The clip from the six o’clock news would be enough to break Willie Nelson’s heart—5,525 pounds of seized marijuana, lined up like sandbags in a flood in front of a Cook County police vehicle.

That’s over two tons of dried cannabis, more than the weight of a pick-up truck, or enough to make a man listen to “Dark Side of the Moon” all day, every day for the rest of his natural life.

The contraband cheeba in question—all $20 million worth—was seized in a house in the southwest suburb of Lyons, according to the Sun-Times. Now the Cook County sheriff’s office gets to strut around proud as peacocks for a few weeks, and some mope named Frederico Moreno is staring down six to 30 for a charge of manufacturing and delivering cannabis. Totally harsh, man.

But now it looks like what’s really intruding on the buzz of marijuana advocates is what to do with all those pounds of police-possessed sticky-icky-icky. The sheriff’s department planned to file for a court order allowing them to incinerate all but 10,000 grams, which I’d guess is probably still enough for a few years of mind-blowing trips to Taco Bell.

On Monday, the Sun-Times ran quotes from some folks with chronic diseases feel incinerating all that grass would be the equivalent of flushing a few thousand pounds of penicillin down the drain. For all I know, they might be right.

I’m not the biggest advocate for marijuana use in the world—I don’t use it, and my experience in high school and college has been that pretty much everyone is less interesting while on drugs—but it seems like a shame even to me to just burn the whole mess of it.

Let’s get creative here. We could be like a sitcom dad who finds his son’s pack of cigarettes, and make poor Mr. Moreno smoke the whole thing until he promises to never, ever do it again. We could just hand it out and instantly recession-proof Illinois’ fast-food restaurants, record shops and Gamestops. We could give it all away as a one-shot gift and make Snoop Dogg really happy.

I don’t mean to make light of good police work, but if I sound unimpressed by the haul it might be because last weekend was a bit uneven for law and order in Cook County. There were 18 shootings in Chicago, more than half of them gang related. The Evanston Police Department responded to a call about gunshots at 3 a.m. on Saturday. It seems criminals didn’t know they were supposed to be celebrating the bust.

I don’t know if marijuana should be legal in any form. But I know that right now it’s illegal, and that means that Mr. Moreno and his buddies don’t get too broken up if they have to break a few more laws to sell their product. And since the drug business seems to be plenty profitable, I doubt even a bust this big will do much to stop them from driving more violent crime in Cook County.

Meanwhile city police departments have been tightening their belts in the face of citywide budget cuts. No such funding problem for the drug dealers, gang-bangers and other lowlifes that contributed to the ten dead and nearly sixty wounded this weekend. Even in a recession, the creep business is still booming.

On second thought, maybe we should send a few pounds to the lawmakers and police commissioners. With problems this bad, the least they deserve is some herbal relief.