COUNTIES TAKE AIM AT POT MENACE

Seven Southern Oregon Counties Get Federal Grant to Unite Efforts

Seven Southern Oregon counties have teamed up to fight marijuana
growers likely linked to Mexican cartels.

Sheriff's departments in Jackson, Josephine, Coos, Curry, Douglas,
Klamath and Lake counties came together to form Southern Oregon
Multi-Agency Marijuana Eradication and Reclamation, or SOMMER, this
year, said Andrea Carlson, a spokeswoman for the Jackson County
office. The team has received a $202,000 federal grant to find,
investigate, remove and clean up massive marijuana gardens in forests
across the region this summer.

"When one county is active in eradicating plants, then the cartels
push into neighboring areas," Carlson said.

After a big eradication push in 2007 -- yanking out 53,899 plants --
Jackson County found no growing operations in 2008, but then saw
30,971 plants removed in 2009. Douglas County found nearly 10,000 pot
plants in 2008.

"The big numbers kind of flip-flop," Carlson said, noting that the
growers seem to focus on one county, then another in hopes of
avoiding detection.

The multi-agency partnership will enable departments to "get a grasp
across the region on a huge amount of land," she said.

Public land across the West but especially in Oregon, California and
Washington -- among the biggest producers in the nation --
increasingly is used for marijuana production, according to the
Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program, the Drug
Enforcement Administration operation that funded SOMMER.

The 2010 National Drug Threat Assessment released in February by the
U.S. Department of Justice's National Drug Intelligence Center
reported that the number of plants removed from public land soared
more than 300 percent from 2004 to 2008, primarily at pot gardens of
Mexican drug-trafficking organizations. The organizations, which also
bring marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin into the country
from Mexico, favor public land because its remoteness can limit
detection and it can't be seized or traced back to an owner the way
private property can, the report said.

A separate 2008 National Drug Intelligence Center report on
cartel-related drug-trafficking organizations said the Federation
cartel was active in Klamath Falls and undetermined cartels were
working in Medford and Roseburg. The most recently available report
compiled information from federal, state and local authorities
between January 2006 and April 2008.

While Southern Oregon hasn't had wildfires linked to growers' camps
or conflicts when hikers, hunters or other legitimate forest users
come upon gardens, officials worry about the possible risk.

Officials here also worry that cartels could become more powerful and
dangerous, as they reportedly have in California and Arizona.

To demonstrate the damage pot-growing operations leave in the woods,
the Jackson County Sheriff's Department offered a tour of a 3-acre
garden cleared of more than 2,000 plants in September 2009. Two men
were arrested, but yards of flexible black pipe snake across the
hillside to carry water from Indian Creek to the growing site remain,
as do scattered heaps of trash. Pans, a lawn mower battery, several
cell phone chargers, smashed cans and other rubble spill down the
hill from a flat area where a tent once sat.

Removing the plants, collecting evidence and cleaning up the trash
even from a relatively small garden such as this one, located a
short, steep hike from Carberry Creek Road, requires hundreds of
man-hours and can cost $10,000, authorities estimated.

That's another big reason why the new collaborative effort is so
important, Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson said.

"We don't have the money to fight this," he said.

His department earmarks about $90,000 annually for marijuana
enforcement and eradication, focusing on prosecuting a handful of
growers each year.

"Working together, we can do this economically and strategically,"
Gilbertson said.

He said Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters came up with the idea of
a multi-agency regional marijuana-eradication team and was able to
secure money, based in part on the numbers of plants removed in
recent years. The seven counties pulled out more than 55,000 pot
plants in 2009, with nearly 31,000 of them coming from Jackson County.

Neighboring counties eagerly signed on, having already seen the
success of a regional search and rescue team at handling potentially
costly problems that spread across a wide area, Gilbertson said.

"We want to stand together," he said.

SOMMER will work closely with Brim Aviation, which provides
helicopters for aerial surveillance and lifting out plants, the
National Guard, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land
Management, officials said.