A Texas cattle rancher this week stumbled upon nearly 5,500 marijuana plants with a street value of $2 million growing on land he had just leased from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Now if this were a movie, the story would go something like this:

The rancher, a cash-strapped but honest man with a pretty wife and an ailing child, collects the plants and—in a tragic choice that would lead to fatal consequences—makes a deal to sell them to his wacky and slightly shady old Army buddy to raise money to pay for his child's operation. But after the deal is made and the rancher gets the cash, everything goes south as the owners of the illegal growing operation (Note: Let's give them some sort of stereotypical border-themed organized crime syndicate name, like, say, "The Juarez Cartel." Yeah, that's a good one…), the cunning "Juarez Cartel," shoot and kill the Army buddy and kidnap the rancher's wife and ailing child, threatening to kill them if the rancher doesn't turn over the money. The now-angry rancher (Note: Chuck Norris is too damn old. Can Dolph Lundgren do a Texas accent? Can he at least fake a Southern accent?…) doesn't like being pushed around by drug thugs on his own land, so he leads them off into the hills to pick them off one by one in an ever-more-gory fashion. (Note: Sort of like "Crocodile Dundee II" except more blood, which reminds me - can Paul Hogan fake a Texas accent? This is clearly going straight to Hulu anyway so let's look into that…) But the two most dangerous members of the cartel—Alejandro and Pablo (Note: Just for shits and giggles let's make them brothers…)—are holding the rancher's pretty wife and ailing child in an old, abandoned house in the woods. In a series of deus ex machina events, the rancher kills the Juarez brothers and rescues his wife and child but only after sacrificing himself in a fiery explosion. (Note: The rancher has to die, because the moral of all drug-related action melodramas is the wages of sin are death…) Flash forward a year to a scenic graveyard at sunset, where the rancher's pretty wife is shown placing a yellow rose (Note: That's the kind they have in Texas, right?) on her husband's headstone while the rancher's formerly ailing son—now healthy because the rancher managed to put the cash in a safe place before he blew himself and the bad guys up—stands by her side, and the audience can leave the theater confident that he will grow up to be a good, strong American like his tragic father. The camera pulls back to show the setting sun over the hills while the music swells. The end.

But, as the old song goes, this ain't the movies so the rancher just called the cops instead.

In other news, cannabis products are still safe, legal, plentiful, delicious and generating huge amounts of tax revenue in Colorado.

Image via ABC News