WNB

Sequoia park goes to pot
Joe Robinson | Orlando Sentinel | 9/25/2005

Famed for the biggest trees in the world, Sequoia National Park is now No. 1 in another flora department: marijuana growing, with more land carved up by pot growers than in any other park.

Parts of Sequoia, including the Kaweah River drainage and areas off Mineral King Road, are no-go zones for visitors and park rangers during the April-to-October growing season, when drug lords cultivate pot on an agribusiness scale.

"It's so big that we have to focus our resources on one or two areas at a time, because otherwise it's beyond our scope," said Sequoia's lone special agent assigned to the marijuana war, who, for his own safety, can't be identified.

He and two seasonal employees face an army of growers who turn expanses of land set aside as untouched wilderness into contraband cropland.

"In a national park, everything is protected," the agent said. "You're not even supposed to take a pine cone. It's beyond what should be acceptable in today's society."

So far, park visitors and the growers rarely cross paths; the pot farms are in areas with little public appeal: remote slopes at lower, hotter elevations. However, officials report five encounters between gun-wielding growers and visitors on national-forest lands in California this year.

The growers poach wildlife, spill pesticides, divert water from streams and dump tons of trash. Yet enforcement lags. Rangers say they lack helicopters and staff, and elected officials have other priorities, including homeland security and fighting drug cartels in South and Central America.

In the past year, 100,000 marijuana plants have been removed from California national parks, including 44,000 from Sequoia. Cannabis operations are even more widespread in national forests and on Bureau of Land Management lands, where more than 500,000 plants were yanked last year. Pot busts on public lands in California have skyrocketed from an average of a couple of hundred plants per seizure a few years ago to an average of 3,500 today.

"I've had meetings with law enforcement throughout the state, and everybody just sits there with their mouths open. Nobody can believe this has happened on the scale that it has," said William Ruzzamenti, a 30-year Drug Enforcement Administration official who heads the Central Valley High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a program that spearheads drug investigations and has provided support to Sequoia and Kings Canyon.

Pot plantations have surged as Mexican-affiliated drug cartels adapt to increased border security since 9-11 and cash in on the rising price of high-grade weed, now more profitable than methamphetamine, according to investigators.

Oddly enough, public outcry has been remarkably muted.

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