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Weed-whacking time
EDITORIAL | San Francisco Chronicle | September 3, 2006

IT'S LATE SUMMER, and the hills are alive with the sound of helicopters.

Pulling up illegal marijuana patches is going full bore in California's wrinkled landscape of steep hills and hidden valleys. The next few weeks are harvest time for the multibillion-dollar cannabis crop.

On one side is stepped up law enforcement, which last year yanked a record 1.1 million plants, twice the number of the prior year. Teams hike up mountain trails and shinny down dangling ropes from hovering choppers to haul off marijuana plants.

On the other side, the game is changing, too. Weed patches are bigger than ever, such as a 20,000 plant garden recently discovered near Bolinas. Prime-growing areas have fanned out from the storied Emerald Triangle zone along the state's North Coast to prime seizure spots in Shasta, Tulare and Fresno counties in the state's interior.

A more significant factor is changing the cannabis trade. Growing is no longer done by back-country small-timers who gave the trade a Willie Nelson-outlaw luster.

Now, it's dominated by organized crime rings based in Mexico, who smuggle in farmworkers to tend the crops and post armed sentries. The weed trade doesn't just produce a recreational drug or medical marijuana, law enforcement notes. Profits pay into a second business: The manufacturing of addictive and lethal methamphetamine, or speed. These are genuine dangers.

The hide-and-seek game between dope growers and the law won't end soon. State Attorney General Bill Lockyer, whose office oversees the annual marijuana sweeps, says seizures last year were worth $4.5 billion. With this much at stake, it's a business unlikely to disappear.

But the public may also question whether an unwinnable eradication effort is worth it. Isn't there a way, for example, to grow voter-endorsed medical marijuana without promoting outlaw operations?

The country may not be ready to legalize marijuana on a wide scale, but there should be a way to undercut a troubling trade that mocks the law and thrives beyond the reach of helicopters.

 

dredpiratrobert

How sad is it when a beneficial madicine plant will be exploited by illegal immigrants and cartel in order to make MORE PEOPLE SICK?

Gov. Shwartzneggar (spelling?) called for a WALL and congress responds by building a FENCE. A fucking fence. It had holes in it before they even finshed installing the thing... that's over a million bucks in the toilet. Plus, every dollar you spend on "commercial" pot grown by these cartel is going in the toilet too! OR WORSE! It funds sales, manufacture and distribution of meth, heroin, and cocaine which can effectively eradicate normally healthy people from their homes and businesses.

wise up! Cartel = Mexican Nazis

reggie_the_dog

In countries where the penalty is not too great the cannabis growing is done by the friendly "willie nelson" types, look at Canada, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, in the USA these folks were taken out of the game because so much jail time is risked for 25 or 50 pants (10 or 20 pounds worth in Illinois) that folks may as well grow 25,000 plants, but this requires organization, armed guards, etc. Also this requires people who really have the attitude that they will get into a shootout with police, which was not likely the case with the smaller hippie growers.

This has nothing to do with a fence or a wall, plenty of members of Mexican, or Honduran gangs in the United States have either a green card or are natural born Americans.

Tokamak

Mexican cartels are running most California pot grows? I don't think so. When confronted with an article like this, you have to ask yourself where the reporter is getting his information. In this case, it's obviously from the DEA and law enforcement. What better way to rile up more and more people in favor the Drug War than by linking marijuana production to "organized crime rings based in Mexico" who "smuggle in farmworkers to tend the crops and post armed sentries," then procede to link the cultivation with the media's favorite drug scourge, methamphetamine. It all sounds like manufactured hype to me.

Being a resident of Tulare county, I've known quite a few pot growers. All of them were American citizens trying to make a little (ok... a LOT of) disposable income while providing a product that was in high demand. Not only were none of them involved in gangs or cartels, none of them were even of Mexican descent! When I read something like this blatantly contradicting my own personal experience, I can't help but question it. The sources bringing us these "facts" have had no problem lying in the past to suit their own ends, so why should it be any different now?

Peace.

__________________
"He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know."
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching