The headline in the Wednesday USA Today was “Drug agents can’t keep up with pot growers” and it examines the work done by CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting), a law enforcement agency in California charged with eradicating outdoor marijuana grow operations.
In the 2005 growing season, CAMP says it so far has destroyed more plants than ever — 1.1 million worth $4.5 billion on the street, up from 621,000 plants last year. But agents still lost ground to growers. No longer is marijuana cultivation the cottage industry that flourished in the 1960s and ’70s after waves of counterculture migrants bought cheap land in the northern California mountains and grew pot for their own use and extra income.
The article lays the blame on “Mexican drug cartels” using sophisticated growing techniques and methods of avoiding detection. Because of tight US border security, the article claims, the Mexicans made a business decision to move up north.
But despite the best efforts of CAMP, they are learning that Prohibition always fails. You cannot eliminate a supply if there is a demand. Many people like to smoke marijuana, always have, always will. As long as they demand the plant, someone will step in to grow it for them.
So, what are the consequences of allowing the criminal element to run clandestine outdoor grow operations in the great wilderness of California? Well, there’s violence…
Today’s high potency weed [drug war myth alert!] is so valuable — $5,000 or more for a pound of buds on the East Coast — that big operators employ armed guards who camp in pot gardens for months, nurturing plants that grow to 15 feet and taller. A state Fish and Game officer was wounded and a suspect shot and killed in a Santa Clara County bust in June, the fourth incident in two years.
Fishermen and hikers stumble onto armed men in the woods who threaten them and demand that they leave. Pot-growing has become epidemic both on privately owned timber tracts and public lands in California, including national forests and parks.
…and there’s environemntal harm…
Growers scar the landscape by crudely terracing hillsides that erode under winter rain. They spill pesticides, fertilizer and diesel fuel used to power generators that run extensive drip-irrigation systems. They dam creeks for water sources, plant salsa gardens, disfigure trees and leave behind tons of garbage, human waste and litter.
“They’ll pour fertilizer right into a stream, then irrigate out of it,” says Alexandra Picavet, a Sequoia National Park ranger. “That creates algae blooms, hurts fish and animals and contaminates downstream.”
…and it’s expensive, both in money and man-hours…
Roger Rodoni is a cattle rancher and registered Republican who has represented a conservative district in Humboldt County — conservative by local standards, anyway — on the board of supervisors since 1997. He calls CAMP “an exercise in futility.”
“It’s a vast expenditure of public funds that for all practical purposes does no good,” Rodoni, 65, says. Demand for marijuana keeps growing, and CAMP has done little to stem the supply, he says. As evidence he points to a drop in the price of “the quality stuff'” from $6,000 a pound a few years ago to $3,000 today.
…and basically doesn’t make a dent in the clandestine grow operations…
Since 2001, officers have destroyed 105 pot gardens covering 181 acres in the park but have had enough money to clean up fewer than half the sites. “We think that for every one we’ve been able to eradicate, there’s another one out there,” Picavet says.
Leave it to one of our own to inject some desperately needed sense into the article:
“Look at the amount of economic value we’re destroying,” says Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “This could be legally taxed and regulated and we could all be making money off it. We never saw this lawlessness until there were drug laws and CAMP.” NORML estimates that Californians’ pot consumption could yield at least $250 million a year in sales taxes.
Gieringer also says that, despite the government’s assertion, there is no evidence that Mexican cartels are involved in the cultivation.
A June report for Taxpayers for Common Sense by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron found that despite billions of dollars spent on marijuana suppression — nearly $4 billion by the federal government in 2004 alone — usage is about the same as 30 years ago.
Which reminds me of a quote from the late actor Michael Landon:
“If drugs were legalized tomorrow, my kids wouldn’t take drugs. People who take drugs take drugs. So to spend billions a year trying to find out where somebody’s growing a marijuana plant I think is ridiculous.” — Michael Landon
And he’s right: people who take drugs take drugs. 15 million Americans smoke marijuana regularly (at least once a month) and some 30 million smoke at least once a year. 90 million Americans — like George W. Bush, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, John Kerry, John Edwards, and others — have admitted to smoking marijuana at least once in their lives. Nothing we have done in almost seventy years of marijuana prohibition and thirty years the “war on drugs” has diminished the American appetite for marijuana.
The question is, then, if this demand isn’t going away, how best should we control the supply? Should we force suppliers into the criminal underground, where violence is the only method of protecting assets and solving disputes? Should we artificially maintain the $3,000/lb. price on a weed that funds so many criminal activities? Should suppliers be free from any government regulation for safety, potency, quality, buyer identification, selling practices, and environmental controls?
For that is the system we have in place now. A system where anyone who wants marijuana, including school kids, can easily get it. (Marijuana dealers don’t ask for ID.) A system where the profit potential far outweighs the legal risks. A system where violence trumps the rule of law. A system whereby its black market status makes this relatively benign plant an alluring entrepreneurial prospect for someone shut out of legitimate business avenues. A system where our alarmist propaganda fools nobody and subverts any trust the youth might have in meaningful and honest drug education. A system where this recreational drug, milder than alcohol and healthier than tobacco, isn’t just “something adult” and unappealing to youth, like Cognac or cigars, but instead a “killer demon weed!”, the use of which is a seductive act of rebellion.
The article closes with the cherished drug war myth of “this ain’t your daddy’s 1960’s pot; this is superpot!”
And each of those plants carries a lot more kick today. No more of the baggies with stems and seeds that baby boomers remember from their college days. Growers learned to “sex” the plants — cull the males early in the season to deny the females pollination and prevent buds from going to seed.
In a futile effort to attract pollen, the female plants produce more and more THC, the active ingredient and the source of marijuana’s “high.” The plant’s buds get fatter and fatter. By September, they’re sticky with THC and ready to harvest. “Back in the ’60s and ’70s the stuff imported from Mexico, there wasn’t much bud to it,” Noe says. “If it was good quality maybe the THC was 5%.”
Tests nowadays find THC content as high as 21%, he says.
Yes, bricks of Mexican dirtweed from the ’60s and ’70s was a lot of stems and seeds… and still are today. Dirtweed is dirtweed, always has been, always will be. But this notion that growers are only just now learning how to sex their plants is ridiculous. Any first year botany student or half-ass decent pot grower knows how to produce THC-laden sticky buds. They were doing so even back in the ’60s and ’70s, growing that “Acapulco Gold” and “Maui Wowie” even back in the day.
The bags of “beans and lumber” (seeds and stems) smoked by the baby boom college students was done so due to factors of finances than availability. Dirtweed is cheap, buds are expensive, but both were readily available to the Summer of Love generation.
Furthermore, the article warns against 21% THC buds (a dubious claim, most buds are about 14%-15%) as if they are a bad thing. THC is not like alcohol. It has no toxicity. You could be concerned if someone wanted to raise beer’s average alcohol content from 3.2% to, say, 8%, because then drinking the same four beers is going to have a much more harmful effect if you drink the strong stuff.
But with marijuana, more THC just means you get high sooner by smoking less. The onset of the high from smoking pot is near instantaneous. Pot smokers smoke to get high. Once they are high, they stop, whether that takes a bag of dirtweed or one bowl of bud. In fact, you could argue that higher THC content is better for the user, since he will smoke less of the plant to get high, meaning less smoke and carcinogens and tars in the lungs.
Imagine all of those police resources being turned from eradicating nature and toward eradicating dangerous home meth labs.
