Hibiscus cannabinus L.

The story is told in this two year old article "Was It Pot Or Not?." The answer, of course, was it was not. It was kenaf purposely planted as deer food. But, because of the way that things work a federal judge ruled that Harrison County Sheriff George H. Payne Jr. had "qualified immunity" as is pointed out in this update from The Clarion Ledger: "Judge: Plants destroyed by mistake." An honest mistake, but an expensive one, and not just in dollars spent, but at a great cost to us all.

A DEA Task Force agent spots some suspicious plants from the air and notifies the county sheriff. The sheriff and his deputies mobilize their eradication unit and bring in 4WD vehicles, some Stihl weedwhackers and bunch of inmates. They all enter the suspect property without a warrant, because those plants might be a flight risk. With proper supervision and oversight the inmates cut down all of the "marijuana" and load it into trucks to be hauled off. I wonder how hard they were laughing? Never mind the white flowers. Here is what the real stuff looks like. The female is front and center and the males are the scrawny ones that look a little past their prime. Simple enough, eh?

Next up is "Brewing a pot of hysteria" Nature Neuroscience 8, 971-971 (01 Aug 2005) Editorial. Luckily the full text of this editorial has been posted here. It is an excellent read and well worth your time. It does reference the excellent 1999 Institute of Medicine study "Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base". If you have not read it before you really should. Here is the same study in a slightly different HTML format without the pages available in PDF format.

Speaking of editorials about the drug war here is one from an unlikely source, The Washington Times. In the editorial Against the drug war A.G. Gancarsk reviews the book An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy by David Boyum and Peter Reuter of the American Enterprise Institute. The full text of this book is available here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

And finally we need to talk some more about Marc Emery. Connie Fogal has a very long piece titled "Marijuana and the Loss of Canadian Sovereignty US Interference in Canadian Criminal Law and Policy pertaining to Marijuana" at GlobalResearch.ca. What we need to remember about Marc is that he was the head of a registered political party in Canada who paid his taxes and tried to work the system from the inside. And you thought that his arrest wasn't politically motivated.

As always, there is a lot to read and a lot to think about. Once you have please go out and do something positive. I'm Cannabis and that's it for "This Week In Marihuana."