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We were duly impressed by whoever it was who grew three foot marijuana plants in the center of Millville, New Jersey’s business district. The cannabis was never harvested since police got tipped off by a passer-by last week and confiscated it. But the plan, which took advantage of municipal utilities by cultivating the plants on baskets hung beneath lampposts, showed an admirable degree of creativity and even a bit of Recycle Reduce Reuse awareness.
Yet it pales in both ambition and ingenuity to what a 35-year old entrepreneur was doing in the middle of Greece’s busiest motorway. Literally the middle of literally their busiest motorway.
He tapped into the sprinkler system that the rest of the plants were using, carefully laid his seeds in soft earth, and let them grow. And grow they did:
“The suspect had planted 42 plants up to 1.8 metres (5.9 feet) high, probably in April or May,” Pieria prefecture police director Thanassis Fotopoulos told state television NET. The illegal patch on the median strip of the Athens-Thessaloniki motorway had ample access to water.
Now Southern Europe isn’t exactly a region infused with the Protestant Work Ethic, and yet here they are doubling us up on publicly grown cannabis. This is the kind of innovation – to say nothing of sheer hard work and dedication – that you just don’t find in the American marketplace any more. That can’t be good for global competitiveness.
On the other hand, they’re growing weed for themselves. So any productivity gap might well take care of itself.