U.S. Border Patrol Deputy Chief Refers to Marijuana as “Weapon of Mass Effect”

“Of course, Mr. President, you probably already know all this stuff from your ‘Lindsay Lohan’ days…”

It looks as though the U.S. War or Drugs will continue for a bit longer. U.S. Border Patrol Deputy Chief Ronald Colburn, in answering a question by Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), used hyperbole in the name of job security by equating weed with terrorism:

“There were nearly a million people that weren’t successful in crossing both borders this year. And speaking of weapons of mass effect, 2 million pounds of marijuana is a weapon of mass effect that we prevented from happening this year along the border.”

This is a bit of a stretch if you use the definition of “weapon of mass effect” as it appears in the CSAT Top-Screen User Manual [PDF], a chemical security manual produced by the Department of Homeland Security, which defines it as:

…an industrial gas that can be used as a weapon without reacting with other chemicals to create a third material.