Police clean out a city park.
Police later hauled away 300-400 medium-sized plants that they also believed was marijuana.
If fact, officers only stopped collecting the plants because it got too dark, and planned to return in the morning to look around for more.
However, after spending more than an hour removing and tagging the hundreds of plants, then hauling it all down the police department downtown, testing revealed that none of it was marijuana at all.
No word yet on what the plants actually were, or how it will be disposed of now.
Also no word on the street value of the seized weed.
Ah — brings back memories of the hibiscus incident.
Update: Turns out the weed was mentha longifolia (or horsemint). Here’s some pictures of that dank weed for your enjoyment (note: these are not actual pictures of the weeds the police removed, but file photos of that species — I don’t know if they were flowering or anything).
Apparently it has an aroma similar to oregano. Which now makes every search in that town that was based on officers “smelling” pot suspect and perhaps even inadmissible as evidence.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha These people have guns.
What the? These people are so ………oh never mind.
Efficient, enthusiastic, and otherwise unoccupied, the police force made for great ad hoc gardeners. Maybe the city should use the police department for landscaping more often. Cops spending their days weeding city parks don’t wear out city equipment, generate wrongful death lawsuits, or bring shame and disgrace down on the city.
Yes,they have guns but unfortunately they get more than one bullet. I wonder how many still showed up the next morning at daylight.
Well, I guess this proves one thing, American cops really ARE too dumb to tell the difference between marijuana and industrial hemp. I mean if they can’t even tell the difference between marijuana and common hibiscus….
Wow, I’m going through all this trouble to grow some cannabis whenm I can just put weeds in my garden instead?
Lol!
At least they didn’t hurt anyone this time.
There had to be several people working on that project… it’s hard to comprehend that not even one of them, supposedly professional “Experts” about marijuana, could even recognize the infamous and dreaded plant they were supposed to be guarding the citizenry from.
I love the last sentence in the story “According to the city’s Brush Collection Schedule, the next set out period for the area of town that includes the police station doesn’t begin downtown until May 31.”
They could dry it an try it to see if it was some of that k-2 growing wild
Ok, that’s it, I’m planting every single Cannabis look alike in my front yard. Good idea?
ROFL! Now they are becoming landscapers ! great going Mr. Piggies keeping the community looking beautiful! Can you plant some nice flowers while you are at it or put some mulch down!
All that money…wasted
How many food stamp cards or Unemployment bennies did that represent? How many kids are going hungry in this country tonight because the parents didn’t have the money for food due to that money being wasted by the anti-drugs bureaucracy?
Turns out the weed was horse mint, Mentha longifolia, which doesn’t look or smell like Cannabis. Good work guys!
It’s one thing for drug warriors to break into innocent people’s homes and shoot their pets. Now they’re after our gardens! No flowering plant is safe with the prohibitionists on the prowl.
It is astounding to me that the Police will kill a person who they suspect of having a substance which, it appears, they themselves cannot identify.
Where will these jokers hide when the rest of the world realizes what hateful, harmful, stupid people they are?
OT:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37319358/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
Wow, where to start with this one….
claygooding, that’s probably a joke but I figured I’d clarify. K2 is a random herb sprayed with synthetic chemicals – most notably jwh-018. It doesn’t grow naturally like that.
I know and you know but the cops probably don’t know.
It makes you wonder what the drug czar spent all that money on if they did not at least train all LE how to ID cannabis.
I doubt they could tell the difference between strawberrys and corn. Oh, well, the Chief will probably give them a raise for been “alert” and we definitely need more “lerts.”
Oh, of course, yes, -now- a see the resemblance. Why, goodness me, it’s uncanny! They look exactly alike!
… I should hide my mints.
It turns out that there are different plants which are referred to as horsemint or horse mint. Monarda punctata, which smells like oregano is commonly called spotted beebalm, spotted horsemint or horsemint. Mentha longifolia smells like mint. Than’s one of the many problems with common names. I watched this video Marijuana Seizure Turns Out To Be Horse Mint! and I can’t tell which one it it. The leaves are short and wide and don’t look like either species. It certainly doesn’t look like Cannabis. I bet it doesn’t smell like it either. We should send them the old Bureau of Narcotics publication “Marihuana Its Identification.”
I wondered from the start if they were pulling up what we used to incorrectly call “horseweed” where I grew up in the midwest, although it’s more commonly known as ragweed. It’s a tall, spindly plant with fan leaves. The center stalk does look a little like the tall industrial hemp plants, but doesn’t really look or smell anything like hemp on closer inspection.
Ragweed grows anywhere and everywhere. I’ve seen that “raided” before when the police cut down a 10 acre weedy farm lot for fear it was marijuana. Any farmer could have told them the difference, but police like to pretend they know it all especially when their reputation is on the line.
If this was really horsemint then I guess they grabbed it for it’s flower “colas”, although they don’t look much like a hemp plant at all. Education, identification, and re-verification could really save alot of tax dollars!
The two plants don’t even look remotely similar. They did say it was getting near dark, though.
More Reefer Madness.
*sigh*
ya know, it would probably be a whole lot easier to get the job done if all you plant lovers could figure out that the junkies, crack-heads, tweakers, trippers, etc are just as deserving of equality as you are.
we’d be a force to be reckoned with if everyone could understand that this bullshit really isn’t about pot.
get outraged! get totally fucking outraged!!! but not because it’s over your drug — because it isn’t. it’s about your mind and your right to your very being.
stop fucking around.
Step one: Get outraged.
Step two: ???
Step three: The drug war ends.
If it looks like a witch it is a witch…burn all witches. We all have read the various ways they identified witches back then.
Step one: get outraged
Step two: Get involved with local laws
Step three: Get witch burning out lawed
Step Four: End the wHich…witch hunt.
Hope thats a bit closer Pete.
Its difficult to live in this world when you know your government is victimizing its people on a daily basis in anyway it can. They wish us to be good little slaves and go back to sleep and not notice….
…sorry , there can be no sleep now…only depression and the fight.
Doesn’t this just make you feel so good to have these people as our “authorities”. And they say it’s weed that makes you dumb. These people are so ignorant. Is there hope? Jesus Christ.
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pete, you win no points with such inanity.
the parade has been going in circles for a century. so, do you want to help put an end to it or play stupid games with me?
doing the same shit over and over is not the path to victory. we need to get people to not just pay attention, but to actually DO SOMETHING to help.
Umm, how do we know these cops aren’t onto something? Has anyone here ever smoked this ‘horse mint’ plant? Anyway, I’ll try it out today and report back later…
Brian: Do what? That’s the part I keep missing somehow. You say we have to stop winning battles and start winning the war, but I’m still not sure what you want us to do.
Yes, I want you to help put an end to it.
Lay it out for me. What are you going to do? What should I do? What should i get my readers to do? And don’t give me that crap about how every drug policy organization should give up its mission in order to follow you — life doesn’t work that way.
sorry if i’m not working fast enough or hard enough for you pete, but it isn’t too difficult to grasp what needs to be done. basically, we need to put the pressure on the “leaders” of dpr to pull together the coherent message, teach everybody the song and have them march in the same direction.
leaving everything fractured in petty fiefdoms as is now the case remains the single biggest obstacle to our success. the big organizations to get their shit together (unlikely) or we acknowledge that they are actually irrelevant and work to get it done among ourselves.
i am working on putting it all together in a book, but i can only work so fast. so, i’m kind of depending on other people who can see the big picture to put two and two together and help encourage others to join the chorus. most of the issues were fairly well laid out back in 1973 when consumer reports released their big green book — ever read it?
i’m sorry, but what we need to do is quite obvious, and it doesn’t involve petty references to south park. hell, get ethan nadelmann to step down and i’ll be happy to show everybody exactly what to do. but as a one man army, i can only work so fast.
and while we’re at it, what’s your plan? peck away slowly as has been the case for the past four decades? keep “hoping” that the leaders will manage to do something useful?
curious readers want to know.
What a CASE in POINT that so utterly proves how damaged the frontal lobs are of Drug Warriors and their flying monkey minions. The descriptive but disparaging word that comes to mind, for me, after reading this CORKER of a piece might be too offensive … but I will use it anyways.
What complete DUMB-FUCKS! They are, in fact, the perfect definition of the term. Ha ha ha ha! Your tax dollars at work! — cheers, kitkat
No, the police won’t kill someone for possessing or selling marijuana– you usually do get a lengthy jail sentence, though and they CAN kill you if you refuse to comply and come to the police station with them.
As an amateur botanist, I have to say that I sympathize with the police. Marijuana is actually a very hard plant to identify because it has so many look-alikes. I’d like to see one of you in the policeman’s place– do any of you know what marijuana looks like so well that you can consistently identify without mistaking a look-alike like horsemint for it? Remember, if you saw a plant that looked like marijuana but was slightly dissimilar and smelled different and decided not to confiscate it based on that, you would get a great deal more criticism for stupidly failing to confiscate the drugs which you thought were a wildflower.