THE CHANGING FACE OF THE DRUG TRADE

Mexican drug trafficking organizations have expanded the marijuana
cultivation in public lands in Mendocino County in a major way since
2000. Based primarily on the number of plants eradicated by the
County of Mendocino Marijuana Eradication Team, 2007 appears to have
been a bumper marijuana crop year with more than 320,000 plants
eradicated this season. Mexican DTOs find it cost effective to grow
pot in this and other rural Northern California counties for a number
of reasons.

The penalty for growing pot continues to be substantially lower than
for drugs of other varieties. Personnel apprehended for marijuana
grows do not typically face long jail sentences, and one needs only
look at arrest logs to determine Mendocino County arrests do not
appear to discourage many from repetitively participating in the business.

The reward is high. While marijuana supply in California continues to
be plentiful and prices are less than at historic peaks, it remains a
very lucrative cash crop. If the plants removed by COMMET from
Mendocino County alone had all reached full growth this year, they
could easily have netted as much as $600 million and still
represented only a small percentage of this year's crop. The U.S.
Drug Enforcement Agency estimates Americans spend nearly $11 billion
to purchase marijuana annually.

The grow sites are close to a readymade market with high
concentrations of users living in the Bay Area. Marijuana use is
growing within California bucking the national trend, leading to an
expanding market. The Bay Area is a transportation hub providing
multiple ways to distribute product to users throughout the United States.

There appears to be an increasing supply of Mexican nationals
attached to the drug cartels willing to relocate to the United States
to tend the crops. Many of the growers have grown the crop in the
same or nearby locations on public lands for several years in a row,
building an infrastructure that allows grows to continually expand
and improve. The DTOs also have ready access to illegal aliens
willing to tend a grow site through a successful harvest to pay the
Mexican human traffickers who sponsored their entry into the country.

Growers living with the crop are now typically armed, prepared to
protect their high-value crop from thieves or rival organizations and
sometimes, law enforcement personnel. While some booby traps remain,
most growers now rely on automatic weapons to discourage casual visitors.

The invasion of the remote areas of the county begins with a two-man
reconnaissance team, typically during the winter season. The teams
scout sources of water in more and more remote areas of public lands,
likely using inexpensive satellite-based navigation systems to mark locations.

Each spring the typical four-man grow teams return to previous garden
areas not found by COMMET raids. The groups are typically fully
equipped with seedlings, sophisticated irrigations systems,
concentrated pesticides and fertilizers from Mexico not typically
available in the United States and plenty of food and equipment to
last the summer. Teams are also dropped off to start new grow sites
each spring.

Grow teams typically live off the land, poaching wildlife and
diverting water courses as needed to expand the grow. In the
Mendocino National Forest, some grows have been found with large
overhanging tarps covering the entire campsite. Some sites contain
exercise facilities, hammocks, tents, tree houses and barbed wire
fences. Cooking and sleeping camp usually have a view of the
cultivation site. The open flames pose a summer wildfire threat. Most
grows organized by the DTOs have more than 3,000 plants although
grows as large as 30,000 plants have been discovered. Human waste,
garbage accumulations, compacted soil, dead trees and removal of
native plants, pesticide and herbicide spills, poisons used for
controlling gnawing rodents are plentiful at established grow sites.
These toxic chemicals enter and contaminate ground water, pollute
watersheds, kill fish and other wildlife, and eventually enter
residential water supplies. Foresters estimate that for every
cultivated acre another 10 acres are damaged. The cost of remediation
is an estimated $11,000 per acre.

During harvest season, the marijuana is trimmed and dried at the grow
site and then carried out in black plastic bags to distributors. The
garbage and toxic chemicals remain at the grow site entering the
environment during the seasonal rains. The disturbed soils erode over
the winter, adding silt to the creeks and rivers impacting fish
reproductive cycles. It also seems unlikely proceeds from the grows
ever enter the Mendocino County economy.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is Part 2 of a series on the growing involvement
of Mexican drug trafficking organizations in the Mendocino County
marijuana trade.