In my own backyard

Thanks to my friend Karen for sending in today's stupid eradication story from Worthington, MA. This one hits close to home; I used to live out in those hills and truth be told, I had a grow in a swamp on the other side of that town about 20 years ago. I also named my plants and grew them in five gallon pails but I didn't label them. It would have been like putting a name tag on your own children. It's not necessary, you know them by sight, even if they're identical twins.

I probably know a lot of the 50 people involved in this one personally, certainly almost every guy from Cummington who helped on that operation. They're actually decent guys and I'd bet money they volunteered their time, just because that's what they do out there in the hilltowns. Nonetheless there's still the matter of the tax dollars being wasted on National Guard helicopters being used to find the plants and what the hell is the Worthington PD doing flying around looking for pot anyway after eight years? This smells of Bush's avowed crackdown on pot smokers.

The article doesn't say how many there were but doing the math on the information available it appears they found 250 plants in an area 300 by 60 feet square which does give each plant a fair amount of space. Again however, although the plants were four to five feet tall, it doesn't mean a thing unless they had significant buds and I doubt they did. The plants could have been 20 feet tall, without the flowers they are still pretty much worthless and you just don't get high yield buds outdoors there anyway.

It's been a cold summer in New England and even in a warm summer they would have just started seriously budding out now. You don't harvest for another month up there and you hope like hell you don't get beat by the frost. That's part of the reason you put in the swamp. The water protects it somewhat from the frosty mornings. And even if they managed to get some decent bud activity and assuming they had good seed stock there is no way the grower would have ended up with eight ounces of dried buds from one plant which is what they would have to get to make them worth $2,000 each.

I can picture this operation in my mind, I can almost hear the banter - I know the way these guys talk and I know the land they're treading. Although I'm just as irritated that they wasted the resources on chasing down harmless plants, this one makes me more sad usual, not only because these guys were ruining what was obviously a grow that someone really cared about and but also that guys like the Forgeas and Dennis Anderson, that I otherwise really like, would have participated in such a stupid effort and have been party to perpetrating such misinformation.

Funny world.