Drug Cartels Are Growing Tons of Weed Inside the U.S.

Inside U.S. national parks, that is. And guess what? Turns out the cartel's stealth grow ops, first detected on protected Forest Service land in 1995 in California, are pretty awful for pristine forests: Growers not only clear stands of trees to accommodate plants, but they often make a mess of the place while dousing their crops with all manner of fertilizers, insecticides and poisons that pose serious runoff risks to streams and aquifers.

It's a rapidly-growing problem. In a sobering reversal coming on the heels of Colorado and Washington legalizing weed for recreational use, Mexican cartels have officially cannon-balled right into the shit, an affirmation of the old black-market adage that to make out like a bandit the idea is to move production as close as possible to points of distribution. Narco cultivation camps have spread to a whopping 20 states and 67 national forests, the Daily Journal reports, since the mid 90s, with undocumented immigrants tending over 1,600 grow sites between 2005-2010 alone. The Feds razed roughly 3 million outdoor marijuana plants nationwide in 2004, according to Drug Enforcement Administration figures. By just last year, that number was over 6 million.

Chemical containers left behind at forest grow op (via Bay Citizen)

Whether the other green party's big election night returns prove a blow to these northbound inroads remains to be seen. On paper, they could--legalize the stupid stuff, weed advocates argue, and you put the traffickers, and all the attending corruption and threat of violence that they tow around, out of business literally over night. Meanwhile, legalization's critics are saying that relaxing existing marijuana laws does little but compound the specter of toxic, gang-run national forests and tribal lands.

“[Legalization] certainly doesn’t help the situation,” Benjamin Wagner, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, told the Journal. “It creates an environment in which law enforcement gets mixed signals.”

Mixed signals or not, the Feds are already waging full-on assaults against the new Mexican-American cartels. Last August's obligatorily whoop-ass sounding Operation Mountain Sweep, which took aim at sizable weed grows "on public lands in seven Western states, including California," as the Journal quoted Wagner, brought down 578,000 plants at an estimated street value of $1 billion.

But here's one twist. Grows are being sniffed out in greater numbers in far-flung places where the encroachment of criminal gangs from south of the border has gone largely unexpected, until now--places like Wisconsin's Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, where an August raid netted over 8,000 plants and arrested seven people, only one of which had no ties to cartels; a forest in Michigan, where 3,000 plants linked to drug trafficking groups were razed in July 2011; and a forest in rural Ohio, where over 2,500 plants were confiscated from a secluded grow site in 2010. Eleven Mexican nationals have been indicted in connection to the Ohio raid.

The other twist, of course, is what this rising tide of homegrown National Forest product may potentially wash in. So long as weed remains illegal en masse across America, spurring cartels to penetrate deeper into the great white North, the game will become ever more about one side outwitting the other with various shades of leading- and rudimentary grow- or spy-tech. Because for every dozen demostic grow ops sporting laughably (but effective!) primitive irrigation systems, say, there are now likely an equal amount of local police departments and federal agencies, not to mention Canadian law enforcement, lining up for authorization to fly small-fry surveillance drones to weed out weed. It's actually already happening.

Top: Forest grow op in Wisconsin (via) 

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