A report shows that while the DEA seized a lot less marijuana in 2018 compared to past years, it cost the agency almost twice the cost per plant.<\/p>\n
According to recent figures published in the DEA\u2019s Domestic Cannabis Eradication\/Suppression Program Report, the agency and its partners confiscated 2.82 million marijuana plants around the U.S. in 2018, a significant decline from the 3.38 million total cannabis plants it confiscated in 2017.<\/p>\n
The report provides\u00a0a total breakdown of all the marijuana seized<\/a>\u00a0by the agency and its law enforcement partners as part of the country\u2019s only nationwide law enforcement program exclusively targeting cannabis cultivation. The five states with the most cannabis seized in 2018 were California with 1.8 million, Kentucky with 418,000, Washington with 112,000, Mississippi with 70,000 and West Virginia with 68,000.<\/p>\n The advocates over at\u00a0NORML noted<\/a>\u00a0the seizure totals in 2018 represented a 17% decline from 2017, and a whopping 66% decline from 2016, when the DEA seized 5.3 million marijuana plants nationwide. 2016 also was the biggest year on record since 2011, when the DEA seized\u00a06.7 million plants<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 or enough to give every person in Washington state a plant of their own.<\/p>\n As the success of these enforcement programs continues to decline, NORML says they\u2019re a thing of the past.<\/p>\n \u201cThese federal eradication programs are a holdover from a bygone era,\u201d NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano told Cannabis Now in an email. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cAt a time when roughly one-quarter of the country resides in a jurisdiction where adult marijuana use is legal, and when members of Congress are openly discussing removing cannabis from the federal Controlled Substances Act, it is time for these federal anti-marijuana efforts to be put out to pasture and for federal agencies to take positions that more closely comport with cannabis\u2019 rapidly changing cultural status in America.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Another thing that Armentano noted in his analysis of the DEA\u2019s numbers was that California played a major role in the recent decline, as there was approximately a 40% drop in seizures of outdoor plants in California from 2017 to 2018.<\/p>\n In 2017, the DEA reported that it seized 2.24 million plants in California. In 2018, the year that California\u2019s legal cannabis marketplace<\/a> opened, law enforcement seized almost 800,000 fewer plants.\u00a0<\/p>\n After the DEA released their numbers from 2018, the Government Accountability Office released\u00a0their official review of the DCE\/SP<\/a>. The GAO \u2014 which is the federal government\u2019s official auditing branch \u2014 noted that on average, over $17 million went to the program between 2015 and 2018. According to these numbers, that would mean the DEA spent $3.20 per plant in 2016 when seizing marijuana. In just two years, that price has almost doubled to $6.07 per plant.<\/p>\n The majority of the funds allocated to the DEA\u2019s local law enforcement partners went to cover overtime pay and air support. The costs of keeping a helicopter up alone burns thousands of dollars in aviation fuel per hour.<\/p>\n Apart from noting the expense of the program, the GAO also had some harsher takeaways for the program about its problems keeping a reliable count on the expense of the efforts.<\/p>\n \u201cDEA oversees participating agencies\u2019 compliance with program expenditure requirements in various ways, but does not consistently collect supporting documentation for expenditure reports,\u201d the GAO report noted. \u201cDEA field officials collect varying levels of documentation, and headquarters officials were not aware of these varying practices.\u201d <\/p>\n (This means our cost-per-plant analysis might be a bit off, but it\u2019s not our fault.)<\/p>\n The GAO also says the problems aren\u2019t exclusively in-house at the DEA, and that the local law enforcement partners the DEA worked with were keeping different records.<\/p>\n \u201cDEA collects information on program activities to help manage DCE\/SP, such as number of plants eradicated,\u201d the GEO report said. \u201cHowever, participating agencies GAO spoke with have practices for reporting some program activities that differ from DEA\u2019s guidance due to varying interpretations of the guidance.\u201d<\/p>\n The GAO said due to all these problems, the program\u2019s \u201cinformation is neither fully accurate nor reliable for assessing program performance.\u201d<\/p>\n The report noted that the DEA agreed with the GAO\u2019s findings. They said they would redo the handbook by summer chopping season so contractors wouldn\u2019t slip up, clarify and provide guidance on the what is supposed to be reported and actually give the program tangible goals \u2014 as opposed to just chopping all the weed down.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0do you think the federal government should police cannabis?<\/p>\n The post The DEA Seized 2.8 Million Cannabis Plants Last Year<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
A report shows that while the DEA seized a lot less marijuana in 2018 compared to past years, it cost the agency almost twice the cost per plant. According to recent figures published in the DEA\u2019s Domestic Cannabis Eradication\/Suppression Program Report, the agency and its partners confiscated 2.82 million marijuanaContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[148,50,848,1534,90,146,4432,9598],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36933"}],"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\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36934,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36933\/revisions\/36934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
The Cost of the DEA\u2019s Cannabis Eradication Efforts<\/h4>\n
\n
\nRead More: The DEA Seized 2.8 Million Cannabis Plants Last Year<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"