POT GROWTH HURTING WILDERNESS

Toxic Water, Mounds Of Waste Foul Public Lands Where Cartels Run
Plantations

Long after illegal marijuana gardens cultivated on public lands have
been cleared, the trash, toxic chemicals and other environmental
damage remain.

"They've terraced, they've filled garbage pits, they've contaminated
the ground with various chemicals," some of which have been banned in
the United States, said Gary Sharpe, associate field manager with the
Bureau of Land Management's Ukiah office. His office's jurisdiction
includes two of the state's top five pot producing counties, Lake and
Mendocino.

Poaching and stream diversions also are problems, he said. "I don't
think people realize how much damage they do," Sharpe said.

"They" are believed to be mostly Mexican nationals working for drug
cartels back home. The hired laborers live in makeshift camps on
public lands during the outdoor marijuana growing season.

When they leave, or are chased off by the law, left behind are
mini-landfills, toxic pools of water, animal carcasses and miles of
drip irrigation pipe.

Of the 2.9 million pot plants seized during the state's 2008 Campaign
Against Marijuana Production, 70 percent were on public land. The
figures do not include year-around pot seizures by other federal,
state and local law organizations.

Local officials also have been dealing with toxic messes left on
private property.

Lake County's public lands are hot spots of marijuana cultivation.
The county has been tops in the number of seized plants during CAMP
operations for the past three years. The program yielded almost
500,000 plants in 2008, most of them from public lands.

BLM law enforcement officials estimate it costs $1 to $2 to eradicate
each plant and four times that to clean up the mess left behind by
growers, Sharpe said.

"We could easily go though $1 million a year for the next five years"
to clean up what's already been left on BLM lands, he said. "And
that's if (the pot cultivation) stopped. Which it's not going to do."

Nor is sufficient funding available.

BLM received $20,000 last year for a pilot cleanup project during
which it removed garbage from two gardens along the Lake-Mendocino
border with the help of volunteers and their pack horses, Sharpe said.

It expects to get another $95,000 this year, with $75,000 for cleanup
on two former pot gardens in the Cow Mountain area.

The U.S. Forest Service does not receive money specifically for pot
garden cleanups, but the California division set aside $350,000 of
its budget to clean up 30 sites in California, said Ron Pugh, special
agent in charge of law enforcement in California.

Officials locate about 350 such sites a year, he said.

"Most haven't been cleaned up," Pugh said. He's hoping legislators
will increase allocation for the efforts.

Marijuana legalization proponents say the problem would be alleviated
if marijuana was legalized, which they say would reduce the monetary
incentive to grow illegally.

The pot garden cleanups are costly because the refuse -- fertilizers,
pesticides, rodent poison, propane tanks, food, human waste, tarps
and plastic tubing -- is widely scattered in remote regions. It must
be consolidated into piles that are then either hauled out or picked
up by helicopters.

Illegal pot production has become the U.S. Forest Service's national
priority, Pugh said. Congress has voted to double the number of its
law enforcement officers to 160, he said.

Twenty of those are dedicated to marijuana eradication and tracking
down the people who head the operations, Pugh said.

Pugh said it's not the cultivation of marijuana in itself that upsets
him.

"This is a systematic occupation of armed foreign nationals
conducting criminal activities on our public lands for profit.
They're creating resource damage and creating a huge public risk," he
said.