World view

I haven't looked at the world news in a long time. Australian authorities say Vietnamese gangs are taking over the cannabis trade Down Under and producing non-stop crops in hydroponic grow-ops. I see their police are just as optimistic about valuing the plants.

Hothouses operate around the clock with some plants able to yield more than 10kg of cannabis each.

Assuming that means kilos, even someone as "math challenged" as I am can safely say that's over 20 lbs per plant? What planet do these people live on?

Meanwhile, prohibition fever is striking in The Wiggles homeland with the federal government urging penalities be increased for simple possession, while in the UK cooler heads prevailed and the government refused to reclassify cannabis to a more dangerous class of drugs.

MP Chris Davies welcomed the decision saying, "Making criminals of people who are causing no harm to anyone other than themselves makes no sense at all. It is a waste of police time and public resources." Amen to that although I reserve judgment on the harm factor.

On a different note, in Morocco, the government is embarking on a program to develop an alternate economy for their poor farmers.

The project aims at varying the region's agricultural production, increasing the farmers' revenue, improving life conditions in rural areas, avoiding soil erosion, and creating an alternative agricultural activity to replace cannabis production.

Towards that end the government intends to distribute 600,000 fruit trees, mainly fig, carob, and olive and to foster contacts between the commercial users of the raw products and the farmers. It sounds like a lovely plan but I have my doubts it will supplant cannabis farming as long as the black market and its seductive profit levels exist.