T
The420Guy
Guest
THREE RIVERS, Calif. - Wearing camouflage and armed with machetes, a
dozen police officers waited in the gathering heat of morning for a
helicopter that was to drop them into a marijuana farm, in the hills
two miles distant.
Rattlesnakes, poison oak and bee stings would be the least of their
concerns, the officers were warned before the raid: They might be
welcomed with gunfire.
"You've got to take care of yourselves," Sgt. Richard Matthews, a
SWAT team leader for the Tulare County Sheriff's Department, told the
officers in a briefing near here, at the western boundary of Sequoia
National Park.
Almost every day through the marijuana harvest season, which recently
ended, federal agents and the local police descended on the
increasingly large pot farms in California's national forests,
looking for the growers and their possible connections to Mexican
drug traffickers.
"The Mexican cartels have taken over the industry, and when they do
something, they don't do it in small amounts," said Sonya Arriaga
Barna, operations commander for a California Department of Justice
task force, Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP, which
coordinates some of the law enforcement teams that conduct pot raids
around the state. The Drug Enforcement Agency says that 935,680
plants, worth about $3.7 billion on the street, were seized in
California this summer and early fall, the most ever.
Almost half of the plants seized in California were uprooted from
national forests. Seizures in California - where Mexican drug
organizations appear to have concentrated their cultivation and the
leader, by far, in the national marijuana stakes - have more than
doubled in the last four years. Of the top 10 forests around the
country where pot was seized last year, six were here.
About 720,000 plants were eradicated nationwide from Forest Service
lands in 2001, more than twice the 1997 figure. This year's numbers
are still being compiled.
Law enforcement officials in the Sequoia National Forest and in
others across the West say marijuana groves are an increasingly
frequent and often undetected feature of the vast terrain. Far from
places usually visited by tourists, the plantations thrive.
This year's crop continued a trend of huge growth in the size and
number of pot farms run by Mexican traffickers, officials say. Facing
tighter border controls and more effective policing in Mexico, they
have switched from smuggling their crop to planting it on United
States soil.
"Why take the risk of smuggling marijuana over the border when you
can come here to grow it?" asked Sgt. Marsh Carter, who until
recently led the SWAT team for the Tulare County Sheriff's
Department, which covers much of the Sequoia forest.
Laura Mark, assistant special agent in charge of the Forest Service's
drug eradication effort in the West, said: "Ninety to 95 percent of
the marijuana in California is now grown by Mexican nationals who
work for the drug cartels. The dynamics of it have changed. This
isn't about hippies anymore."
Mike Delaney, who oversees marijuana eradication for the Drug
Enforcement Agency in Northern California, said it appeared that
"command and control" of at least some of the plantations originated
with "organizations based in Mexico."
"The majority of these growers are armed, and that poses a threat if
someone is hiking or camping in the wilderness," Mr. Delaney said.
While no campers or hikers are known to have been harmed, several law
enforcement officers have been injured in shootouts. At least two
suspected growers have been fatally shot in raids.
No growers were in the plantation near Three Rivers, 80 miles
southeast of Fresno, when the 12 law enforcement officers flew in.
The growers may have been scared away by a raid on a nearby
plantation a week earlier. Still, 3,846 plants were hauled out in
nets by the helicopter and destined for burning.
Planting on federal land leaves no property owners to prosecute; the
traffickers cannot be identified unless they are caught visiting
their crops.
In June, nine men with ties to what prosecutors called the Maga=F1a
cartel pleaded guilty in federal court in Fresno to a variety of drug
charges. The men were arrested in October 2000, with more than 30
others, after they were connected to more than 100,000 marijuana
plants in the Sequoia National Forest. The authorities said the
cartels were responsible for about 80 percent of the pot grown in the
Sierra Nevada.
Advertisement
Sergeant Carter, the former SWAT team leader, said detectives had
identified four other organizations in the area. "Ninety-nine percent
of the people we arrest or investigate are from Mexico," he said.
A report by the law enforcement and investigations unit of the Forest
Service said that organizations in Mexico were supplying workers to
tend marijuana on Forest Service lands in California and in Arkansas,
Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington.
Investigators in the Maga=F1a case said cartel leaders brought in
illegal workers from the Mexican states of Michoac=E1n and Jalisco.
Others were recruited from California street corners, where they
gather in search of day jobs. The recruiters often tell them they
will be working in "agriculture" or "cutting wood." The men are
generally taken to remote places, given equipment, seeds, fertilizer
and tents and sometimes weapons - and told to stay there, sometimes
for months. They might earn $5,000 or $6,000.
"A lot of these guys don't want to be there," said Doug Babb, a
recently retired Tulare County deputy. "We've talked to guys who say
they're basically forced into slave labor."
The garden tenders are often violent. "These guys shoot people," said
Ms. Mark, the Forest Service official. "They do not distinguish
between police, hunters or campers. As far as they're concerned,
everyone is a pot thief."
Officers investigating pot workers' camps have found elaborate
treehouses, makeshift showers and, invariably, trash and pesticides,
much of which ends up in streams and creeks. The crops are often
surrounded by barbed wire, and sometimes irrigated with water from
nearby streams.
Wildfires this summer in the Sequoia forest destroyed several pot
farms and flushed many of the tenders from hiding.
"When the big burn happened, a lot of guys came out of the hills,"
said Jan Barnes, a resident of Springville, 20 miles south of here.
"They looked like they were starving, and they were filthy."
People are getting accustomed to the pot farms. They are still
talking about the smoke that wafted over town two summers ago, when
plants were burned at the county dump south of Springville.
Firefighters for the California Department of Forestry and Fire
Protection were exempted from random drug tests for three months
because of their exposure to the marijuana cloud.
"The town loved it," Steve Kelley, a California Highway Patrol
trooper based in Springville, said, not entirely seriously. "They
asked for more."
( A lot of us Californians are wondering just where this "Mexican"
marijuana is going to. Certainly, the medical market remains in the
hands of small-scale patient growers. It's therefore ironic that the
DEA is spending so much time trying to catch medical growers. All of
the forty-plus medical growers that have been busted by DEA in
California put together account for fewer than the 10,000-plus plants
typically found on a single Mexican pot plantation. Yet rarely are
the growers of these large plantations arrested. If it wanted to,
the DEA could stake out their gardens and try to arrest them.
Instead, they are staking out cannabis clubs in San Francisco. But
of course there's no end to the DEA's shameless hypocrisy.)
- Dale Gieringer, Cal NORML.
Source: New York Times (CA)
Webpage: Marijuana Found Thriving in Forests
Pubdate: 15 Nov 2002
Marijuana Found Thriving in Forests
By NICK MADIGAN
dozen police officers waited in the gathering heat of morning for a
helicopter that was to drop them into a marijuana farm, in the hills
two miles distant.
Rattlesnakes, poison oak and bee stings would be the least of their
concerns, the officers were warned before the raid: They might be
welcomed with gunfire.
"You've got to take care of yourselves," Sgt. Richard Matthews, a
SWAT team leader for the Tulare County Sheriff's Department, told the
officers in a briefing near here, at the western boundary of Sequoia
National Park.
Almost every day through the marijuana harvest season, which recently
ended, federal agents and the local police descended on the
increasingly large pot farms in California's national forests,
looking for the growers and their possible connections to Mexican
drug traffickers.
"The Mexican cartels have taken over the industry, and when they do
something, they don't do it in small amounts," said Sonya Arriaga
Barna, operations commander for a California Department of Justice
task force, Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP, which
coordinates some of the law enforcement teams that conduct pot raids
around the state. The Drug Enforcement Agency says that 935,680
plants, worth about $3.7 billion on the street, were seized in
California this summer and early fall, the most ever.
Almost half of the plants seized in California were uprooted from
national forests. Seizures in California - where Mexican drug
organizations appear to have concentrated their cultivation and the
leader, by far, in the national marijuana stakes - have more than
doubled in the last four years. Of the top 10 forests around the
country where pot was seized last year, six were here.
About 720,000 plants were eradicated nationwide from Forest Service
lands in 2001, more than twice the 1997 figure. This year's numbers
are still being compiled.
Law enforcement officials in the Sequoia National Forest and in
others across the West say marijuana groves are an increasingly
frequent and often undetected feature of the vast terrain. Far from
places usually visited by tourists, the plantations thrive.
This year's crop continued a trend of huge growth in the size and
number of pot farms run by Mexican traffickers, officials say. Facing
tighter border controls and more effective policing in Mexico, they
have switched from smuggling their crop to planting it on United
States soil.
"Why take the risk of smuggling marijuana over the border when you
can come here to grow it?" asked Sgt. Marsh Carter, who until
recently led the SWAT team for the Tulare County Sheriff's
Department, which covers much of the Sequoia forest.
Laura Mark, assistant special agent in charge of the Forest Service's
drug eradication effort in the West, said: "Ninety to 95 percent of
the marijuana in California is now grown by Mexican nationals who
work for the drug cartels. The dynamics of it have changed. This
isn't about hippies anymore."
Mike Delaney, who oversees marijuana eradication for the Drug
Enforcement Agency in Northern California, said it appeared that
"command and control" of at least some of the plantations originated
with "organizations based in Mexico."
"The majority of these growers are armed, and that poses a threat if
someone is hiking or camping in the wilderness," Mr. Delaney said.
While no campers or hikers are known to have been harmed, several law
enforcement officers have been injured in shootouts. At least two
suspected growers have been fatally shot in raids.
No growers were in the plantation near Three Rivers, 80 miles
southeast of Fresno, when the 12 law enforcement officers flew in.
The growers may have been scared away by a raid on a nearby
plantation a week earlier. Still, 3,846 plants were hauled out in
nets by the helicopter and destined for burning.
Planting on federal land leaves no property owners to prosecute; the
traffickers cannot be identified unless they are caught visiting
their crops.
In June, nine men with ties to what prosecutors called the Maga=F1a
cartel pleaded guilty in federal court in Fresno to a variety of drug
charges. The men were arrested in October 2000, with more than 30
others, after they were connected to more than 100,000 marijuana
plants in the Sequoia National Forest. The authorities said the
cartels were responsible for about 80 percent of the pot grown in the
Sierra Nevada.
Advertisement
Sergeant Carter, the former SWAT team leader, said detectives had
identified four other organizations in the area. "Ninety-nine percent
of the people we arrest or investigate are from Mexico," he said.
A report by the law enforcement and investigations unit of the Forest
Service said that organizations in Mexico were supplying workers to
tend marijuana on Forest Service lands in California and in Arkansas,
Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington.
Investigators in the Maga=F1a case said cartel leaders brought in
illegal workers from the Mexican states of Michoac=E1n and Jalisco.
Others were recruited from California street corners, where they
gather in search of day jobs. The recruiters often tell them they
will be working in "agriculture" or "cutting wood." The men are
generally taken to remote places, given equipment, seeds, fertilizer
and tents and sometimes weapons - and told to stay there, sometimes
for months. They might earn $5,000 or $6,000.
"A lot of these guys don't want to be there," said Doug Babb, a
recently retired Tulare County deputy. "We've talked to guys who say
they're basically forced into slave labor."
The garden tenders are often violent. "These guys shoot people," said
Ms. Mark, the Forest Service official. "They do not distinguish
between police, hunters or campers. As far as they're concerned,
everyone is a pot thief."
Officers investigating pot workers' camps have found elaborate
treehouses, makeshift showers and, invariably, trash and pesticides,
much of which ends up in streams and creeks. The crops are often
surrounded by barbed wire, and sometimes irrigated with water from
nearby streams.
Wildfires this summer in the Sequoia forest destroyed several pot
farms and flushed many of the tenders from hiding.
"When the big burn happened, a lot of guys came out of the hills,"
said Jan Barnes, a resident of Springville, 20 miles south of here.
"They looked like they were starving, and they were filthy."
People are getting accustomed to the pot farms. They are still
talking about the smoke that wafted over town two summers ago, when
plants were burned at the county dump south of Springville.
Firefighters for the California Department of Forestry and Fire
Protection were exempted from random drug tests for three months
because of their exposure to the marijuana cloud.
"The town loved it," Steve Kelley, a California Highway Patrol
trooper based in Springville, said, not entirely seriously. "They
asked for more."
( A lot of us Californians are wondering just where this "Mexican"
marijuana is going to. Certainly, the medical market remains in the
hands of small-scale patient growers. It's therefore ironic that the
DEA is spending so much time trying to catch medical growers. All of
the forty-plus medical growers that have been busted by DEA in
California put together account for fewer than the 10,000-plus plants
typically found on a single Mexican pot plantation. Yet rarely are
the growers of these large plantations arrested. If it wanted to,
the DEA could stake out their gardens and try to arrest them.
Instead, they are staking out cannabis clubs in San Francisco. But
of course there's no end to the DEA's shameless hypocrisy.)
- Dale Gieringer, Cal NORML.
Source: New York Times (CA)
Webpage: Marijuana Found Thriving in Forests
Pubdate: 15 Nov 2002
Marijuana Found Thriving in Forests
By NICK MADIGAN
