Dutch authorities busted what they thought was an illegal marijuana farm – only to wreck a scientist’s experiment.
Police thought they had discovered a plantation of some 47,000 illicit marijuana plants with a street value of $6.3 million.
After they had destroyed much of the crop, they were told the plants belonged to a respected school of agriculture and they were a type of hemp and not marijuana.
Simon Vink, a spokesperson for the university, said the experiment involved testing the suitability of cannabis fibers for the production of textiles, paper and synthetic materials.
“The project had been underway for years and was in its final phase, which would have allowed us to introduced these new fibers to the market. We will probably suffer big losses; we are busy doing the calculations. More than half the plants were destroyed,” Vink said.
Hemp is related to cannabis, but contains only trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive substance found in marijuana.
Under Dutch law, marijuana is a controlled substance, and its large-scale production is illegal. However a policy of tolerance is applied to individual users.
[...] Cops Thought They Busted Marijuana Farmer [...]