About two tons of marijuana found growing wild in Floyd County was destroyed over the weekend by sheriff’s deputies. Sheriff Rick Lynch says it’s the sixth time in the last decade they’ve done such an operation. Sheriff Lynch says the mission is to both eradicate the crop and to protect those who are out trying to find the plants to smoke.
Lynch says the risk is that people spray chemicals like Round-up on the wild marijuana to kill it, and then other people pick it for recreational use and they may end up ingesting harmful chemicals that could end up killing them. Lynch says it’s the responsibility of land owners to get rid of the marijuana and they want to make sure as much of it is cut down as possible.
He says they don’t want kids or young adults roaming around the county trying to find the plants. He says if someone does cut off parts of the plant, they can be charged with criminal possession of marijuana. Lynch says the program doesn’t cost the county a lot of money since his department gets volunteer help to look for and harvest the plants.
Lynch says the plants that were cut down were destroyed. He says the plants were taken to an undisclosed area and burned. Many spots in Floyd County grew marijuana plants in the 1940s to be harvested with the hemp portion of the plant being made into rope during World War Two.
Contributed by Bob Fisher, KRIB, Mason City