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LOS ANGELES - Booming Riverside County has an unwelcome new growth industry - marijuana.
Nearly one-sixth of the record 621,300 marijuana plants seized in California this year were being grown in the county, law enforcement officials said Friday.
Mexican drug cartels set up shop in its numerous avocado groves as sheriff's deputies and drug agents disrupted operations in the state's traditional northern growing region. The total of 97,100 plants seized in Riverside County was more than those taken in the so-called Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties.
"They're not using the old places anymore," said Val Jimenez, commander of the state Department of Justice's Campaign Against Marijuana Production, known as CAMP. He said the Northern California growers had started using more greenhouses on private land, making the plants more difficult to find.
For the first time since it was established in 1983, the program set up a team in Southern California, starting two months before the harvest season to find plants when they were small.
The seizures statewide included 155,000 more plants than last year and had a street value of $2.5 billion, Attorney General Bill Lockyer said. More than half of all the pot seized was grown on public land, where armed growers can pose a danger to unsuspecting hikers and hunters.
Such people stumbled upon marijuana gardens 16 times this year, officials said, including one instance in the Sierra National Forest where three brothers going fishing with their children came across men with guns guarding a 3,000-plant garden.
"They feared for their lives," Jimenez said of the men, who picked their way quietly and slowly out of the area.
Members of local sheriffs offices, the U.S. Forest Service, California National Guard and Bureau of Land Management conducted 181 raids, seized 53 weapons and arrested more than 50 people.
Outside Riverside, nearly all the program's raids this year utilized helicopters for so-called "short-haul" operations. Agents drop in on marijuana gardens by dangling from lines attached to the aircraft, saving countless hours previously spent hiking through dense brush or forests to the remote, often secluded locations favored by growers.
"We're marketing that short-haul to 'Fear Factor' and those programs," Lockyer joked. Only about a fourth of all raids used helicopters five years ago, Jimenez said.
More domestic-grown marijuana plants are seized year-to-year in California than in any other region in the nation, according to federal officials who contributed $1.5 million to eradication efforts in the state this year.
Ryan Pearson
Associated Press
https://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/the_valley/10111428.htm?1c
Nearly one-sixth of the record 621,300 marijuana plants seized in California this year were being grown in the county, law enforcement officials said Friday.
Mexican drug cartels set up shop in its numerous avocado groves as sheriff's deputies and drug agents disrupted operations in the state's traditional northern growing region. The total of 97,100 plants seized in Riverside County was more than those taken in the so-called Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties.
"They're not using the old places anymore," said Val Jimenez, commander of the state Department of Justice's Campaign Against Marijuana Production, known as CAMP. He said the Northern California growers had started using more greenhouses on private land, making the plants more difficult to find.
For the first time since it was established in 1983, the program set up a team in Southern California, starting two months before the harvest season to find plants when they were small.
The seizures statewide included 155,000 more plants than last year and had a street value of $2.5 billion, Attorney General Bill Lockyer said. More than half of all the pot seized was grown on public land, where armed growers can pose a danger to unsuspecting hikers and hunters.
Such people stumbled upon marijuana gardens 16 times this year, officials said, including one instance in the Sierra National Forest where three brothers going fishing with their children came across men with guns guarding a 3,000-plant garden.
"They feared for their lives," Jimenez said of the men, who picked their way quietly and slowly out of the area.
Members of local sheriffs offices, the U.S. Forest Service, California National Guard and Bureau of Land Management conducted 181 raids, seized 53 weapons and arrested more than 50 people.
Outside Riverside, nearly all the program's raids this year utilized helicopters for so-called "short-haul" operations. Agents drop in on marijuana gardens by dangling from lines attached to the aircraft, saving countless hours previously spent hiking through dense brush or forests to the remote, often secluded locations favored by growers.
"We're marketing that short-haul to 'Fear Factor' and those programs," Lockyer joked. Only about a fourth of all raids used helicopters five years ago, Jimenez said.
More domestic-grown marijuana plants are seized year-to-year in California than in any other region in the nation, according to federal officials who contributed $1.5 million to eradication efforts in the state this year.
Ryan Pearson
Associated Press
https://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/the_valley/10111428.htm?1c
