Dutch War on Drugs Claims 47,000 Innocent Victims

Plant scientists are accustomed to seeing their research projects destroyed by pests and disease, but not by the police.

Officials at Wageningen University and Research Center, in the Netherlands, were disheartened last week to learn that Dutch police officials had unwittingly mowed down 47,000 experimental hemp plants in a field east of Amsterdam, the Associated Press reported. The hemp was a new strain that scientists had developed as a potentially sustainable source of fiber. The police officials initially boasted that they’d destroyed marijuana with a street value of $6.45-million.

Terribly, terribly sorry.

In the annals of scientific loss, this incident still pales in comparison to that suffered by a British biologist who returned from abroad only to learn that his collection of lizard feces, painstakingly gathered over seven years, had been incinerated when his laboratory space at the University of Leeds was cleaned out.