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.
