cannabisnews.com: Public Lands Fall Prey to Major MJ Operations





Public Lands Fall Prey to Major MJ Operations
Posted by FoM on February 26, 2000 at 12:05:43 PT
By Pauline Arrillaga, The Associated Press
Source: NJO NewsFlash
They were spotted from the air, as conspicuous as sharks in a school of guppies: Three plots of land, seemingly stripped of the towering oaks and manzanitas that shroud this patch of Southern California forest. These were not natural formations. They were entirely man-made -- and entirely illegal. 
A week after the August sighting, a helicopter returned with two dozen Forest Service agents and sheriff's detectives. They cleared a landing pad and cut a trail into the site, coming first to a makeshift reservoir. Six hoses, filtering water from a creek, ran in one end; several more snaked back out the other. Moving on, the agents reached the first clearing. They'd been right. In place of the trees this forest is meant to protect stood a grove of emerald stalks, six to 15 feet tall. They were in full bloom -- robust and ready for harvest. On two acres of prime forest land, about a half-hour from the city of San Bernardino and 1{ hours from Los Angeles, these agents had discovered the latest battleground in the war on drugs: a 23,000-plant marijuana plantation. As money and manpower continue to flow to the Southwest border to stop illegal drugs coming into this country, traffickers -- many employed by Mexican drug gangs -- are producing vast quantities of marijuana right here in the United States, on land owned by the federal government. The reasons are obvious: the land is fertile, remote and free. There's no risk of forfeiture, plantations are difficult to trace, and growers have land agents outmanned, outspent and outgunned. "We spend a lot of time and energy stopping stuff from coming into this country, but we don't really pay much attention to our own back yard," said Dan Bauer, the Forest Service's drug program coordinator. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that more than half of the marijuana consumed in the United States is produced domestically. Much of that -- no one knows how much for sure -- is grown on public lands, primarily the country's 155 national forests. Pesticides used by the illegal growers poison wildlife and waterways, although the crop's danger is not just environmental. Park visitors run the risk of tripping booby traps or encountering armed gangs. After stumbling upon a marijuana farm, some visitors have been run off at gunpoint, Bauer said, adding that Forest Service agents have sometimes exchanged gunfire with growers. The public's perception of the drug war is a border agent pulling bundles of narcotics from the bed of a truck, Bauer said. "They very rarely think of the poor forest agent crawling through the bush..." In 1999, 452,330 marijuana plants were removed from national forest land, mostly in California and Kentucky. With each plant estimated to produce at least 2.2 pounds of pot, that's 995,126 pounds of marijuana, with an estimated street value of about $700 million. By comparison, the U.S. Customs Service seized 989,369 pounds of marijuana along the Southwest border in fiscal year 1999, while the Border Patrol confiscated just under 1.2 million pounds. The difference: Customs has 2,900 inspectors and agents manning Southwest ports of entry; the Border Patrol has 7,761 agents patrolling between those ports. There are just 588 Forest Service agents and officers assigned to 192 million acres of national forests, a decline from 625 officers in 1996. That's nearly 330,000 acres per officer, and only one of them is dedicated full time to drug enforcement. "We don't know how much is growing out there," Bauer said. "There are places where we're probably getting less than 10 percent. I doubt we're getting much over 50 percent in most of our areas." Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug in the United States, with about 11 million users, including 8.3 percent of teens, according to government statistics. One nationwide program is dedicated to the problem of U.S.-produced marijuana -- the Drug Enforcement Administration's Domestic Cannabis Eradication and Suppression Program. It receives 1 percent of the agency's $1.4 billion budget. In 1998 the DEA reported seizing 2.5 million U.S.-produced marijuana plants, including 232,000 indoor plants. However, those seizures were done in coordination with state and local agencies; the DEA doesn't track seizures done by public land agencies. "Issues dealing with cocaine and heroin and drugs that people are dying from tend to have a higher priority as far as enforcement goes," DEA spokesman Terry Parham said. Public lands have long been targeted by marijuana producers, but investigators trace a rise in production to the 1980s, when the government enacted more stringent asset forfeiture laws. Before that, "if you were caught growing pot on your own property, you wouldn't lose your property," Bauer said. "People could grow corn rows of marijuana literally in corn fields." In the late '80s and early '90s, the profile of a typical grower was a "white, hippie-type" running 100- to 1,000-plant farms, agents said. These days the mom-and-pop operations are far outnumbered by major pot plantations, ranging in size from 1,000 to 10,000 plants or more. In the Southeast, old moonshining families now run marijuana farms. But that's only part of the problem in places like Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest, which consistently ranks first among national forests in marijuana seizures. "It's a large unorganized coalition of people that live very close to national forest lands who are generally very close to the poverty level and looking for any way to try to make a dollar," said Jack Gregory, special agent in charge of the Forest Service's Southern region. In the Southwest, Bauer said, most pot operations are run by Mexican drug organizations that either ship crews across the border or hire illegal immigrants to do the work. "Just the cost of doing business up here makes it great," said Mike Wirz, a narcotics detective with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department who works with the Forest Service to investigate marijuana groves on federal property. "They don't pay for the land, they don't pay for the water and they pay very little for their overhead because they're using illegal workers." Wirz also noted that by growing their product in the United States, Mexican cartels eliminate the extra cost and risk of paying a courier to bring drugs into the country. Six months after they located the 23,000-plant pot farm in the San Bernardino Forest, Wirz and Forest Service agent Denese Stokes returned to the site. They flew in to the same helicopter pad, hiked down the same path their agents had carved into the land. The marijuana was long gone, but the destruction remained. Dried pot stalks, unusable on the market, dotted the three main growing plots and numerous smaller plots linked by an intricate network of trails. Where vegetation native to these lands remained, figures of women and Spanish phrases were carved into the trees, many of which are considered endangered. At the four cooking and living camps on the perimeter of the grove, trash the agents missed while cleaning up the site still littered the earth: a tube of Colgate, a jar of Folgers, underwear, a propane tank. Wirz pointed out a hole dug into the ground that had been filled with trash and human waste. "People are of the opinion, `Well, they're just growing a plant out there; what's the big deal?' The environmental damage that it does is horrific," Stokes said. Those who tend the gardens often poison animals to keep them away from their groves. Other species are killed from pesticides that seep into creeks, which feed into some municipal watersheds. In all, a record 53,394 marijuana plants were found on 19 sites in the San Bernardino Forest last year, Stokes said. The 23,000-plant grove was the largest; Stokes estimates it was 3 years old but had gone undetected until that day last August. She also believes as many as eight people operated the farm, though none was arrested. They escaped amid the maze of trails they had cut into the forest. "They'll be back again somewhere," Stokes said. "They won't stop; there's too much money in it." EDITOR'S NOTE -- Pauline Arrillaga is the AP's Southwest regional writer, based in Phoenix. Please send any questions orcomments to: newsflash nj.comPublished: 02/26/00 12:18 PM EasternSan Bernardino National Forest, Calif. (AP)Copyright Associated Press. CannabisNews Articles on Pot Growing & Cannabis:http://www.alltheweb.com/cgi-bin/asearch?type=all&query=cannabisnews+cannabishttp://www.alltheweb.com/cgi-bin/asearch?type=all&query=cannabisnews+Pot+Growing
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Comment #7 posted by kaptinemo on February 27, 2000 at 20:42:23 PT
Point taken, Congressman
Unfortunately, the sour old neo-puritanical farts who run things in this country have their more Net-savvy minions read this and other sites, and in their fervent desire to disallow *anyone* any fun, have probably already drawn up their plans. *So buy some seeds now!*
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Comment #6 posted by CongressmanSuet on February 27, 2000 at 19:20:29 PT
Meeting of the "Minds"...
   Hey, with Fox from Ohio, Kap from MD. and me from West"MY GOD"Virginia, I believe we have the makings of a "Hemp Hands Across America" thing going here...anyone from Indiana and Pennsylvania care to add to our numbers.....but I do have a request, please, PLEASE dont use the word "Salvia" ever again in a post. We dont want it to become the next GHB or Ketamine, now do we?
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Comment #5 posted by Dankhank on February 26, 2000 at 19:48:38 PT:
vote dammit!
Good point .......Talk it up to all ...Register to Vote ...Then vote ... dammit !Peace and love to all
Hemp n Stuff
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Comment #4 posted by FoM on February 26, 2000 at 15:13:45 PT
Thanks greenfox
Thanks green fox for the kind words. I have been coming to Cannabis.com for a couple of years now and I like it here. FoM stands for Freedom of Mind but it also stands for something else that I best not post! LOL! We do have good caring people here and I really am glad. I dislike fighting but I love to discuss issues. We might all meet someday and and that would be nice! I have a couple very dear friends from out of State that I met on line and we just had a nice weekend visit last weekend. The Internet is such a wonderful gizmo!Peace, FoM!
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Comment #3 posted by greenfox on February 26, 2000 at 14:42:06 PT
HATS off to FoM
FoM: MY two cents.. >:)First of all, I think you are right. It's kind of sad (sickening?) that people all over the world abuse their environment on a DAILY basis... (and the government is not exempt from this one..) and then, the next thing you hear, it sounds as if they're from green peace. Whatever. I care for my environment. I only grow MY "tomato" plants in PURE ORGANIC soil, so uncle sam, eat your freekin' heart out! The other thing I wanted to say was this:FoM (what does that stand for ANYWAY?) ;) I think you are doing a great job w/ this board. I feel comfortable and at home here, even though I don't know ANY of you from my little haven up here in cleveland, oh. Just the same, insights from folks like Kaptinemo and Military Sue (to name a few, the rest of you are't forgotton!) keep MY inspiration alive. If it weren't for people like yourselves, I would have given up hope long ago. This place (can.news.com) is a haven for our minds and spirits. Here we are raceless and faceless, yet the message is the same. It's important to me and to others that people remain spoken, and not just closed-door stoners. People afraid to come out of the closset are afraid of freedom itself. Durring the rev. war (US vs. GB) It was said that 1/3 of the people were FOR the Brits, 1/3 against, and 1/3 just didn't care. (i'm not a commie so don't take this as such, but..) if that 1/3 of apathetic souls got up and, say, joined the "torries", then we might be living under the queen's rule today. ;) The point? We cannot win this thing if we stay silent. Vote, damnit! Get up, talk to friends... smoke that bong ONLY after a good day's worth of activism is completed. How much longer can we stay enslaved by the "devil weed laws"? This isn't about pot, folks.. it's about freedom itself. It's about the ability to decide what one can put in one's own body. It's about OWNING property and not loosing it for growing a plant. It's about lighting up a ciggerette or smoking a joint with the same sense of sin and pleasure- OUR OWN. It's about indica, sativa, and even roses. After all, if cannabis became illegal, how much longer before Salvia Divinorum (Sage plant w/ psychoactive prop's) joins it? Then after that, the tobacco plant.. soon after, the morning glory plant.. (cotains lsd's natural cousin).. soon after, the rose. That's right. Pretty soon we will be looking at "uncontrolled substances" which may/may not out number the "controlled substances". The point? Who the HELL is the government to "control" anything short of uranium? Geez... ;)BUT!!!! Hats off, FOM! Keep up the fight, and remember.. even though I can't see, hear, or speak to you.. I love you.. and all my brothers and sisters here all the same. So when you sit down tonight to spark that bong up, do a hit in my honour. It will make me happy to know that somewhere, somehow, someone heard my point. Peace all, off to hit the hookah! ;)-G.F.
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Comment #2 posted by FoM on February 26, 2000 at 13:53:44 PT
My 2 cents
I really don't think the destruction of the land should be even an issue with what our government does to land in Colombia. They don't know how to make their point anymore. They are scrambling to make it a demon weed again but it's too late. People know it doesn't hurt anyone and if it does not anything like legal tobacco and alcohol does. 
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Comment #1 posted by greenfox on February 26, 2000 at 13:27:59 PT
the point is in black and white
No need to read between the lines, folks. The drug war message is right in front of your eyes. See:"They'll be back again somewhere," Stokes said. "They won't stop; there's too much money in it." Now, taking this comment into consideration, is it right that we continue to persecute marijuana growers? If it were legal, then things like this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't HAVE to worry about loosing their homes, thus growing on public land. It's all f*#ked up, if you ask me....
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