Marijuana Growers Ravage U.S. Forests

They were spotted from the air, as conspicuous as sharks in a school of guppies: Three plots of land, seemingly stripped of the towering oaks and manzanita that shroud this patch of Southern California forest.

These were not natural formations. They were entirely man-made--and entirely illegal.

A week after the August sighting, a helicopter returned with two dozen Forest Service agents and sheriff’s detectives. They cleared a landing pad and cut a trail to the site, coming first to a makeshift reservoir. Six hoses, filtering water from a creek, ran in one end; several more snaked out the other.

Moving on, the agents reached the first clearing.

In place of the trees that the forest designation is meant to protect stood a grove of emerald stalks, 6 to 15 feet tall. They were in full bloom, ready for harvest.

On two acres of prime forest land, about a half-hour from the city of San Bernardino and 1 1/2 hours from Los Angeles, these agents had discovered the latest battleground in the war on drugs: a 23,000-plant marijuana plantation.

As money and manpower continue to flow to the Southwest border to stop illegal drugs coming into this country, traffickers--many employed by Mexican drug gangs--are producing vast quantities of marijuana right here in the United States, on land owned by the federal government.

The reasons are obvious: The land is fertile, remote and free. There’s no risk of forfeiture, plantations are difficult to trace, and growers have land agents outmanned, outspent and outgunned.

“We spend a lot of time and energy stopping stuff from coming into this country, but we don’t really pay much attention to our own backyard,” said Dan Bauer, the Forest Service’s drug program coordinator.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that more than half of the marijuana consumed in the United States is produced domestically. Much of that--no one knows how much for sure--is grown on public lands, primarily the country’s 155 national forests.

Pesticides used by the illegal growers poison wildlife and waterways, though the crop’s danger is not just environmental. Park visitors run the risk of tripping booby traps or encountering armed gangs. After stumbling upon marijuana farms, some visitors have been run off at gunpoint, Bauer said, adding that Forest Service agents have exchanged gunfire with growers.

The public’s perception of the drug war is a border agent pulling bundles of narcotics from the bed of a truck, Bauer said. “They very rarely think of the poor forest agent crawling through the bush.”

In 1999, 452,330 marijuana plants were removed from national forest land, mostly in California and Kentucky. With each plant estimated to produce at least 2.2 pounds of pot, that’s 995,126 pounds of marijuana, with an estimated street value of about $700 million.

By comparison, the U.S. Customs Service seized 989,369 pounds of marijuana along the Southwest border in fiscal year 1999, while the Border Patrol confiscated just under 1.2 million pounds.

The difference: Customs has 2,900 inspectors and agents manning Southwest ports of entry; the Border Patrol has 7,761 agents patrolling between those ports.

There are just 588 Forest Service agents and officers assigned to 192 million acres of national forest, a decline from 625 officers in 1996. That’s nearly 330,000 acres per officer, and only one officer works full time at drug enforcement.

“We don’t know how much is growing out there,” Bauer said. “There are places where we’re probably getting less than 10%. I doubt we’re getting much over 50% in most of our areas.”

Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug in the United States, with about 11 million users, including 8.3% of teenagers, according to government statistics.

One nationwide program is dedicated to the problem of U.S.-produced marijuana--the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication and Suppression Program. It receives 1% of the agency’s $1.4-billion budget. In 1998 the DEA reported seizing 2.5 million U.S.-produced marijuana plants, including 232,000 indoor plants. However, those seizures were done in coordination with state and local agencies; the DEA doesn’t track seizures by public land agencies.

Public lands have long been targeted by marijuana producers, but investigators trace a rise in production to the 1980s, when the government enacted more stringent asset-forfeiture laws.

Before that, “if you were caught growing pot on your own property, you wouldn’t lose your property,” Bauer said.

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the profile of a typical grower was a “white hippie-type” running 100- to 1,000-plant farms, agents said. These days the mom-and-pop operations are far outnumbered by major pot plantations, ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 plants or more.

In the Southeast, old moonshine families now run marijuana farms. But that’s only part of the problem in places like Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest, which consistently ranks first among national forests in marijuana seizures.

In the Southwest, Bauer said, most pot operations are run by Mexican drug gangs.