Illegal pot grows on the rise in California

April 10, 2017

Though California is becoming increasingly tolerant of marijuana usage and cultivation, there has been a recent surge of large-scale illegal grows in the state, particularly in national forests. Officials say the grows are killing wildlife, polluting the environment, using mass quantities of water and leading to violent confrontations between Mexican cartel-affiliated growers and officers, as well as scientists. [Business Insider]

In 2016, authorities removed an estimated 1.1 million illegal pot plants in California. As much as 80 percent of the illegal marijuana plants that authorities removed were being grown on federal land, and that amount is just a fraction of what officials find.

Mourad Gabriel, the executive director of the nonprofit Integral Ecology Research Center, said pot growers who are trespassing on public land are using poisons to protect their plants. One such poison is carbofuran, a neurotoxic insecticide that is banned in the United States, Canada and the European Union and causes symptoms ranging from nausea and blurred vision to spontaneous abortions and death. Growers often store the chemicals in Gatorade bottles, which investigators find lying in the forest, Gabriel said.

The toxic chemicals appear to be killing endangered species, particularly the Pacific fisher, a cat-sized carnivore that lives in old-growth forests in the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas. Gabriel and his colleagues tested 58 fisher carcasses they collected over the previous three years and discovered that more than 80 percent had rodenticide in their systems.

In 2016, scientists tested 22 radio-collared fishers that apparently died of natural causes, yet each one had a type of synthetic poison in its system. The rodenticide also showed up in nursing kits, meaning mothers had passed it to their offspring through their milk.

Craig Thompson, a wildlife ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who studies fishers in the Sierras, said he can stand at the intersection of two forest roads and generally know of three or four pot grows within a quarter mile.

“It’s a massive problem,” Thompson said. “People don’t tend to grasp the industrial scale of what’s going on. There are thousands of these sites in places the public thinks are pristine, with obscene amounts of chemicals at each one. Each one is a little environmental disaster.”

Gabriel and Thompson fear the poisons may spread far beyond the grow sites and contaminate the water supply of cities and towns located far downstream. The toxins can leach into soil and linger for years.

Law enforcement officials believe many of the illegal grows in California are set up by Mexican drug cartels. The cartels prefer to ship marijuana from state to state, rather than smuggle it across the border.

The growers whom authorities arrest are often illegal immigrants in their 20s from the Mexican state of Michoacan and they tend to be experienced in covert agriculture and hard living. They make about $150 a day over periods of two to four months, which is much more than they would earn working at a farm or winery.

Growers have followed, detained, threatened, pursued and shot at officers, as well as civilians, including scientists and field techs. Additionally, two K9s were stabbed while apprehending suspects.

Another concern with illegal marijuana grows is water use. Gabriel estimates illegal grows use 50 percent more water due to less efficient irrigation systems.

Also, some illegal growers leave their irrigation systems running around the clock year-round, even when nothing is growing. Gabriel estimates the 1.1 million illegal marijuana plants that were removed in California in 2016 would have used about 1.3 billion gallons of water, approximately the yearly usage of 10,000 California households.