Pot growth soars, as do raids of harvests

By Eric Brazil
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

Northern California's marijuana harvest won't be over until first frost,
but law enforcement officials have already reached two conclusions about
the 1997 crop:

*There's more pot being grown.

*Mexican nationals have made big inroads into growing what used to be a
strictly local cash crop.

Hard numbers support the first conclusion. Pot raiders are destroying more
plants than at any other time in the '90s. In Mendocino County, authorities
have never grabbed more. It's the first harvest since Proposition 215
legalized marijuana for medicinal use in California.

The second conclusion is based mainly on circumstantial evidence:
cultivation methods similar to those used in Mexico, and debris like stale
tortillas, Mexican flags and Spanish literature found at raided pot
gardens.

But Special Agent Bill Ruzzimenti, who supervises marijuana investigations
for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, has no doubt that the trend
is real.

"Mexican organizations are coming in and taking over," Ruzzimenti said.
"These are polydrug organizations with the wherewithal and access to money
and the established distribution systems (for heroin, cocaine and
methamphetamines) to set up illegal marijuana gardens."

He said the Mexican growers were also "taking advantage of illegals
(undocumented workers). They say, "Work for us, and we'll give you a green
card and keep you in the states,' which is just a crock."

"This is total racist bull," countered Ed Denson of the Humboldt County
Civil Liberties Monitoring Project in Redway. "Everyone I know up here
who's growing marijuana is a lifetime resident, and they seem to be growing
it for the (medical marijuana) clubs," said Denson, a member of the
Humboldt County committee charged with figuring out how to implement Prop.
215. "Where are all these Mexican drug lords? We never see them."

Authorities predicted a big jump in the marijuana harvest when Prop. 215
passed last November despite allout opposition from Attorney General Dan
Lungren and California's law enforcement establishment. That prediction has
materialized in the thinly populated mountains of Humboldt, Mendocino,
Trinity and Del Norte counties the socalled "Emerald Triangle."

"There's more being grown and in a more blatant style this year," said
Humboldt County Sheriff's Lt. Steve Cobine, who has flown over those
mountains scouting pot gardens to raid for a decade. "It's easily
recognized from the air, compared to what's been going on in the past."

California's pot cops the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting had
eradicated 116,500 marijuana plants as of Tuesday morning, compared with
94,221 for all of 1996, CAMP director Walter Kaiser said. It's the first
time this decade that CAMP raiders have destroyed as many as 100,000 plants
and they've done it with a budget of $500,000, compared with budgets of
$2.3 million to $2.9 million during the 1980s. CAMP employs local cops and
uses federal and state funds.

The peak of the harvestraiding season when dealers are selling the last
of the previous harvest coincides with a spike in the perpound price of
highgrade sinsemilla marijuana to about $5,000. "It's a seasonal thing, a
period of scarcity," said Dennis Peron, founder of San Francisco's Cannabis
Cultivators Club. "In another month (when the harvest is in), the price
will drop."

Law enforcement has also observed a trend in the size of marijuana gardens.

"We're starting to see outdoor gardens with 1,000plus plants, more than
we've seen in the past 10 years," Ruzzimenti said.

"We're getting industrialsized gardens of 3,000 to 4,000 plants, which is
really against the norm" of small gardens raided during the past five
years, said Pat Lyng, assistant regional special agent for law enforcement
for the U.S. Forest Service in California.

David Burns, who is in charge of antimarijuana operations for the U.S.
Bureau of Land Management in Northern California, said that "over the last
four years there's been a distinct trend for more Mexican growers to be
involved" in the industry. "Some areas are almost all Hispanic, and others
are dominated by freezedried hippies."

The marijuana acreage increase and the growing influence of Mexican
nationals are evident in Mendocino County, local authorities say. "We're
actually sitting on the largest total (of plants destroyed) we've ever
seen," said Sgt. Ron Caudillo of the Mendocino County Sheriff's
Department."

The presence of Mexican nationals in the Mendocino County marijuana
business was first noticed in 1992, and now they have become dominant,
Caudillo said.

"You can tell by the difference in cultivation and the style of
cultivation," he said. "Once you get into an operation, you can tell
whether it's a Mexican grow or a whiteboy grow. Traditional growers will
take the time to plant one per hole, put it into buckets or bags, have drip
irrigation to each one and sometimes a fence around each. With a Mexican
grow it looks like rowcropping, like a little miniorchard," he said.

Cobine said he had been impressed with the care Mexican growers took with
their operations in Humboldt County.

Once, during a longrange surveillance of a marijuana garden, "I watched
them (appear to) repeatedly fall down while they were carrying bags down a
trail, and I finally figured out that they were picking up dry cow pies and
depositing them on the trail to make it look like a cow path," Cobine said.
"That's the kind of real meticulous stuff they do. They get dropped off by
a boss man and walk in with all their equipment" and stay there.

Caudillo and Cobine said that Mexican marijuana gardeners in contrast to
locals tended to live in or near their gardens.

"Local growers have learned not to leave a whole lot of evidence behind
them," BLM's Burns said. "Mexican growers tend to be bigger, and there's a
difference in the way their gardens are constructed and concealed. They
tend to make small tunnels (through bushes or branches concealing the
plots), and you have to get on your hands and knees and crawl into the
gardens. Local growers use foot trails."

Although the woods are full of tales of violence associated with outlaw
marijuana growing, this year's experience seems to be fairly benign, said
Caudillo, who's office right now is at the center of local pot eradication
efforts. "We haven't had any violence so far," he said.

But appearances may be deceiving, said DEA's San Francisco spokesman Stan
Vegar. "In the Fresno area, a lot of people are turning up in the fields
with holes in them," he said. "These killings are unsolved, but it sounds
like somebody took care of business. It's not as blatant as crack violence
it seems to be within their own groups. Hopefully, that won't spread."

Burns said that in his experience "more Mexican growers tend to be armed
than local growers, and there's a greater level of violence associated with
them. From a law enforcement perspective, as well as that of users of
public land, that should be of some concern."

David Fratella, a spokesman for Californians for Medical Rights, which
spearheaded the passage of Prop. 215, said the socalled Mexican menace was
a law enforcement fantasy. "This really does sound like propaganda to make
the whole problem sound worse than it really is," he said.