3-31-2017 Law enforcement officials think many trespass grows are set up by Mexican drug cartels, which prefer to ship marijuana from state to state rather than smuggle it over the international border. Growers arrested during raids are often undocumented immigrants in their 20s from Michoacan, experienced in covert agriculture and hard living. They earn around $150 a day for two-to-four months, much more than they would at a farm or winery.
Captured growers sometimes claim their employers are holding their families hostage until the harvest is collected. Whether or not that’s true, they’re motivated to protect the crop. Hendrickson estimates between a quarter and half of raids turn up some kind of weapon, from crossbows to automatic rifles. He has found elevated sniper positions set up near grow sites.
Growers have followed, detained, threatened, pursued, and shot at officers and civilians, including scientists and field techs. …
As the last of the plants at Palmetto are cut down, Gabriel totals up his findings: 3.6 kilograms (8 pounds) of bromodialone, a restricted-use neurotoxic rodenticide, and two bottles of malathion, an organophosphate insecticide that’s basically a watered-down version of the nerve agent sarin. Each bottle is enough to make 1,900 liters (500 gallons) when mixed with water. All of it has to be left behind, at least for now, since moving it would require hazmat protocols and more time and money than anyone has at the moment….
“I have to talk about risk in job interviews now when I hire people,” Thompson says. “It used to be the risks were bears, snakes, driving mountain roads. Now it’s pot gardens.” It’s enough to scare away applicants, he says….
Pesticides are showing up on both leaves and buds at trespass grows, Gabriel says, and they appear at detectable levels when the plant is smoked. If any of this harvest makes its way to a medical dispensary, it could end up in the lungs of people who are already immuno-compromised from AIDS or cancer. There hasn’t been any formal research in California yet, but studies and investigations in Colorado and Oregon have found pesticides on marijuana in legal dispensaries, including in products that were supposedly certified pesticide-free. Last year, the Emerald Cup, a major cannabis competition in Sonoma County that focuses on organic growing, started testing entries for pesticides. About a quarter of the concentrates and more than 5 percent of flowers were disqualified….
When Gabriel was doing owl surveys here ten years ago, the trickling springs fed a thriving wetland of willows and alders. To give the pot plants a reliable, controllable source of water, the growers dug out the springs into pools the size of hot tubs, covered with sticks and tarps to hide them from the air. As a result, the wetland is virtually gone….
Gabriel has estimated that trespass-grows use 50 percent more water because of less efficient irrigation systems and added stressors like pests, pathogens, and drier weather at higher elevations. Worse, some trespass growers leave their irrigation systems running around the clock throughout the year, even when nothing is growing. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of plants and you have a serious water problem. One study by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife estimated that trespass marijuana grows used about 300 million gallons of water per square mile, roughly the same as almond orchards….
Out of the roughly 80 grow sites Gabriel and his team have investigated since 2014, they have been able to remediate just 29 so far. “We’d like to get that to a hundred percent, but there’s just no money for it,” he says….
Last September, the IERC team surveyed two grow complexes in Lassen National Forest. Together they covered 2.6 square kilometers (one square mile), the largest site the team has ever seen. There were 30 camps in all, each with its own cache of rodenticide, and more than 65 kilometers (40 miles) of irrigation tubing that sucked up 269,000 liters (71,000 gallons) of spring water a day….
The legal-growing boom is making Humboldt County a crazy place: Real estate is through the roof, and the murder rate just hit an all-time high. Gabriel’s mother is from Michoacan, and a lot of what he’s seeing in California is starting to sound like the stories he hears from south of the border. “I worry about raising a family here,” he says. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/backcountry-drug-war/521352/
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3-15-18 Over the past 10 months, about 850 people have applied for permission to grow cannabis in Mendocino County. Only 100 have so far been approved — 0.01 percent of the estimated 10,000 growers in the county. Legal or not, they are nevertheless central to the region’s economy. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8086691-181/hundreds-of-mendocino-county-cannabis
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10-31-17 Current California law caps the size of outdoor cannabis production to 1 acre per parcel, to prohibit the development of industrial-scale cannabis operations outdoors. An unintended consequence of this law may be small dispersed cannabis grows that edge out wildlife….long-term effects of cannabis cultivation on the environment are unknown https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171031202705.htm
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Arcata, Humboldt Co., 8-30-16 Aerial images of clear-cut plots within the coastal forest, bounded by dusty roads and dotted with trucks, show the intrusion of industrial marijuana cultivation into redwood groves and hillsides. Some plots are small, barely detectable. Others cover hundreds of acres with row upon row of oblong structures covered with white tarps, blighting the landscape like giant predatory maggots….
The Compassionate Use Act of 1996, passed by voters as Proposition 215, legalized marijuana for medical use, opening a whole new market for weed. Growing operations multiplied on public and private land in California, particularly in the forested reaches of Mendocino, Trinity and Humboldt counties, a region so full of cannabis crops it’s known as the “Emerald Triangle.”…
Growers poison wildlife with rodenticide, hire armed guards to shoot bear and deer, run noisy and polluting diesel generators to light their indoor grows. Weekly trips by 40-ton water trucks tear up old timber roads built for only a few trips a year. Cannabis plants use massive amounts of water, which comes from rivers and creeks already suffering from intermittent drought (despite a relatively wet winter, the U.S. Drought Monitor currently ranks all of Humboldt County “abnormally dry.”) In a 2015 study, Scott Bauer of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife estimated that marijuana cultivation draws down nearly a quarter of river flows in some watersheds, with “lethal or sub-lethal effects” on federally endangered salmon….Marijuana cultivation took off in Northern California’s remote wildlands because, as the drug war set in, its forests offered excellent cover….
Silvaggio of Humboldt State U. insists that there’s nothing inherently destructive about growing pot, and rejects some of the “racially coded and anti-immigrant rhetoric about ‘cartels’ and Bulgarians” used to disparage people from other countries who have come to California in large numbers to grow pot. (“It’s just because they also grow weed in Bulgaria,” he says. “They grow really good weed in Bulgaria.”) https://www.alternet.org/environment/marijuana-growing-and-environment
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with each plant selling for $500 to $1,000 apiece—last year, according to some estimates, Humboldt County’s marijuana crops alone brought in $415 million.
“If somebody is looking to make a substantial monetary gain, illegally, without paying for water or land, it’s pretty much free game,” Gabriel says. “These drug trafficking organizations capitalize on that, because it’s very difficult to patrol all the back wood areas of our national forest lands or national park lands.”
The camps and crops are often protected by armed drug traffickers; safety is a very real concern for scientists. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/uc_breakthroughs_2014/2014/04/green_but_not_green_how_pot_farms_trash_the_environment.html
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10-13-17 Ten years ago, the Moonlight Fire destroyed 65,000 acres of forest in the Plumas. The marijuana growers stole into the broad footprint left by the blaze in dozens of places. In the section we’re hiking, they cut trails and cleared a series of plots on a steep slope above a ravine. Then the trespassers dug out three springs and diverted their flow into half-inch black plastic piping, which they threaded through the cover of vegetation to their network of plots below. The waterlines emptied into tarp-sealed pits that could store hundreds of gallons of water. Having started thousands of marijuana seedlings in plastic cups, the growers planted them among the shrubs throughout the plots. Each bright green plant was irrigated via drip lines, some triggered by a battery-powered timer. Although the mountainside faced north and east, light was no problem. Where it used to be blocked by trees, the strong California sun now slathered the crop.
Gabriel was with the rangers and deputies when they busted the site in 2015 and uprooted more than 16,000 plants. Judging by bags left around the site back then, he suspects at least 4,000 pounds of potent fertilizer were used. He also recorded several empty containers of a concentrated organophosphate insecticide — a lethal nerve poison that’s toxic to wildlife. http://discovermagazine.com/2017/sept/high-consequences
plastic irrigation piping
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