MEXICAN GROWERS HAVING BIG POT YEAR IN STATE

(07-28) 04:00 PDT Shasta-Trinity National Forest---

Mexican drug traffickers have expanded their marijuana-growing
operations in California parks as state and local governments have
tightened spending and slashed jobs and services.

Law enforcement officials say the traffickers, taking advantage of the
fact that there are fewer sheriff's deputies and rangers monitoring
parks, are cultivating more pot than ever before. This year's
multibillion-dollar crop is on pace to be the largest in history, said
state officials.

"It's a huge problem," said Gordon Taylor, the assistant special agent
in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "California is
ground zero for domestic marijuana cultivation in the country."

The illicit crops are believed to be hidden on ridges and in gullies
in California's 31 million acres of forest, with most being grown in
state and national parks.

So far this year, more than a million plants have been seized by the
state's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP program,
according to Michelle Gregory, the spokeswoman for the California
Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, and the pot-growing season is not even
half over.

"Our whole state is overrun," Gregory said. "It's an epidemic."

Much of the cannabis grown in California is being exported around the
country, into Mexico and overseas. One batch recently harvested in
Shasta County was tracked by drug enforcement agents to Chicago and
South Carolina. Fewer officers

This year, Shasta County has nearly equaled its record of 394,375
plants seized last year despite having only one full-time sheriff's
sergeant and five part-timers available to patrol for marijuana.

Adjacent Trinity County, on the brink of financial collapse, has cut
the number of sheriff's officers from 20 to 13. Sometimes no one is
available to patrol the 3,200 square miles of mostly forested
countryside in Trinity County, where Sheriff Lorrac Craig said drug
cartels are running rampant.

The problem was evident earlier this month when 24 agents from a state
Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement task force swooped in on a large
plantation on a ridge overlooking Hirz Bay on Shasta Lake in the
Shasta-Trinity National Forest.

The five plots of marijuana - 15,474 plants in all - were bright green
and easily visible from a helicopter. The caretakers had fled by the
time agents arrived, and no arrests were made. Immigrant labor

Even if the growers had been captured, drug enforcement officers said,
it might not have made a difference. The cartels can afford to
sacrifice workers and crops, especially when the penalty usually
amounts to nothing more than the deportation of a few low-level
laborers - who typically are illegal immigrants. The growers, who
often make less than $100 a day, are usually working off debts to
"coyotes" who guided them across the border, and they know little or
nothing about the overall operation, according to drug enforcement
officials.

"We've had cases where some of the workers are kidnapped and told that
if they don't work, something will happen to their families," Gregory
said. "A lot of them aren't going to talk because they've been
threatened, and we often have a problem identifying them. If they are
not in the computer system, their fingerprints don't mean anything."

Michael Johnson, the statewide commander of the CAMP task force, said
often the only way to get to the source of the illegal activity is to
allow the crop to be harvested and follow the crop to its delivery
point.

"They are making money on this," said Johnson, gesturing toward the
giant mound of high-grade sinsemilla his agents had just pulled off
the Shasta-Trinity ridge. He said the big, purple buds can fetch as
much as $3,500 a plant.

"The money is being used for other illegal operations, like smuggling
guns and methamphetamines," he said.

Just finding marijuana is often a problem given that helicopters cost
a lot of money to fly and are seldom available to sheriff's officers,
who are often responsible for finding and reporting
plantations.

The CAMP team seized 92,971 plants in Trinity County last year, a
fraction of what they would have gotten if there were enough sheriff's
officers to adequately track down illegal plantations, Craig said.

"We just don't have the manpower to go out and chase them all down,
and they know that," Craig said.

Similar problems were reported in Lake and Tulare counties, which were
the top two pot-growing regions in the state in 2008. Shasta County
was third. Trinity was eighth. Environmental damage

The growers are so brazen that they often return to replant crops in
the same plots that were recently raided, authorities said, and they
don't care about the extensive environmental damage they cause by
clear-cutting forests, damming up creeks and polluting public land
with pesticides and trash.

Legalization is not the solution, Johnson said, given that most of the
pot is being grown illegally on public parkland by foreign citizens
who cannot be taxed.

"I've been doing this for five years, and there just seems to be more
and more of it everywhere," Johnson said. "We don't even bother with
medicinal grows. What we're concerned about is the destruction of the
habitat."