I hesitate to mention this story because some people might be tempted to sign up for the Canadian Armed Forces as a result, so I’ll start with Gerry stay where you are! It’s not worth it! Having said that, Reuters is reporting that Canadian forces battling the Taliban in Afghanistan are having difficulty dealing with forests of 10ft high marijuana plants. 
Apparently, the Taliban fighters have been hiding among the cannabis forest and the Canuck troops haven’t been able to spot them. The plants evidently absorb a lot of heat and as a result thermal imaging gear is ineffective. They also tried burning down the plants, but they were so full of moisture they wouldn’t burn. The few dry plants near the edges that did burn apparently caused some unintended consequences for soldiers who were down wind. Gerry! Sit down! You don’t really want to go to Afghanistan!
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Oh, man. Just reading that story gave me the munchies.
“The plants are so full of water right now … that we simply couldn’t burn them,” according to chief of the Canadian defense staff General Rick Hillier. Holy crap, that’s gotta be some majorly sticky bud! I doubt I’d be accepted into the Canadian Armed Forces, being an old, fat American and all, but I’d be more than happy to act as a consultant. “Yep, that’s marijuana, all right.”
How tragically ironic that a country like Afghanistan, with the perfect land and climate to grow forests of weed and vast fields of opium poppies should for so long be under the control of one of the world’s most reactionary governments. If only the Afghanis could establish progressive political institutions that grant equal rights to women and religious minorities, and permit the establishment of Amsterdam-style “coffee houses,” their tourism industry would rock.
Instead, under the misguided guiding hand of Uncle Sam, Afghanistan’s fledgling government is trying to do simultaneous battle with both the Taliban and the nation’s ever-more-powerful drug lords. If we made allies of the certels, we would legitimize a huge segment of Afghanistan’s economy and have the support of thousands of otherwise-destitute farmers, and at the same time we’d be able to generate revenue for the government the same way we promised that oil revenues would fund our efforts in Iraq. Instead, our blow-snorting hypocrite of a president and all the other anti-drug zealots in every level of the US government would react with condescension at the very suggestion that legalizing certain controlled substances might actually do more to help encouage democracy than hurt it. I think marijuana does cause paranoia, but not so much in the people who smoke it as it does in the people who are afraid of it for no good reason.
I meant “cartels,” not “certels.” I’m sure you knew what I was getting at, but I wouldn’t want someone to come along and argue that my typo is evidence of a sloppy, drug-addled mind.