Campaign Seizes Record Number of Pot Plants

A statewide campaign to eradicate marijuana plantations seized a record number of plants this year, as Mexican drug cartels have increasingly taken over cultivation in California and created larger and more sophisticated farms, officials announced Wednesday.

At a news conference at the Angeles National Forest headquarters in Arcadia, state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said the eradication effort--known as CAMP, for Campaign Against Marijuana Planting--pulled out 241,164 plants between late July and October. The seized plants had a value of $965 million, an 80% increase over last year and 40% more than the previous record year, 1985.

Lockyer said that many of the biggest seizures were in Central and Southern California, a shift from the traditional Eden of pot growing on the North Coast.

One farm discovered in San Benito, southeast of Salinas, in September contained 48,000 plants, the largest officials can recall. An 11,000-plant crop was taken out of the mountains near Santa Barbara, and 8,000 plants were removed from eastern Orange County.

“It used to be the largest seized was 1,000 plants,” Lockyer said. “Now, we’re finding numerous plantations that exceed 8,000 plants.”

Besides plants destroyed in the CAMP effort, authorities recently eradicated a 23,000-plant garden in the San Bernardino Mountains, and 6,000 high-quality sinsemilla plants in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Narcotics agents say the Mexican cartels are finding it easier to grow the marijuana in California than to smuggle it across the border. The growers use public lands that are remote and rugged. More than two-thirds of the pot seized this year was being grown on public lands.

This trend is creating a growing problem for the U.S. Forest Service, which must deal with eradication while its budget is dwindling.

There are two potentially large plantations being cultivated in the Angeles National Forest, Special Agent Rita Wears said. But the agency does not have enough money to do surveillance, make arrests and remove the plants.

“There are some we’re just going to walk away from because we don’t want to pay people overtime,” she said.

Last month, the Forest Service worked with CAMP officials to remove more than 3,200 plants from a remote section of the San Gabriel Mountains, and Wears said she hopes to collaborate with CAMP more in the future to supplement the limited eradication effort.

The main goal for forestry officers is to combat the ecological damage to the watershed caused by the plantations. Workers who tend the crops use pesticides, set up elaborate camps and irrigation systems, and hack away native plants.

They pose a further risk to public safety, officials say, because many marijuana growers are armed with semiautomatic weapons and set up booby-traps to guard their plantings. Officials said this year there were no violent or armed encounters.

The CAMP program, run by the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, began 17 years ago targeting the so-called Emerald Triangle in Northern California during harvest season, when the plants are most visible. Now, it brings together officials from 70 local, state and federal agencies and is conducting an increasing number of raids to the south, officials said.

The campaign’s total numbers are only a part of what is seized statewide every year. Last year, while CAMP took about 135,960 plants, more than 400,000 were seized in California, officials said.