SO MEXICAN CARTELS ARE GROWING WEED ON WASHINGTON TRIBAL LANDS. WHAT'S
THE SOLUTION?

The Seattle Times reports today on a scourge plaguing the pristine
forests of Washington: Mexican drug cartels are cultivating vast
marijuana plantations in remote areas of the state's largest Indian
reservations. Reporter Amy Harris interviewed DEA agents, members of the
State Patrol's Narcotics Division, federal prosecutors, and various
other law-enforcement officials, all of whom pontificated on the
seriousness of the problem and pointed to the untold time and resources
spent eradicating thousands of pot plants as proof that the government
is doing its darnedest to win the war on drugs. Never mentioned, of
course, is the fact that the entire effort is futile.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. In the last paragraph of the
story, Matt Haney, chief of police for the Colville Tribe, is quoted
as saying, "Until somehow we figure out how these operations are
organized, we'll always be one step behind . . . We have to get into
the organizations so that we can get ahead of them."

In other words, the current law-enforcement strategy--wander around
the woods until a grow-op is discovered, destroy the plants, arrest
the lowest-level guy in the operation doing the gardening--is
completely and utterly pointless. It will do nothing to stop cartels
from continuing to grow weed on public lands, not to mention smuggle
the stuff across the border.

Nevertheless, the raw numbers touted by the feds sound impressive when
put in print. According to the Times' story, "In 2010, almost 82,000
marijuana plants were seized on Washington's tribal lands--nearly
one-quarter of the 322,320 plants hauled in by law enforcement
throughout the entire state," and "The number of marijuana plants
found on tribal lands last year was more than nine times the number
seized six years ago, according to the State Patrol."

It's true that the waste left by the illicit pot growers and the
chemicals they use to cultivate their crops can devastate forest land.
Harris notes that the National Park Service estimates that, for every
acre of forest planted with marijuana, 10 acres are damaged.

But the big picture perspective is that the cartels' presence in
Washington forests is itself a symptom of marijuana prohibition.
Officials in Harris' story boast that they've tightened border
security, making it (slightly) more difficult to smuggle pot in from
Canada and Mexico. The cartels have simply decided it's more
profitable to produce their product closer to the consumer.

Last week at Seattle Weekly's "Toke Signals" forum, former U.S.
Attorney John McKay argued that current pot laws are directly
contributing to the raging violence in Mexico, where nearly 40,000
people have been killed since Mexican president Felipe Calderon
declared war on the country's powerful cartels in 2006. "We made our
bed, now we have to lie in it," McKay said poignantly.

McKay is hardly alone in that belief. In a report from the Latin
American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, former presidents of
Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil argued in favor of marijuana law reform,
writing "Prohibitionist policies based on the eradication of
production and on the disruption of drug flows as well as on the
criminalization of consumption have not yielded the expected results.
We are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs."

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to funnel nearly $9 billion annually to
the governments of Colombia and Mexico to fight drug traffickers with
brute military force. But advocates of reform and legalization say the
crime and terror associated with the illicit drug trade would largely
end if American marijuana laws are overhauled.

"There is no doubt that marijuana legalization would hurt Mexican
gangsters in their pocketbooks," Tom Angell, spokesman for Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition told Time Magazine last month.

That perspective, however, was nowhere to be found in Harris' story.
Reached by phone this morning, she explained why.

"It was honestly just a space issue," Harris says. "We wanted to
address the fact that this is such a big problem on tribal land and
the State Patrol said this was the front line . . . I definitely do
think about balanced reporting, but for this, the story itself I was
trying to write was more just laying out the problem and how law
enforcement was dealing with it. It's an important question to ask if
the enforcement is being effective, but I think that's the subject of
a follow-up article."