POT FARMS THRIVE DESPITE BEST CAMP EFFORTS

It's not amber waves of grain that are being harvested from isolated
plots of Stanislaus National Forest and U.S. Bureau of Land Management
(BLM) property in Calaveras and Tuolumne Counties.

Instead its the long green of fast-growing marijuana.

Sheriff's deputies, forest and BLM rangers and state agents with the
Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) have together uprooted and
destroyed more than 90,000 plants so far this summer.

With nearly two months still left in the season, officers have already
harvested a record 26,000 plants in Calaveras County. The 64,000-plant
Tuolumne County tally is still behind last year's 83,000 mark, but
could rise quickly with the kind of raids CAMP has been making in the
Mother Lode this year.

Last Friday alone, agents raided three Tuolumne-area gardens that
together hosted 17,000 plants.

Indeed, the pot plantations officers have been finding this years are
not mom-and-pop operations or a scrupulously attended plant or two
aimed at keeping Grandpa's glaucoma at bay. Instead they are
elaborately irrigated woodland farms with many thousands of plants
each.

In the past month the big busts have been regular front-page news:
Nine thousand plants at Moccasin, 5,000 near Mokelumne Hill, 15,000 on
forest land near American Camp, 8,000 on BLM land near Mokelumne Hill.

The absentee landlords are said to be Mexican traffickers aimed at
putting their fabulously expensive product on the streets and turning
a profit of millions. Had the the plants eradicated in Tuolumne and
Calaveras county so far grown to maturity, say agents, they could have
sold for $100 million or more.

Although Tuolumne and Calaveras counties pride themselves on
vineyards, apple orchards, home-grown honey and other agricultural
products, clandestine pot grown under armed guards will not be part of
any Mother Lode farm tours.

We don't need them and commend CAMP for doing an exemplary job of
ridding both public and private lands of the plantations.

If there is a down side to the effort, it's that the seizures have
hardly put a stop to illegal growing.

CAMP began 24 years ago with a statewide harvest of 64,579 plants. But
the deterrent of hovering helicopters, aerial surveillance and
vigilant agents has hardly dried up this illicit crop.

Instead statewide seizures rose to 621,000 in 2004, nearly doubled to
1,100,000 in 2005 and reached 1,675,000 plants valued at $6.7 billion
last year. Lake and Shasta counties, together yielding more than a
half-million plants in 2006, topped the list of counties. Tuolumne
ranked 12th and Calaveras 25th.

Clearly, growers believe the confiscation and eradication of hundreds
of thousands of marijuana plants is an acceptable cost of doing the
dirty business they are in.

Maybe that's because there's a young and eager market awaiting their
crops.

According to a 2002-03 national survey, about 3.2 million Californians
use marijuana over the space of a year. Of those, 443,300 are 17 or
younger and 1.2 million more are between 18 and 25.

An inescapable conclusion is that much of the marijuana grown
illegally in Tuolumne and Calaveras counties and elsewhere eludes CAMP
agents and, via circuitous routes, ends up on the streets -- including
some on our own -- despite law enforcement's best efforts.

Discouraging?

Yes, but nowhere as discouraging as the picture might be if CAMP
pulled up stakes, its choppers were grounded and our agents were reassigned.

Without the effective deterrent of experienced state narcotics agents
working with local deputies and rangers who intimately know the
pot-growing turf, marijuana would become a far more pervasive problem
than it is today.

Union Democrat editorial positions are formed through regular meetings
of the newspaper's editorial board -- Publisher Geoff White; editor
Teresa Chebuhar; managing editor, news Craig Cassidy; senior
reporter-columnist Chris Bateman.