DEA STILL DESTROYING HEMP, CALLING IT MARIJUANA

760,000-Plus Pot (Hemp) Plants Destroyed

AUSTIN, Texas -- Narcotics officers from the Texas Department of Public
Safety, with help from the Air National Guard and the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, destroyed more than 760,000 marijuana plants across the
state in 2001, officials said.

The bulk of the plants were growing wild in the Panhandle, but tens of
thousands of others had been carefully cultivated by growers bent on
profiting through illegal sales of their crops, DPS spokeswoman Tela Mange
said.

"We found some pretty sophisticated operations, including one that was
being irrigated by an automatic pump, and it appeared that there was some
genetic engineering going on with the plants," said Mange, who spent three
days in late summer in the field with drug agents.

The program led to the arrest of 160 people and the seizure of 77 firearms.

The marijuana eradication program has operated in Texas since 1987. In
2000, more than 415,700 marijuana plants were eradicated, 71 people were
arrested and 53 weapons were seized.

The program, funded by a DEA grant, "has helped make Texas a safer place,"
said Col. Thomas Davis Jr., director of the DPS. "This is a program that
shows definite, immediate results. Many burglaries and other crimes are
directly related to drugs and drug use."

Mange said most of the wild marijuana plants were remnants of previous
legal cultivation for hemp in wartime 1940s.

"Some of those wild plants grew to about 20 feet tall and were 2 inches in
diameter," Mange said. "We took them down with gasoline-powered weed eaters
with steel rotary blades."

State offices worked with local law enforcement agencies to locate both the
wild plants and those cultivated for profit. Officers patrolled in National
Guard helicopters and could easily spot the plants from the air, Mange said.

The marijuana that had been cultivated was held as evidence and slated for
destruction after the legal process had run its course. The wild plants
were left to decompose naturally.

"Those plants have a really low THC content," Mange said, referring to
tetrahydrocannabinol, the most potent mood-altering component in marijuana,
"So it's unlikely that people are going to be smoking it and getting high."
(END)

NOTE: In America's "Drug War" 99.2% of all "marijuana" eradicated in the
United States is actually low-THC non-psychoactive "hemp". Check out the
unbelievable facts in Vermont's State Legislative study on the federal
government's "Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program" at:
(http://www.state.vt.us/sao/pages/CAN_final.HTM)