The fact may get lost in the hype about multi-million dollar outdoor marijuana garden seizures at this time of year, but the vast majority of all marijuana plants seized by law enforcement are ditchweed. For those who didn't grow up in the Midwest, ditchweed is feral marijuana descended from the hemp plants farmers produced as part of the war effort in World War II.
According to official DEA figures [15], police seized an estimated 223 million marijuana plants last year. But 219 million of them, or 98%, were ditchweed. That figure is in line with previous years. And a whopping 212 million plants came from Indiana alone. Missouri came in second with 4.5 million plants, Kansas third with 1.1 million, and Wisconsin fourth with 272,000. Most states reported no ditchweed seizures.
The DEA pays for the ditchweed eradication boondoggle, something for which National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws [16] executive director criticized it in a statement noting the annual seizure figures. "The irony, of course, is that industrial hemp is grown legally throughout most of the Western world as a commercial crop for its fiber content," he said. "Yet the US government is spending taxpayers' money to target and eradicate this same agricultural commodity."
Your tax dollars at work.