THE CARTELS TOUCH OREGON

It's one thing to read about the war among drug cartels in Mexico.
It's another to be reminded once again -- by reporting, as the paper
did Saturday -- that Mexican drug cartels are reaching into Oregon in
a very direct, tangible and dangerous way.

Linn County Sheriff Tim Mueller says that a major marijuana
plantation in the woods of Linn County was apparently linked to a
Mexican drug cartel.

The place was raided on Aug. 20. Deputies and other officers found
900 plants along with an elaborate watering system. The men who ran
it, though, fled into the brush and got away.

In Mexico, the news reports tell us, the cartels are fighting about
the drug routes into the United States. If so, what's to keep them
from starting to fight about their plantations in Oregon?

This is no game. It is not just a rougher side of some harmless
recreation. On Aug. 11 in Jackson County, a Mexican national armed
with a shotgun, who had been working at a pot plantation, was shot to
death when law enforcement raided the place and he made a move as
though to fire.

Last week a grand jury in Medford took five minutes to find the
shooting justified. But for good reasons, authorities kept
confidential the names of the deputies who fired at the man. District
Attorney Mark Huddleston said officers in California had become
targets for the cartels' retaliation in similar circumstances.

It goes without saying that stomping out the tentacles of foreign
drug operations has to be a top priority of law enforcement, and not
just locally.

The Oregon attorney general has been eager to conduct himself as the
top law enforcement official in Oregon. If he hasn't done so already,
let him launch an initiative that finds and destroys all similar
plantations in Oregon and catch the men that operate them.

This situation seems almost like an armed foreign invasion. That
means it would warrant involvement by the National Guard and whatever
equipment it has, including helicopters, to locate the pot farms deep
in Oregon woods, and then call in units to surround them with enough
troops so that the operators cannot escape.