Cannabis is as American as baseball. Actually, that trope is wrong. In this country, cannabis has a longer history \u2014 and in today\u2019s world, cannabis may actually be a more influential cultural export. <\/p>\n
According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration\u2019s\u00a0official website<\/a>,\u00a0cannabis \u201cis the only major drug of abuse grown within the U.S. borders.\u201d\u00a0Legal marijuana grown in California and Colorado now makes its way to the United Kingdom, which, in colonial days,\u00a0encouraged<\/a>\u00a0American colonists to cultivate hemp as raw material for producing rope, sails, and clothing \u2014 a very long route of return. (It\u2019s a happy accident that Major League Baseball will follow tins of branded California cannabis to London this summer, for the first overseas MLB games played somewhere other than Japan.)<\/p>\n Baseball\u00a0wishes<\/em>\u00a0it was American as cannabis.<\/p>\n So it seems counterintuitive, or at least historically unsound, that the DEA would suffer from an unhealthy and unrealistic obsession with cannabis. But that\u2019s the only way to explain why the agency\u00a0began advertising<\/a>\u00a0in late March for a Houston-area contractor with the power to incinerate \u201cat least\u201d 1,000 pounds of marijuana a day, for eight hours a day, which is more than 13 times the sum total of all the marijuana the DEA seizes in a year.<\/p>\n CBS affiliate KHOU-11 in Houston was the first to report that the federal drug agency is looking for a private contractor with both massive burning capacity and a secure facility equipped with video surveillance in which to do the burning. The DEA needs \u201cpapers, cassette tapes\u2026 pharmaceuticals, and other incidental controlled substances\u201d incinerated. The agency also needs whomever is doing the burning to be able to handle \u201cat least 1,000 pounds of marijuana per day and for a minimum of eight hours a day,\u201d according to KHOU.<\/p>\n The DEA anticipates needing this burning desire between now and Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, and will require it to be mobile, with \u201cwork\u2026 required\u201d in border cities like Galveston, Brownsville, Corpus Christi and in other areas not far from the\u00a0Mexican border<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The posting is bizarre for a host of reasons and could portend the country\u2019s most sweeping marijuana eradication effort in history, a simple math error, or wishful thinking so fanciful it resembles a fever dream.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cannabis is a domestic drug, as the DEA itself admits. Marijuana\u00a0does<\/a>\u00a0come from Mexico, but less so than ever before. Given the\u00a0flooded markets<\/a>\u00a0in legal states like Oregon and California, it\u2019s probably safe to assume that even if the \u201cnarco tunnels\u201d were cannabis trains, drug smugglers would not be able to compete. For context, a 70-pound seizure\u00a0was enough<\/a>\u00a0to make news recently in El Paso. Such a seizure would have to become routine in order for the DEA to need so much burning capacity.<\/p>\n In 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, the DEA\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0the seizure of 151,444 pounds of marijuana in America. Almost 75 percent came from two states: California (91,871 pounds) and Washington (21,277 pounds). Both of those states are a long way away from\u00a0Texas<\/a>, where the DEA is looking for someone who could torch Washington\u2019s annual stash, a good bulk of its year\u2019s work, in less than three days.<\/p>\n Taking weekends off, the DEA needs only destroy 600 pounds per business\u00a0day<\/em>\u00a0to eliminate all the weed seized in 2017. Why it\u2019s looking for someone to work for eight hours a day when it has barely work enough to keep someone busy for a full hour isn\u2019t clear and makes absolutely no sense, unless someone in a DEA press office was bored and wanted a story to go viral.<\/p>\n In a statement sent to KHOU, the DEA explained that \u201cthis is a complicated, large-scale government contract we\u2019re required by law to bid every few years, and there are usually only a handful of companies with the necessary facilities and resources to help us dispose of this material.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhile it makes for an interesting headline, the truth is far more prosaic,\u201d the DEA continued. \u201c[O]ur agents working across the Houston Division make a huge number of great cases, and as a result, we seize a tremendous amount of illegal drugs. Arranging for the safe [sic] and effective destruction of these drugs is just part of the job.\u201d<\/p>\n According to the DEA\u2019s own statistics, the DEA seized 172 pounds of processed marijuana in all of Texas in 2017, or about six minutes\u2019 worth of work for their contractor.<\/p>\n More cannabis than that was seized in the state that year by other law enforcement, but even allowing for that, 8,000 pounds a day is a cartoonish and arbitrary number the DEA is presenting for reasons it seems unwilling to impart to the public. Drug agents have often been accused of inflating numbers \u2014 weighing dirt seized in grows, for example \u2014 to inflate their own importance, but this is one of the most baffling examples yet.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, have you noticed any other government agencies making crazy claims about cannabis?<\/p>\n The post The DEA Must Be Joking About Their Plan to Burn All the Weed in the U.S.<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Cannabis is as American as baseball. Actually, that trope is wrong. In this country, cannabis has a longer history \u2014 and in today\u2019s world, cannabis may actually be a more influential cultural export. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration\u2019s\u00a0official website,\u00a0cannabis \u201cis the only major drug of abuse grown withinContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[191,50,848,170,265],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34162,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34161\/revisions\/34162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Feds Light Up More Than They Can Blaze<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: The DEA Must Be Joking About Their Plan to Burn All the Weed in the U.S.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"