Pot Plantation and Police Raids

Re “Pot Plantation Poses Big Risk for Authorities,” Aug. 31: In forests all over the state, there are sites identified almost reverentially as bootleggers’ encampments from the Prohibition era. Today we have whole cities going unprotected while the entire police force is out in the woods pulling up pot plants. All of the environmental damage, booby traps, guns and threats to rangers and innocent hikers are effects of the drug war, not justification for it.

When do we end our drug war?

ART LYON

Bellflower

*

Somebody must be asleep at the switch. Why else would the U.S. Forest Service’s budget for drug enforcement in the forests of Southern California (a paltry $340,000 allocated this year) be shrinking at a time when the problem of illegal marijuana plantations is growing?

It is galling to think of Mexican drug traffickers crossing the border to foul our rivers and streams with the pesticides and fertilizers used in the cultivation of their multimillion-dollar crops.

I am appalled that those in control of funding, whether by design or stupidity, are hindering the U.S. Forest Service.

BLANCHE B. WIMER

Rancho Palos Verdes

*

Lionel de Leon’s Aug. 28 Voices essay, in which he advocates the legalization of drugs, couldn’t have been more timely. The same edition had a story about a “narcotics raid.” According to the El Monte Police Department, even though they had “no evidence” that a house contained drugs, they raided it anyway, killing a 65-year-old man in the process. This incident is the quintessential example of how the “war on drugs” inspires a maniacal, zealot-like mind-set on the part of law enforcement in a fruitless attempt to regulate drugs by establishing a prohibition of them.

JACK B. POLLACK

Redondo Beach