The U.S. Government Has A Fort Knox For Their Weed Stash

Down in the deep south, the feds have a stash that would put Cheech and Chong in the emergency room.

By James Joiner

Way deep down in Oxford, Mississippi, nestled away in the heart of the Ole Miss campus, our government has a Fort Knox-like fortress full of green gold.
The LA Times visited the federally funded Marijuana Research Project, a 46-year-old center dedicated to growing, processing, and selling pot for the United States government, which is the only one of its kind. (There was supposed to be another at the University of Massachusetts, but bummer DEA chiefs harshed their mellow.) This is the only stash scientists can dip into — after jumping through a dizzying array of hoops — in order to legally investigate marijuana’s medicinal properties.
Inside the lab, there is a stoner’s wet dream of a THC stockpile, as described by the Times’ reporter, Evan Halper:

Marijuana buds are packed into thousands of baggies filed in bankers boxes. Fifty-pound barrels are brimming with dried, ready-to-smoke weed. Freezers are stocked with buckets of potent cannabis extracts. Large metal canisters sit, crammed full of hundreds of perfectly rolled joints.

The lab is in the process of readying 30 thousand plants on their 12-acre farm, and has made headway in developing new bud strains that are higher in the chemical compounds scientists posit help the sick. But don’t expect these plants to flower in the feel-good reggae vibe of their cousins on the outside. Their overseers are not the heady kind.
The lab’s boss, Mahmoud A. Elsohly, has been running a tight ship here since 1980. He believes in the medical powers of cannabis, though he is also opposed to smoking it, which he attributes to just getting high. Instead, he has been working on a THC suppository, since you can't get high “through your rectum.”
This is a claim some stoner-types would dispute.
His deputy, a former narcotics cop named Zlatko Mehmedic, echoes his anti-puffing policy, saying the weed they receive for testing from law enforcement agencies, “could put a novice user in the emergency room.”