MARIJUANA CROPS ALSO BAD FOR ENVIRONMENT

Toxic Poisons, Waste Foul Public Lands

Come September, marijuana growers who have labored for five months in
some of California's most remote country will abandon their secret
gardens, taking their multimillion-dollar crops.

What will they leave behind? Irrigation tubes that snake for a mile
or more over forested ridges. Pesticides that have drained into
creeks and entered the food chain, sickening wildlife. Piles of trash
and human waste in the most rugged and bucolic drainages.

The environmental consequences of marijuana gardens - or plantations,
as they're more aptly called - are increasingly apparent as law
enforcement continues its statewide crackdown on the illicit operations.

"They basically trash our public lands," said Matt Mathes, a
spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service in Vallejo. Officials in
Calaveras County so far have eradicated 26,000 plants in raids on pot
gardens in the back country.

The finds in Calaveras are merely the latest of many; a multi-agency
campaign counted a record 1.67 million plants seized in California in
2006, half a million more than the year before.

There's not enough money to thoroughly rehabilitate many of these
sites, Mathes said. At Sequoia National Park, officials estimate it
costs $11,000 per acre to fix the damage.

The trash goes first, packed out sometimes by National Guard
helicopters or hotshot firefighters once fire season is over.
Restoring native plants and fixing soil erosion problems are
longer-term issues which, officials say, are sometimes never addressed.

"Unfortunately, we really can'tclean up all those sites like we would
like to," said Ross Butler, assistant special agent in charge of the
Bureau of Land Management's Sacramento office.

"We go in, we get the weed," Butler said. "Everything else just kind
of ends up staying behind."

Pot is especially a problem in foothill counties such as Calaveras,
he said. Gardens as large as 4 or 5 acres are cultivated year after
year, and by the time officials find them, the environmental damage is done.

Empty cans, egg containers, food wrappers, gas cylinders, dirty
magazines and lean-tos are left behind.

And then there's the makeshift pit toilets, the smell of which
sometimes tips off the cops that they're close to stumbling upon a plantation.

"It's just a huge mess," Butler said.

Another concern revolves around endangered species. Pesticides are
used to keep rodents out of the marijuana; those rodents, including
wood rats, are a primary food source for the California spotted owl.

At Whiskeytown National Recreation Area near Redding, park rangers
investigating a tadpole die-off in a creek wandered upstream and
found a small dam in which someone had rigged an open can of
fertilizer. According to testimony later delivered before Congress,
rangers crawled on their bellies up steep slopes and found marijuana
gardens perched atop cliffs.

Supporters of legalizing marijuana say the environmental destruction
that accompanies these hidden gardens would not occur if pot was
treated like any legal agricultural product.

"There is a reason you never hear of anyone planting clandestine
vineyards in the national parks," said Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for
the Marijuana Policy Project in San Francisco. "Marijuana can be
grown safely in an environmentally responsible way, or it can be
grown dangerously."