Law enforcement officials in Costa Rica have destroyed 562,757 marijuana plants in a two week operation earlier this month. Over the past two years police destroyed over 4 million plants in the Talamanca region of the country, where the tallest mountains are.

The region is very remote, and police provided humanitarian assistance to the few people that are up there while they were destroying tons of marijuana. No arrests were made, which is a good thing, but that’s still a lot of money and medicine destroyed.

If you think about it, it’s a very odd thing to have adults running around destroying a plant. A lot of man hours dedicated to ridding an area of a non-toxic substance, yet it happens all over the world, mainly because the U.S. decided cannabis was bad and told everyone else to say the same.

And shouldn’t humanitarian assistance be the reason the police are going into the mountains of Costa Rica, not cannabis plants? If weed wasn’t growing up there would they just ignore those people?

- Joe Klare