SOMMER OF SUCCESS

Team launched this past summer eradicated more than 125,000 marijuana
plants valued at more than $283 million

A team formed to fight suspected drug cartels growing marijuana in
Southern Oregon forests removed 125,787 pot plants with an estimated
value of more than $283 million this summer, according to a final
tally publicly released Saturday by team organizers.

The Southern Oregon Multi-Agency Marijuana Eradication and Reclamation
team, or SOMMER -- which covers Jackson, Josephine, Coos, Curry,
Douglas, Klamath and Lake counties -- yanked nearly 70 percent of the
total number of plants destroyed in Oregon this year, a report of the
team's first year said.

"This was definitely a success," Jackson County Sheriff's Department
spokeswoman Andrea Carlson said.

The efforts of SOMMER cost about $600,000, and federal funding will
cover the bulk of that, said Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters.

"We had a great team put together by these seven counties," he
said.

"When everybody is working together, rowing in the same direction,
you're going to be successful."

In addition to the large number of plants seized and destroyed at 31
large marijuana-growing sites on public lands this summer, the team
arrested 23 people, most of them in Josephine County. Prosecutors said
all those suspects will face federal charges. Ongoing investigations
have identified other suspects who aren't in custody yet, Carlson said.

Jackson County Sheriff's deputies shot and killed a 20-year-old
Mexican man, Itali Arellano-Vargas, on Aug. 11 in a marijuana garden
on remote Bureau of Land Management property in the Salt Creek area of
northern Jackson County.

Investigators suspect most of the marijuana grows removed by SOMMER
were guarded by members of Hispanic drug-trafficking organizations.
Mexican drug-trafficking organizations dominate illegal drug
wholesaling in the United States, reported the 2010 National Drug
Threat Assessment released in February by the Department of Justice's
National Drug Intelligence Center.

Two Curry County sites raided by SOMMER this year were tended by Hmong
groups, officials reported. The National Drug Threat Assessment notes
that Asian drug-trafficking organizations have expanded their
influence nationally in recent years, primarily dealing in Ecstasy and
high-potency marijuana usually smuggled in from Canada. Since 2005,
however, a decrease in the amount of marijuana seized at the
U.S.-Canada border points to these Asian groups establishing marijuana
grows in the United States to cut smuggling risks and costs, the
federal assessment said.

In this region, Hmong groups grow marijuana in Del Norte and Curry
counties, but haven't spread eastward, Jackson County Sheriff Mike
Winters said.

Of the marijuana-growing sites found this summer in the seven counties
covered by SOMMER, seven were in Jackson County, 21 were in Josephine
County and three were in Curry County.

Carlson said all of the participating counties also have independent
drug teams that handled their own investigations of small growing
operations and out-of-compliance medical marijuana sites.

Winters proposed a multi-agency, regional marijuana-eradication team
that could deal with cartel-related pot gardens on the vast public
lands of southwestern Oregon. He initially secured a $202,000 federal
grant to pay for the SOMMER team, which was launched in July. The
collaborators said at the time they hoped to prevent growers from
simply moving into a neighboring county when one county cracked down,
a phenomenon they had seen in past years.

The team got another infusion of grants in midsummer and additional
funding continues to trickle in now as unspent eradication money from
other agencies is redistributed by the Oregon Department of Justice,
Winters said. He said the federal eradication grants will cover more
than half of SOMMER's expenses, and other state and federal sources
are being tapped to help pay for the effort.

The seven counties pulled out more than 55,000 pot plants in 2009 and
hoped to remove 100,000 this year, Carlson said. The 125,000 plants
removed topped that goal and accounted for the majority of the 184,015
plants that the Oregon Department of Justice reported were seized
statewide in 2010.

"We definitely got their attention," Winters said of the cartels.
"Cartels shouldn't be allowed to operate in Oregon."

While SOMMER's combined effort to find, investigate, remove and clean
up big marijuana gardens played a role in netting the high numbers,
some credit has to go to the region's weather and overall growing
conditions, which are among the state's most conducive for marijuana,
Carlson acknowledged.

In addition to the seven southwestern Oregon counties, sheriff's
departments from Northern California's Siskiyou and Del Norte
counties, the Oregon State Police, Brim Aviation, the Oregon National
Guard, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Forest Service and the
Bureau of Land Management helped with this summer's
marijuana-eradication effort, SOMMER reported.