Talk:Eradication

Talk

Discussion for: Eradication • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Eradication covers the destruction of growing cannabis as a method: the treaty duty, cutting and burning, machines, helicopters, wild and feral plants, how fields are found, who does the work, a table of campaigns by country, how far the reported figures can be trusted, and the effects on growers and on plant populations. Herbicides and their national campaigns belong to Herbicide spraying of cannabis and its country pages. The American part in campaigns abroad belongs to United States and cannabis eradication abroad. Dated events and year-by-year figures belong to the campaign pages and news items. The law of each treaty belongs to the treaty's page.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

• Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, articles 22 and 28; United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, article 14.
• Office of the Inspector General, US Department of Justice (1995), Audit Report 95-20; Drug Enforcement Administration programme reports for 1987, 1989 and 1993: the American programme, its categories and its counts.
• Canavan and colleagues (2022), Biological Conservation 274: 109709; Aina and colleagues (2025), Scientific Reports 15: 20423: feral hemp.
• Chouvy (2019), EchoGéo 48; Chouvy and Afsahi (2014), International Journal of Drug Policy 25: 416–423; Afsahi and Darwich (2016), International Journal of Drug Policy 31: 190–198: Morocco, Lebanon and the reliability of estimates.
• Houmi, Mohamadi and Balz (2018), ISPRS Archives XLII-3: 547–551; Guno and colleagues (2024), Traitement du Signal 41: 1473–1483; Mikhaylov and colleagues (2025), Discover Applied Sciences 7: 1197: detection.
• Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989); Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001).
• Bloomer (2009), Journal of Political Ecology 16: 49–69; Duvall (2019), EchoGéo 48; McPartland and Small (2020), PhytoKeys 144: 81–112.
• The General Accounting Office (1988), the State Department's narcotics reports and the Organization of American States reviews, with the press for recent campaigns.

How far the evidence on plant populations goes

None of these sources compares the genetic diversity of a cannabis population before and after an eradication campaign, and none gives the share of a population destroyed. The American ditchweed counts are of plants, by state and year, with changing rules for what was counted. Canavan and colleagues use the counts to make a point about persistence and invasion risk. Aina and colleagues describe feral plants collected in recent years and draw no conclusion about eradication.

Statements that eradication has harmed landraces in general give no measurement and name no population. McPartland and Small put the threat to Central and South Asian landraces down to introgressive hybridisation. Eradication is not among the causes they discuss.

Survival of a population after a campaign does not show that the campaign had no genetic effect. A population can survive with fewer parents, and that would not appear in any of these counts.

Forced eradication and hybrids in Morocco

Chouvy and Afsahi (2014) say that the role of forced eradication in the turn to hybrids is not clear, because most of it took place outside the historic growing zone. Afsahi and Darwich (2016) list the replacement of the local variety by hybrids in Morocco among their examples of eradication failing to last. The two papers share an author and are not in plain conflict: the first asks about cause, and the second names what followed. Neither gives a measurement.

Moroccan eradication dates and figures

Chouvy and Afsahi (2014), citing the State Department, say that forced eradication stopped in 2011. Chouvy (2019), citing the UNODC, gives eradicated areas of 8,000 hectares for 2011, 5,000 for 2013, 1,147 for 2015 and 395 for 2016.

In 2005 the Moroccan authorities reported 12,000 hectares eradicated in Larache, where the UNODC survey found 3,917 hectares before eradication. Chouvy and Afsahi connect this with the two-year delay in publishing the survey, as a likely reason and not a stated one.

Counts that are not comparable

The figures in the table are in plants, hectares, mu, dunums, acres, tons, plantations and operations, from police, ministries, auditors, the UN and the press. They are not converted or added together. The American count of 1.9 billion ditchweed plants for 1998 to 2006 is Canavan and colleagues' sum from the annual reports, and NORML's figures for 2005 come from the same tables.

The inspector general's audit of 1995 tested ten states. Six reported work by agencies outside the programme, and in four of those six the supporting papers could not be traced, so the extent of the error there is unknown.

Colombian totals differ between sources: the General Accounting Office credited the programme with more than 33,000 hectares for 1984 to 1987, and the interagency intelligence estimate is lower for the years it covers. The figures are set side by side at United States and cannabis eradication abroad.

Fiji: the name of the operation

The Fiji Sun report of 26 February 2026 prints the operation's name as "Operation Samaki". The name Operation Sasamaki follows Cannabis eradication in Fiji.

Belize

The State Department report of April 1995 says that aerial eradication was banned in January 1995. The DEA's country brief of March 2000 says that the government neither conducted nor allowed spraying.

Aceh

The statement about 1990 is the Indonesian government's account as reported by Asia Watch, which treats that account critically.

Bloomer on Lesotho

Bloomer's study is about cannabis as a livelihood. It is not a measurement of what any eradication campaign cost a household.