WAR ON WEED REQUIRES NEW TECHNIQUES, MORE FUNDS

Who would have thought it: Hot, dry Arizona has become a prime location for
illegal marijuana farming.

But for those in the know, Arizona makes perfect sense. It has
high-elevation pine forests with remote, protected valleys that get plenty
of rain in the summer. And it's close to Mexico, where drug cartels have
the money and the muscle to undertake major, cross-border marijuana-growing
operations.

Not all the details of the latest pot farm bust in the national forest near
Strawberry have been released -- the U.S. Attorney's Office has scheduled a
press conference today in Phoenix. But the fact that the feds are involved
makes it a good assumption these weren't just a bunch of good 'ol boys up
in the hills growing some weed for their own enjoyment.

The trend in recent years has been for drug cartels from Mexico and
Colombia to dispatch workers loaded with fertilizer and armed with AK-47s
to remote U.S. public lands in the spring, then work the farms through the
summer, often setting up water lines from creeks, well-equipped camps and
garbage dumps. One estimate has a typical pot farm developing 180 acres of
wilderness for every five acres under cultivation.

The size of the farms -- one bust in California yielded 79,000 plants and
there have been an equal number of plants pulled from the Tonto National
Forest so far this year -- makes it hard to believe they can escape detection.

But most national forests, including the Coconino, cover millions of acres
yet have only a handful of patrol rangers who spend most of their time near
high-use areas like campgrounds and trailheads. It's unrealistic to expect
federal land managers to know exactly what's going on in every square mile
of their territory, especially if those on public lands don't want to be found.

What the public should have a right to expect is a more sophisticated
approach by law enforcement to match the sophistication of the criminals.
These are multi-national, billion-dollar "corporations" that should be
policed as white-collar criminals. Who, for example, is supplying the funds
and laundering them? Why isn't the U.S. Justice Department pressuring the
Fox government to issue search warrants and turn over evidence of
U.S.-based crimes by Mexican drug lords to U.S. authorities, the better to
produce local indictments and extradition orders?

Locally, who is supplying the labor for the pot farms? Undocumented workers
don't just suddenly show up in the middle of a wilderness looking for the
work. If there are U.S. nationals involved in supplying transportation and
protection, where are the funds and guns coming from?

It's bad enough that our national forests are so understaffed that it's
impossible to prevent the replanting of vast stretches in high-grade pot.
But now that word is out about how our public lands are being exploited by
foreign drug cartels, it might be time to redirect back to the United
States the billions of dollars the federal government has spent to
eradicate coca plantations in Colombia. Monday's bust in the Coconino
National Forest shows that the war on weed is right in our back yard, and
it's no longer acceptable to conduct business as usual.