WAR ON ILLICIT POT FARMS HAS SUNK INTO A QUAGMIRE

We're Not Winning the War on Drugs.

Two decades ago, the state government launched the Campaign Against
Marijuana Production (CAMP). Agents fanned out through the woods and
took to the skies to find and destroy illegal pot gardens, especially
in Northern California.

The results were dramatic. In its third year, 1985, officers uprooted
nearly 170,000 marijuana plants from isolated patches. Growers even
appeared to get the message, or at least they grew more cautious. By
1990 the number of plants found dropped to about half the peak, and
it stayed at that manageable level through most of the '90s.

Those Were the Days.

This year, agents in Shasta County alone yanked up nearly 240,000
illegal pot plants. Statewide, the figure approached 1.7 million --
10 times the 1980s peak.

State officials' reaction? A declaration of victory.

"The record-breaking numbers reflect CAMP's continued, remarkable
success in ridding California of illegal large-scale marijuana
gardens," state Attorney General Bill Lockyer said last month in
announcing this year's results.

He would have a point if there were any evidence that the problem was
whipped, that illegal growers were getting the message and taking
their business elsewhere. But even the cops who take on the tough and
dangerous job of stopping pot farming guess they find only 20 percent
to 30 percent of the illicit crop.

Is There a Solution?

U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott, the chief federal prosecutor for the
region and former Shasta County district attorney, suggested that the
increase was in part caused by tougher law enforcement -- not in the
northern mountains, but on the southern border. Since it's become
harder to smuggle drugs from Mexico, cartels have simply started
growing dope up north. Even if Scott is correct, though, relaxing our
border controls isn't in the cards these days.

Shasta County District Attorney Jerry Benito says tougher sentences
for growing marijuana are needed, especially for the massive gardens
that are increasingly common in Northern California. We must punish
lawbreakers, but as it happens the state's prisons are already so
full that federal judges are threatening to free prisoners to relieve
the overcrowding.

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who died last
week, advocated treating marijuana the way we do alcohol -- taxing
and regulating it to keep it out of the hands of children, keeping
intoxicated drivers off the road, but otherwise letting adults do
what they want to their own bodies. Well, Friedman's free-market
views on the economy greatly influenced such leaders as Ronald
Reagan, but Americans aren't quite ready to apply them to drugs. (In
anything-goes Nevada, an initiative to legalize marijuana won 44
percent of the vote in this month's election.)

But the lens of supply and demand clarifies the issue. As long as
there's a demand -- and neither the law nor good sense has stopped
pot smokers yet -- somebody will provide the supply.

In other words, helicopters will be scanning the north state's
forests for pot patches for a long time to come.