Research shows that in the 1950's Brooklyn used to have marijuana plants that grew as tall as Christmas trees

Is Brooklyn in the house?!?!

There was a time in Brooklyn’s history when marijuana plants as tall as Christmas trees grew out in the open in vacant lots across the borough. From Avenue X to the banks of Newtown Creek, the plants grew in what a Brooklyn Eagle reporter described in 1951 as “lush impudence.”

This forgotten botanical history was recently unearthed by Ben Gocker, a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection. While searching through the archives for a patron, he found a folder marked “Crime: Drugs: Marijuana.”

It turns out the green stuff was growing all over Brooklyn, including around the Gowanus Canal. Many residents had it in their yards, and didn’t even know it.

“I wondered why we had so many photos just on this topic,” said Gocker, who recently wrote about his findings on the collection’s blog, Brooklynology. “I just kind of dug around in the morgue and found newspaper clippings, and it turned out that there was this big citywide effort to uproot all this pot that was growing wildly.”

Marijuana “plantations,” both wild and cultivated, became the target of massive raids by the Department of Sanitation and the NYPD, who sought to eradicate the narcotic growth, said Gocker. In the summer of 1951, sanitation workers dug up and incinerated 41,000 pounds of marijuana from 274 lots around the city. Queens produced the largest crop, at 17,445 pounds, while Brooklyn was a close second, with 17,200 pounds.

Well damn, they must have been getting Wiz Khalifa high back in the days!

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