🚀 go-pugleaf

"DLS" <3q456@cozit.net> wrote in message
news:3f27343c.11551411@news.io.com...
> TIME/Jul. 27, 2003
>
> Busted!
> Drug dealers are planting pot farms all over our national parks, and
> the Park Service is struggling to root them out. TIME goes on a raid
>
> By MARGOT ROOSEVELT I AUBURN, CALIF.
>
> A blue-gray dawn tickles the tops of the ponderosa pines at the Sugar
> Pine Recreation Area in California's Tahoe National Forest. Campers
> slumber in lakeside tents; bikers have yet to hit the trails. But all
> is not quiet on this cool July morning. A platoon of camouflaged
> figures equipped with rifles, pistols and bulletproof vests creep
> through manzanita brush with a police dog. Their objective: a
> marijuana plantation a few hundred yards from a well-traveled tourist
> area.
>
> As the Forest Service rangers stealthily approach, an unsuspecting
> Mexican laborer named Pedro Villa Garc�a, 51, stands in a clearing.
> All around him the hillside is freshly terraced, irrigated by black
> plastic hoses and dotted with iridescent green cannabis. Villa Garc�a
> peers down the path. Is that a black bear-a common local
> species-emerging from the morning mist? Suddenly he sees the rangers
> and dashes off through the brambles. But the police dog, a Belgian
> Malinois, catches up quickly, sinking its teeth into Villa Garc�a's
> arm. Two rangers wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him. "We're
> good at jungle warfare," says Laura Mark, a Forest Service
> investigator, as she prepares to question the suspect. "We're the
> ninjas of the woods."
>
> Armed combat is hardly what families hope to encounter as they head
> for their summer vacations in America's national parks and forests.
> But drug smugglers, methamphetamine cooks and cannabis cultivators are
> invading federal lands as never before. A U.S. Park Service ranger in
> Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was gunned down by a
> Mexican pot smuggler last August. In Missouri's Mark Twain National
> Forest, 192 meth labs have been dismantled over the past three years.
> And marijuana farms are infesting Kentucky's Daniel Boone National
> Forest and Alabama's Talladega National Forest.
>
> But the most explosive conflicts-and the biggest hauls-are taking
> place in California. As enforcement tightens along U.S. borders,
> especially since 9/11, it is getting harder to transport drugs into
> America. So Mexican traffickers have turned to creating vast marijuana
> plantations Stateside, that much closer to their main customers.
> Thanks to a mild climate, rich soil and a lengthy, March-to-October
> growing season, California cultivators routinely produce 10-ft.-high
> specimens worth up to $4,000 each. Some of these California pot farms
> stretch over several hundred acres and have as many as 50,000 plants.
> Last year 420,000 pot plants with a street value of $1.5 billion were
> eradicated from the state's 18 federal forests, a tenfold increase
> from 1994.
>
> In Sequoia National Park, renowned for its majestic trees, rangers
> confiscated eight tons of marijuana in a single week last September.
> "We have a tremendous influx of Mexican growers," says Ross Butler, a
> special agent for the federal Bureau of Land Management. "They are
> sophisticated. They have guns. And we don't know much about who they
> are."
>
> Villa Garc�a is unarmed when he is caught in the Tahoe
> forest-probably, rangers say, because it is early in the season. If
> they had already matured, the 3,500 plants he was tending would have
> yielded some $8 million worth of pot-an investment worth protecting.
> In the fall, when scores of Mexican workers arrive to harvest and
> process the pot, shoot-outs occur between law-enforcement agents and
> camouflage-clad growers toting AK-47s. Sometimes the pot pirates
> mistake innocent tourists for thieves or cops. Last year kayakers on
> the Salmon River in the Klamath National Forest were held at gunpoint
> by traffickers, as were a hiker in the Sequoia National Park and
> hunters in Mendocino National Forest. Two years ago, an 8-year-old boy
> hunting deer in the Eldorado National Forest with his father was shot
> in the face by pot farmers. "If you are a hunter, a fisherman or a
> backpacker, it can be dangerous," says Michael Delaney, who oversees
> marijuana cases for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Northern
> California. "There's a safety factor for everyone who is out there."
>
> Squirming in his handcuffs, the white-bearded Villa Garc�a looks more
> like a kindly grandfather than a drug trafficker. He says he has been
> in the U.S. poquito-only a short time. A stranger came to his village
> in the Mexican state of Michoac�n and brought him across the border,
> along with four others.
>
> One of them was with him on the Tahoe farm but managed to escape. "I
> did not know what kind of work it would be," he says in Spanish,
> adding that he was paid $200 a month. Villa Garc�a was arraigned on
> narcotics-cultivation charges, pleaded not guilty, and is in prison
> awaiting trial. His is a story federal agents know well after
> arresting scores of low-level gardeners, all undocumented, most
> hailing from Michoac�n. "They don't know much, and they're told, 'You
> talk, you gonna die,'" says Mark, who has questioned 60 such workers
> in the past year. "The odds of us finding the organizers are slim."
>
> At least five Mexican drug rings are under investigation, some of them
> related to the Michoac�n-based Magana family. In June 2001, nine
> members of the Magana clan pleaded guilty in federal court to
> narcotics charges and were given prison sentences ranging from four to
> 12 years. The Maganas have been tied to 20 large gardens with more
> than 100,000 plants in the Sequoia, Sierra, Stanislaus and Mendocino
> national forests. They also supplied workers for pot farms on federal
> land in Arkansas, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington. According to
> investigators, the Maganas and other groups have used profits from
> methamphetamine operations to expand into marijuana. They own gas
> stations, haciendas and million-dollar resorts in Puerto Vallarta,
> Guadalajara, Michoac�n and other parts of Mexico. "They have
> tremendous networks involving legal businesses, money laundering and
> distribution," says Jerry Moore, the Forest Service's regional
> law-enforcement chief. "We arrest people, but new players move in."
>
> Villa Garc�a and his Tahoe pot farm were discovered a week after two
> forest rangers on patrol noticed a recently bushwhacked footpath.
> After the bust, the rangers found the usual layout and pattern of
> cultivation. "It's like they all go to the same college
> course-Marijuana 101," says Mark. As in other grows, seedlings are
> planted 6 ft. apart in rows. A forest canopy admits filtered sunlight
> but hides the seedlings from aerial surveillance. A stream is diverted
> to allow its water to flow through drip-irrigation tubes along the
> terraces. So that the workers can escape more easily, their sleeping
> area-strewn with toothbrushes and bottles of Pepto-Bismol and
> NyQuil-is hidden in the brush, apart from the kitchen and processing
> area. Propane bottles provide fuel for a two-burner stove next to bags
> of tortillas, cans of Juanita's-brand menudo (tripe), sacks of
> fertilizer and a votive card of St. Peter with the inscription "May
> your spirit intercede for sinners �" in Spanish.
>
> Rangers say that in March and April, workers are driven in vans along
> remote forest roads at dusk or dawn. They pile out onto prescouted
> paths with 100-lb. packs of supplies. Once they set up camp and begin
> planting, they are resupplied every two to three weeks. Throughout the
> summer, a skeletal crew tends the gardens, which are often divided
> into connected plots. In the fall, more workers come in to process the
> weed; one raid found 40 sleeping bags at a single site. The workers
> pick the flowering tops and hang them in nets to dry for up to a week.
> They peel off the buds, package the pot using scales and Baggies, and
> hike it out at night in duffel bags. At preset pickup points, vans
> await to transport the pot to consumers across the U.S.
>
> Beyond the safety issue, the ecological damage from large-scale farms
> in parks and forests could take years to repair. Tree cutting and
> terraced slopes are causing massive erosion. In addition, the pot
> farmers leave a mess. At the Tahoe grow, 20 rangers and sheriff's
> deputies dug up the cannabis and stuffed it into paper bags as
> evidence. But propane tanks, coils of irrigation hose and food cans
> were left behind. "We don't have the manpower to get the garbage out,"
> says Mark as she rips open plastic bags and tosses tortillas into the
> bushes.
>
> Only seven drug-enforcement agents are assigned to police California's
> 20 million acres of federal forests. Rangers estimate that they
> discover as few as a third of the pot farms growing on public
> lands-and more than half of those are left untouched for lack of
> personnel to investigate them. When forest fires demand extra bodies,
> as was the case during last year's drought, even more cannabis is left
> to harvest. "This is a huge criminal enterprise, and we have so few
> resources to fight it," says Mark. "There are more growers than we
> know about or can deal with. We pick off a couple. The rest get away."
>
>
> -----------------
> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030804-471161,00.html
>



So legalize it and then people don't have to buy from them and they can grow
their own.