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War on Drugs Targets Harmless Weed
$Millions wasted on eradication programs
Michael Friis Johansen | OhMyNews | 07/02/2006

My garden is full of marijuana.

Please don't tell anyone. I don't want the police to find out about it, because I think it might be against the law. My home is usually nice and quiet these days. It would be a shame to spoil that with a fleet of helicopters taking heat readings overhead, or whatever it is they do to weed out marijuana plantations.

I realize that because of these plants I might have a stretch of prison time in my future, so I'd like to take this opportunity to disavow any responsibility for their existence, if this would do me any good. I didn't even know the plants were growing in my garden until a few weeks ago.

Most of the lawns and flowerbeds around here are well manicured, but not my little walled courtyard. It's a great place for my dog to run around outdoors safely, but its seclusion has made it a sanctuary for a lot of wild vegetation. Grass, dandelions, various flowers, and many other kinds of plants have been growing undeterred by the threat of a lawn mower or a weed whip. The marijuana plants, more than 20 of them, ranging in height from just a few cm to well above my knees, have been sprouting up secretly for months, securely hidden by the surrounding growth and the stone walls, until I happened to wander out one day and spotted them.

Now, at the risk of repeating myself, I want to make a few things clear for the record (criminal or otherwise): I did not plant this marijuana and I am not cultivating it; I have not even touched any of the plants (you can check for fingerprints if you don't believe me); and I certainly have no intention of harvesting them, smoking them, selling them, or baking them as brownies.

Nonetheless, I am still unsure of my legal liability and am considering turning myself in to the police just to be safe. Is simply knowing about these plants a criminal offense? Does doing nothing about them (such as destroying them myself or reporting them to the anti-drug authorities) open me up to prosecution?

Until recently, I would have said 'no,' but this is Stephen Harper's Canada. Our new prime minister is trying to reverse the liberal trend of our country's drug laws, which are taking a turn toward strictness.

If it is my civic and legal duty to uproot and kill (although presumably not burn) any marijuana I find, then I have a lot of work ahead of me. I've not only found the stuff growing in my garden, I've seen it in all the nearby ditches, along both banks of the river that winds through this region, in many of the area's provincial parks and along all the trails that lead over hills and through the woods and fields in every direction. In fact, over the years I've seen it growing abundantly all over southern Ontario and many other parts of the country. I know it to be a common weed on both sides of the whole Canada-U.S. border.

It's wild. No one planted it and no one is going to smoke it unless they're very desperate - it has only about .6 percent THC (the main psychoactive substance found in marijuana-ed.), and good dope requires at least five percent. Wild marijuana has thrived in temperate areas of this continent long before humans arrived and long before anti-drug crusaders declared hemp (until then the world's best material for making rope) to be the Scourge of Satan, or something to that effect. (BuzzNote: Actually, cannabis was brought to the New World by Angolan slaves brought to Brazil in 1549.) That opinion might not hold today among the majority of citizens in Canada or the United States, but it's still adhered to firmly by the governments in power, yet another ridiculous and expensive facet of the so-called War on Drugs.

Fortunately, Canadian police seem a bit more restrained than their American counterparts. Across the United States law enforcement agencies are dedicating hundreds of officers and millions of dollars towards exterminating the plant in their jurisdictions, mostly by using powerful herbicides that not only kill other plants, but also reportedly threaten bird species and other animals. One police department in northern Indiana boasted that it managed to kill more than 200 million wild cannabis specimens in one campaign, although a spokesman explained that the plants weren't originally wild since they'd been planted under government authorization in the 1940s to make rope for the war effort.

Apparently, the spokesman did not see the irony in his explanation.

Nor do the authorities in Indiana and elsewhere seem to be aware that their programs to eradicate wild marijuana, generally known as "ditchweed," may actually be helping illegal marijuana growers. Cultivators of high potency weed complain that the prevalence of the wild variety is hurting the quality of their crops, since the low-potency variety is pollinating their commercial product and lowering its quality. When police come into an area just to weed out wild marijuana they may only end up improving the plants produced by local growers.

That aside, however, for me to copy Indiana's achievement around my garden and to ensure that the ditchweed never grows back, considering that marijuana is native to the area, quite hardy, and prolific, I would be forced to bulldoze all the vegetation in the region or, more easily, just set fire to it. I hope it doesn't come to that. After all, the plants growing around here are of no interest whatsoever to people who like getting high from marijuana. If anyone wants to smoke some weed, they're better off buying it from a reputable dealer than picking it from my garden or the surrounding forest.

But if someone wants to make some good rope, I know where he can get some great plants - just give me a call.

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