The news report which was run on the BBC news service, goes on to report the plants have since been incinerated. Yet the operation only occurred on Wednesday?

Clearly it seems the police man who wrote up this report may have inadvertantly consumed some of the cannabis as it appears he has his sums seriously wrong.

Here's the maths;

390kg of cannabis is truly a massive haul, but for every cannabis plant which is ready to harvest - that is, carrying fully mature female flowers, around 80% of the plant, (the leaves etc) is waste matter. So we're down to about 78 kilo's. Still a huge amount of cannabis but a lot less than 390kg's.

With the plants chopped and trimmed the flower heads dry out entirely. Wet cannabis is bad cannabis and most people will not want to buy it so after they have dried thoroughly, they lose another 75% of the gross weight of the flowers in moisture content. Which brings us down to around 19.5 kilo's.

Its a fair bet the police weighed the plants lock, stock and compost pots and with a mature cannabis plant requiring between 6 and 10 litres of compost each (conservative estimate) thats a lot of weight to take into account, leaving us with only guesswork and supposition - which pretty much sums up how the British judiciary deals with cannabis offences such as this.

Perhaps its about time the police employed people who have experience of dealing with cannabis plants (or any plants) and who can put a realistic value against the weight of the illegal, consumable parts of the plant?

Its a drug offence so only the "drug" parts of the plant should apply surely?

A person has been arrested, and is looking at an inhumane amount of prison time based around the figure 390kg's.

When the fact is, the only reason that amount has been published, is for the sake of Bournmouth police and their end of year drug results.

The police may wish to take part in a national league of drug busts but thats no basis on which to convict a person of a crime.

From where I'm sitting this case is flawed and should be thrown out, and frankly I expected better of the BBC.

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