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The Feds Made 113,664 Weed Busts on the Mexico Border in Six Years

Meanwhile, Americans will continue consuming the best cannabis in the world, which, of course, is not being grown in Mexico.
A bunch of seized bud, via US Customs and Border Protection

Immigration reform may be in the air--literally in the air, with legislation proposing 24/7 drone surveillance of the US-Mexico border--but noticeably absent from top-level discussions of border security? Drug busts.

So what better time for the Center for Investigative Reporting to release findings culled from 80,000 rows of US Custom and Border Protection data on individual drug seizures at various ports of entry and checkpoints along the nearly 2,000-mile border between January 2005 and October 2011. CIR's full interactive map, which you can find here, is worth a long look. But two glaring outliers are worth noting.

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1. Marijuana constituted the vast majority--about 89 percent--of the 128,169 total busts combed by CIR. That's 113,664 busts just for weed--presumably ditch-brick schwag, at that. The figure would almost be comical compared to the number of cocaine (9,505), meth (4,618), and heroin (1,352) busts in the same six-year stretch if it weren't for the untold tens of thousands of lives lost at the hands of cartels, whose drug operations are only incentivized by blanket prohibition to the north.

2. From out of this lopsidedness we can see a lot of truly massive weed busts, and even more tiny, small-fry pot busts. By truly massive busts, of which CIR counted 6,864, I mean an average weight of about 145 pounds. And by tiny busts, of which CIR recorded a staggering 8,938, I mean an average weight of 0.14 ounces. 0.14 ounces. Last I checked, that's probably not enough of the devil's cabbage to do too much of anything.

Meanwhile, Americans will continue consuming arguably some of the best cannabis in the world, which, of course, is neither being grown in Mexico, nor muled over the border by this idiot.

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson