POT RAID ENDS RECORD SEASON FOR YOLO COUNTY

Camouflage-clad narcotics officers used machetes to carve nearly 2,000
marijuana plants out of a steep Rumsey Canyon hillside Tuesday,
completing a record-breaking season for outdoor pot seizures in Yolo
County.

After Tuesday's raid -- the Yolo Narcotic Enforcement Team's sixth of
the season and likely its last -- the total number of pot plants
burned by county narcotics officers this summer billowed to 25,000.

The officers in just one day had seized the same number of plants team
members confiscated in all of last year's roughly five-month marijuana
growing season.

One look at -- and sniff of -- the weeds hauled out of the Rumsey
Canyon by helicopter could explain why reconnaissance of the area has
been so fruitful this year.

"This right here is exactly what (growers are) looking for in their
growths," said YONET Commander Roy Giorgi, admiring impressive flowers
on a towering marijuana plant. "You couldn't find a better-looking
bud."

The admiration was short-lived. The 2,000 plants -- each 8 to 10 feet
tall and heavy with buds -- were burned at a local fire department by
YONET officials, who were careful to stay upwind of the aromatic blaze.

In one fire, team members destroyed drugs that could have fetched as
much as $15 million on the streets. Officials said levels of THC, the
active ingredient in marijuana, in California's pot plants reach 25
percent -- "one-hit marijuana," Giorgi called it.

This year, almost 1.5 million marijuana plants have been seized in
California by members of the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting,
surpassing last year's total of 1.1 million. That year had been a
record-breaking one as well.

Though Giorgi attributes Yolo's sudden jump this year to a more
aggressive approach by his team, the state's growing number of
seizures likely stems from an increased number of pot farms budding
across the state, said Ovonual Berkley, an assistant regional officer
in charge of CAMP's Regional 5, which includes Sacramento and Yolo
counties.

CAMP -- a multi-jurisdictional task force that assists local agencies
in pot eradication by providing air- and manpower -- began in 1983
when recreationers were being run off public land by armed marijuana
farmers, Berkley said.

That problem has resurfaced in full force in the past four to five
years, Berkley said, as highly organized Mexican drug cartels set up
shop on public lands across the state. About 70 percent of farms
raided this year were on public land, according to the Department of
Justice.

Berkley said profits get reinvested in more marijuana farms, as well
as the production of other drugs.

"I think they're all interrelated," said Berkley, who has worked with
CAMP for 20 years and law enforcement for 45.

Though acknowledging that some people might use marijuana
recreationally without great harm, Berkley said he feels good about
the work he and other narcotic officials do.

"Every plant that I cut and we haul and dispose of, it's a plant
that's not going out on the street," he said. "That's my contribution
to society."

Attorney General Bill Lockyer on Tuesday applauded the efforts to
eradicate pot in the Sacramento Valley, which he said has been
"blanketed" with the weed.

"Our agents will keep pulling it up wherever they find it, whether in
fields or subdivisions," Lockyer said in a news release. "I appreciate
the hard work of these tenacious law enforcement agents."

Agents indeed were tenacious Tuesday, hiking nearly two miles into the
Rumsey Canyon -- a two-hour trek through heavy brush on a steep
hillside that ended with hacking down 2,000 plants on more steep hillside.

There, the mature plants were interspersed between manzanita bushes
and juvenile oak trees -- a tactic growers use to camouflage the
illicit plants. A tangle of black irrigation tubes comprised a drip
system fed by a dammed creek.

Two abandoned campsites offered a glimpse into the lives of the unseen
farmers who carefully tended the weed: a propane tank, empty chicken
packages, discarded "animalitos" cookie bags, a tube of Colgate toothpaste.

Giorgi, YONET commander, said narcotic officers have learned through
interviews with workers arrested in other raids that the men, often
Mexican farmers, are paid $15,000 to $25,000 for overseeing the
growths, provided the crops are not seized.

With the bulk of marijuana harvesting season over, Giorgi said YONET
members will return to enforcement activities other than outdoor
marijuana eradication -- which, in condensed terms, probably takes up
only about two weeks of the team's time.

But Giorgi said he expects to return to familiar stomping grounds next
year, when new crops of marijuana have sprouted.