According to The New York Times, there’s a farm in Chicago that sounds like urban ag paradise, with “plants up to 10 feet tall in perfect rows across a stretch of land the size of two football fields, and all of it within Chicago’s city limits.” What urban farmer wouldn’t be jealous of this crop? It’s local, it’s thriving, and — oh, yeah — it can get you high.
A tactical flight officer “was on a routine helicopter flight over the city on Tuesday when he noticed a glimmer of lime green,” the Times reports:
“When I walked in there to get my head around this, I couldn’t believe how big it was,” he said. “I was in shock. Basically, someone put 1,500 plants in the middle of an industrial park.”
It’s an urban ag dream! Buuuuuut it’s also a giant field of illegal mind-altering drugs. Which is why this urban pot farm is now all gone, bulldozed to the ground and burned for good measure. Chicago also wasted perfectly good urban farmland by spreading the area with “special wood chips” so no one would plant a new crop.
It was really only a matter of time before people who saw gardens growing in vacant lots thought, “Hey, we get our tomatoes hyper-locally — why not our weed?” But we fear now for urban gardens and farms all over the city. The officer who found the pot farm told the Times that “now every plant looks like dope to us.” We can just hear the cries of “But officer, that’s my fall kale!” as police decide that patch of green behind a rusty fence looks awfully suspicious.
