijuana eradication efforts in the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online.  According to Table 4.38.2005, “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, 2005…

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