1,500 pounds of illegal marijuana plants before being destroyed/NPS
Editor's note: The following is an unedited release from the National Park Service.
Nearly 3,000 illegal marijuana plants were eradicated from Sequoia National Park in California last month. Law enforcement officers discovered a cultivation site in the Yucca Creek drainage west, which is in a designated wilderness area of Sequoia National Park, west of Generals Highway.
The 2,986 plants were removed on September 14 and had an estimated street value of $7.5 million. No arrests have been made and an investigation is ongoing.
“Illegal marijuana grows like this can wreak havoc on the environment,” explained Ned Kelleher, chief ranger for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. “Trash is left everywhere and herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals accumulate in the watershed. The cultivators poach native wildlife, clear-cut acres of forest, and create unauthorized trails.”
Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks this year have seen a five-fold increase in illegal marijuana cultivation over the last five years. So far this year, 21,000 plants with an estimated value of $52 million have been eradicated. And since the early 2000s, when the trend of large scale cultivation operations first began in the parks, approximately 270,000 plants have been eradicated with an estimated street value of $911 million.
Large marijuana cultivation sites can have major impacts on the Central Valley. A single marijuana plant uses six to eight gallons of water a day, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. That deprives water that would otherwise serve communities downstream with drinking water and provides for irrigation of crops. Because a large number of pesticides are used in growing marijuana, the water that does run off from large cultivation sites can be tainted.
The September 2016 operation was completed with the assistance of the California Army National Guard’s Counterdrug Task Force and the United States Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of California.
Comments
I've read a number of articles like this and am curious. Often there is no mention of any arrests only pulling up and destroying the plants. Do they not also arrest the growers and if not why? Is it lack of resources, too dangerous or do these articles just not mention the arrests?
Granted, the so-called War on Drugs has been a failure, as the history of Prohibition indeed forewarned us it would be. It's just that, from where I sit, I see that always used as an excuse. Wild places makes the critical observation that there are not enough arrests. At least keep the cartels off the public lands, right? But no, what began 50 years ago was allowed to spread.
Before the cartels there was my girlfriend's brother-in-law selling pot to Berkeley students. The cartels soon got the idea that the public lands would not be protected from them, either. Why has the spread been so precipitous? Again, think hard on that word "recreational." No word is meant more to deceive us into looking the other way.
Here in Washington State, where pot is legal, the bureaucrats care only about the taxes it will bring. They ask us to pooh-pooh the so-called notion that pot leads eventually to harder drugs. Or national forests invaded by cartels. It's all Mom and Pop to them, nor can we say anything against the good people of Mexico. To liberal Washingtonians, what you call a cartel is just making a living, and what is so wrong with that?
As Sir Walter Scott reminded us, "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." The deception here, that pot has no consequences, forever haunts our ability to protect the public. So yes, now that we have deceived ourselves, drugs are overflowing the country. Just put the blame where it belongs--first on the deception itself, and then on the cartels.
Alfred, I doubt the cartels are growing in the Washington National Forests. The legalization has taken out the profitability. But contrary to the predictions the cartels would be eliminated with legalization, they just moved on to more powerful drugs such as meth. Just like Capone didn't go away when Prohibition ended, he just went on to gambling and prostitution. Quite predictable but not what people want to hear. Kind of like the failure of Obamacare.
Lat year I visited a pot dispensary in Denver, not to buy some, but out of curiosity. The young lady showed me some glass jars and gave me the prices. I don't remember the exact cost but it was high and she told me she went through two a day. How she afforded it I cannot imagine and won't speculate as Donald Trump would do. My concern is that the price of legal marijuana is high enough that it will still pay the cartels to grow it illegally on public lands.
I support the legalization of most drugs but am really tired of all the hype over it, but being an ex-smoker have no interest in acquiring another addictive habit. Regarding marijuana in my thousands of mile s of travel in arctic Canada the consensus of medical staf and RCMP was that marijuana resulted in less murder than alcohol.
And from everything I've read the governmental revenues in Colorado have done quite a wonder in paying for schools and other social needs. I never heard much about "make the cartels go away", but I don't live there.
This isn't the place to debate your partisan opinion about the Affordable Care Act. All I know is that I have many friends who previously had no insurance and who now have what has been, in some cases, truly lifesaving insurance benefits. When lives are saved, I say screw the partisan naysayers.
Yeah, $129 million on a state budget of $25 billion. Real boom - not counting the costs. Not that I have any issue with legalization. I just wish it were nation wide at the federal level. Then we wouldn't have all the deadbeat moving to Colorado.
Yes more people have insurance but with deductibles and co pays rising the overwhelming majority have less coverage at a higher price. Meanwhile the whole system is collapsing.
For Siglin
http://www.westword.com/news/why-marijuana-prices-at-colorado-dispensari...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/losing-marijuana-busin...
My friend Richard Schrock, who is running for Washington State Insurance Commissioner, can tell you all about the Affordable Health Care Act. The problem is: He is running as a Republican, and every liberal newspaper just doesn't want to hear it. In 2017, Baby bar the door. Richard points out that those so-called affordable premiums will jump an average of 67 percent. Many companies are just dropping out. Like any Ponzi Scheme, it worked at first. Now there are too many sick people and too few healthy people (and too few middle-class taxpayers) to keep the experiment afloat.
But yes, we were talking about marijuana. Again, that is what the politicians always say. Look at the schools we are building! I recall when the same argument was used establishing the Washington State Lottery. Now? Those poor people lining up every week to buy tickets are the ones "investing" in our schools the most.
We kids ourselves that "something for nothing" gets us anywhere, but yes, Americans relish being fooled. It's so much easier than having to think about the consequences of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Okay, say we could rob Warren Buffett first--and only the Warren Buffetts. It wouldn't support the country for more than a couple months.
Everything we hold dear was built by the middle class. And now we are being told we are "selfish" for having worked so hard. We are told to look the other way about everything and see only the good that comes from being generous. Gosh, if we legalize marijuana, too, just think of the schools we can build!
In reality, all of those new tax dollars are going to expand the bureaucracy that keeps insisting we are selfish rubes. And because of those taxes, exactly right--illegal marijuana remains far cheaper, and none of those cartels is about to go away.
If I were president, I would send in the National Guard and remove every grow from the public lands. But that's an old Theodore Roosevelt New Yorker talking. Today, we prefer only talk and never action.
Enforcement? Another bureaucracy that never wants to solve the problem. They get paid chasing it around. Like the police we never see anymore in Seattle, now too busy pulling the gangs apart. A traffic stop? You can't be serious! We have much more important things to do!
Then do them, but just don't tell this citizen that looking the other way ever works. Now, where was that lottery ticket I bought last night? At 267 million to one odds, this poor sucker just might have won!