Drought leads to less seized marijuana

Kyle Nagel in the Dayton Daily News comes up with some stoner-related news: Ohio officials seized about 40 percent fewer marijuana plants in 2012 as part of a national program to battle growing operations. Officials said the drop can be attributed to drought conditions decreasing production.

The anti-marijuana operation, in which Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation works with county sheriffs, seized about 30,000 marijuana plants this year, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office announced last week. That was a drop from 50,704 in 2011 in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration-led Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program.

The decades-long program funds state agencies — including about $500,000 annually in recent years for Ohio — to search and seize or destroy marijuana growing operations. Officials say the effort is important because marijuana is the only “drug of abuse” grown inside the U.S.

States use much of that money to pay for helicopters that fly over residential areas or farmland looking for growing operations. Those operations are often cut into farmland without a farmer’s knowledge.

But this year, Ohio officials noticed more marijuana growing in residential areas, such as gardens. BCI employs trained spotters to look for signs of marijuana from helicopters, and agents on the ground find the operations and make arrests, if possible.

“I think people are seeing what’s happening in other states, with some attitudes and some legislation passed about legalization for medicinal purposes, and they think, ‘I’ll take my chances,’ ” said Scott Duff, a BCI special agent supervisor for Ohio’s marijuana eradication program....

Cannabis shot by Bogdan, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license