ILLEGAL AGRICULTURE

Violence Grows Along With Pot In Hidden Gardens Throughout The County And State

As he pushed through another head-high stand of poison oak, Sgt. Rob
Wilkinson was starting to sound a little frustrated."They said 100 yards
from that cattle guard, and we've gone farther than that," he shouted ahead
to the Sheriff's deputies who were hacking their way through the heavy brush.

Wilkinson was standing in the bottom of Colson Canyon, about 30 minutes
east of Santa Maria, and he was looking for a marijuana garden. The
helicopter pilots who'd spotted the marijuana garden had told the narcotics
bureau sergeant that it would be easy to find at the bottom of this
sometimes-vertical, scrub-covered ravine. But after 20 minutes of creeping,
bushwhacking progress, neither Wilkinson nor his four deputies had
discovered anything.

Compounding matters, the helicopter that would usually be on hand to
provide aerial directions had been grounded by heavy fog back at the coast.

Sun photographer Christopher Gardner and I emerged from the patch of poison
oak that Wilkinson had just maneuvered through. Wilkinson turned around.

"If you're wondering if this has happened before," he said with a grin,
"yes, it has. Things can look a lot different from the air. And since
they're not here to point the way … " he trailed off with a shrug.

And so the trek continued down the dry creek bed. Though the preceding
deputies had hacked a minimal path through the scrubby brush and overhead
poison oak bushes, crawling on hands and knees was sometimes the only way
to make progress.

As Wilkinson paused under a canopy of oaks, officers farther downhill
shouted that they'd found what they thought was the water supply for a
garden. They were going to follow the irrigation tubing that led downhill,
they yelled back, and see where it went.

When Wilkinson got to the spring, hidden under trees and camouflaged with
cut brush, he turned to Gardner and me and told us to stop.

"When they make sure that it's all clear, we'll go in," he said.

Wilkinson wasn't just being dramatic. Over the previous week, suspects had
shot at raiding narcotic officers in San Luis Obispo, Butte, and Shasta
counties. During ensuing gun battles in Butte and Shasta, four suspects had
been killed. San Luis deputies hadn't returned fire, but they did apprehend
a shotgun-toting individual.

That same week in Ventura County, a suspect had shot at a hunter who'd
inadvertently strayed too close to a garden. Bucolic Mendocino County -
arguably the epicenter of California marijuana growing - had seen a spate
of pot-related murders as well. And while there hadn't been any shootings
in this county, narcotics officers did find booby traps around two gardens:
a trip wire in front of nail-covered boards, and a bear trap.

Earlier that morning, Wilkinson had said his department is safety-minded
for obvious reasons: "We want to use caution because it's always possible
that there's suspects, and it's always possible that they're armed.

"But trust me, we want to catch these guys," he'd said. "It's a
disappointment when we can't find the body that's behind the garden."

Up ahead, a deputy shouted the all clear, and Wilkinson followed the black
plastic tubing that snaked through the bushes and along one side of the
ravine. Just past the base of a young oak tree, he found what he was
looking for: a clump of marijuana plants nestled in a foot-wide depression.

The five plants weren't very big - about a foot high - or very healthy. But
about 5 feet beyond that first group, there was another indentation and
group of plants, and then another and then another. Past that, the
irrigation tubing wound around a corner and eventually alongside more than
1,500 plants on multiple terraces in the oak-shrouded ravine.

Before he followed the tubing to the rest of the garden, Wilkinson had work
to do. Reaching down and grabbing the little plants at their base, he
yanked them out of the loose soil.

"There you go," he said, holding them up.

Cops and growers

Earlier that morning, as he drove east on Betteravia and then the dirt
roads that lead into the Los Padres National Forest, Wilkinson explained
how marijuana is grown.

Wilkinson's a casual guy - he wears his hair pulled back into a tiny
ponytail when he's out in the field - and his exuberance for his job was
evident as he steered his SUV into the dawn-tinged hills.

The Sheriff's Department, he said, starts looking for gardens in June,
after most growers have transplanted their seedlings from indoor growing
facilities to the mountains. After that, it's a cat-and-mouse game between
the two sides: The growers try to stay away - Wilkinson's seen highly
sophisticated setups where growers use a variety of timers and watering
systems to keep their garden growing - and the lawmen start their aerial
surveillance.

At some point in the summer, the growers have to come back and pull out the
male plants so that they don't pollinate the females and also trim back the
female plants to "stress" them and increase their potency. But all the
while, Sheriff's Department and National Guard helicopters are clattering
through the county's forested canyons.

Wilkinson said that hikers and hunters find a few gardens, but trained
spotters in helicopters, which literally skim the treetops, discover the
vast majority. They look for the all-black or blue-striped drip irrigation
tubing, he said, and the color and quality of green that's unique to
marijuana plants.

Pilots note the GPS coordinates of the gardens they find, and by
mid-summer, crews start eradicating. They hike into some gardens,
helicopters airlift them into others, but in every case, the deputies cut
down or pull out every plant they find. After that, a helicopter flies the
pot down to the southern half of the county where a tractor repeatedly
drives over the plants and then buries the crushed and ruined stalks.

Wilkinson said he's amazed by the amount of work and care people put into
their gardens: the miles of irrigation tubing, the fertilizers, the
watering timers. But it makes sense, considering how much money growers can
get for their crops. Each well-tended plant can produce about a pound of
buds - the part of the plant that's dried and smoked by users. And at the
retail level, depending on the potency of those buds, a pound can gross as
much as $5,000.

The question is, who's growing these gardens? Wilkinson said that based on
the size, location, and number of plants, today's grower was probably a
local who knew the area well. But more and more, narcotics officers are
finding gardens they claim are grown and funded by Mexico-based drug cartels.

That's a sentiment that Christina Clem with the California Attorney
General's office echoed. Her office heads the Campaign Against Marijuana
Planting, or CAMP as it's commonly known. Funded by various state and
federal grants, CAMP is made up of about 40 members from the U.S. Forest
Service, National Guard, and various sheriff's departments that assist
local narcotics units with eradicating pot gardens.

Clem said law enforcement knows Mexican organizations are involved from
three main indicators: Mexico-specific trash found at gardens, arrests that
are made, and from what she called "our ongoing investigations." But other
than that, neither she nor Wilkinson could be more specific on why
officials are sure that cartels are running so many gardens.

When it comes to this year's violence, Clem said that some of it could be
tied to those groups, but regardless, it was highly unusual: "It's not
normal. Normally we don't see this kind of violence."

The Shasta and Butte County gardens where officers shot four suspects were
large-scale operations worth millions of dollars, she said, and CAMP
connected them to Mexican drug organizations based on their size and the
fact that undocumented immigrants were tending the grows.

But as for why they opened fire, "we don't know why they were willing to
take that step. Maybe they were acting on the orders of superiors, but we
don't really know," she said. "Usually when we come upon suspects in a
garden and they see it's law enforcement, they either turn and run or they
surrender.

"It's unusual for them to take aim."

The North Coast connection

Joe Smith* grows pot.

Some years it's four or five plants; some years closer to 10; but either
way, for the past 15 years of his life, Smith's had a close relationship
with the drug.

A Santa Barbara County native, Smith moved to Humboldt County about five
years ago. There, he became involved in what's known as the medical
marijuana movement after his family practitioner recommended he try the
drug to help with his anxiety and mood disorders. Now, under the protection
of 1996's Proposition 215, he grows several pounds of pot every year for
himself and several other medical marijuana patients.

Articulate and softspoken, the late-20-something-year-old is a far cry from
the Hollywood-esque cliche of a stoner. And he's quick to point out the
huge difference between the medical-marijuana and commercial-growing
cultures. Medical marijuana is used by a doctor's recommendation and is
arguably not grown or sold for commercial uses, he said, so attitudes
toward violence are completely different than what's happening at the
larger gardens.

Having grown up in Santa Barbara County, Smith said he's seen the growing
culture change from a "hippies and back-to-the-landers" philosophy to a
much more commercial mindset. But one point that he would argue against is
that there's some kind of "invasion of Mexicans" in the county's gardens.

"Santa Barbara is just a phenomenal climate to grow in," he said. "The
whole [idea that the] Mexican Mafia running the growing scene is partly, I
would argue, racist. I hear that all the time, but I am a little skeptical
of it. It seems like a lot of Santa Barbara County Sheriffs' racist
presumptions.

"There is some truth to it," he continued. "I mean, a lot of Mexicans are
involved, and not just in the methamphetamine labs but working in the [pot]
fields, and that's kind of a new phenomenon in the history of marijuana
cultivation in California … . [But] as far as I know, I think there's more
independents out there."

As for the increased violence this year, Smith couldn't point his finger at
a specific reason. But one thing that has to be acknowledged, he said, is
that "the market value of pot has increased dramatically over the past 10
years."

"The price doubled at one point, and now [pot costs] the same price per
weight as gold. I think that's when it got more organized and bigger groups
got involved. Whites as well as Latinos as well as every culture have got
their own thing going."

A couple hours' drive south of Smith's home in Humboldt is Mendocino
County. The equally rural area is one of the top marijuana producers in the
nation, and in the 30 years Bruce Anderson has lived there, he's reported
on a lot of the turmoil that surrounds that industry.

In 1984, Anderson took over the reigns of the county's most vociferous
weekly newspaper - the Anderson Valley Weekly - and at about that time, he
saw the emergence of large-scale grows. That's when, he said, the
"botanical genius" of local growers perfected more potent strains which,
because of high retail value, spurred people's desire to grow a lot of pot
very quickly.

"As marijuana prices rose, along with it came this massive immigration to
work in the vineyards. A lot of the guys who end up growing pot are
seasonal vineyard workers in Mendocino County." And there are definitely
growers who are connected with the criminal cartels who distribute meth and
pot up and down I-5, he said. "It's certainly organized, and it isn't
mom-and-pop counterculture hippie-types anymore."

Anderson thinks this year's violence has something to do with the price
drop that he's seen over the past two years. He said that people jokingly
refer to the Sheriff's Department and CAMP as the "price support unit"
because they cut down so much, it keeps the price high. "But so much is
being grown now that prices are coming down anyway."

And as a result, he continued, "certain people are getting squeezed.
Particularly the middlemen, and they, in turn, are squeezing their supplier
… and it sometimes results in violence. It's already a pretty violent time
of year anyway … but this year there has been a number of murders.

"It's a huge cash crop, and any time you have a lot of cash, there's going
to people trying to rip it off," Anderson said later in the conversation.
"It's pretty ruthless."

Back on the farm

Up in the Los Padres National Forest, it took Wilkinson and his team more
than an hour to eradicate the sprawling garden. Each man slowly walked
along the narrow terraces yanking out the plants, counting how many came up
with each handful, and methodically hacking the irrigation tubing into
unusable sections.

After piling up the plants - none of which were higher than about two feet
- - the deputies added up their separate counts. In all, they pulled up 1,529
plants.

"If these would have gotten enough light, this would have been huge,"
Wilkinson said, holding his hand shoulder-high over the pile. "It would
have taken four helicopter loads."

"This is just funny," agreed one of the other deputies. "But they had
planned on making a lot of bucks."

By the time the deputies tied the plants into two bundles and threw them
over their shoulders, the sun was peeking over the rim of the canyon, and
it was getting hot. Wilted pot leaves caught on the bushes as the men
climbed, and the pungent smell of marijuana followed them up to the to the
road.

On the ride back to Santa Maria, Wilkinson said that the garden was
probably the last one they'd eradicate in Northern Santa Barbara County
this year.

"There's the potential for a couple more," he said. "But we've flown the
hell out of it. And not just us, the National Guard, too."

A few days later, when the bust and the previous week's violence had had a
chance to soak in, Wilkinson had a little more to say about how the
county's pot gardens affect Santa Maria.

First off, he said, people shouldn't worry, but they should care: The pot
is being sold in the community, and there are ramifications from that.

But even more importantly, the growers are using forest property where
people hunt or picnic or hike with their families. In the five years he's
worked eradicating about 100 gardens, Wilkinson said he's only encountered
one suspect, but Santa Marians are entitled to go out into the forest
without having to worry about booby traps or a guy with a gun. Look at that
hunter in Ventura County who was shot at, he pointed out.

"Who's to say; it's just a matter of time before someone may actually get
killed," he continued. "That's where you've got to care.

"That's where you have to have concern, that it's going on in your county
in an area that you have access to."

[sidebar]

Busted!

This year, Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department emplyees estimated that they
pulled about 5,000 plants from seven outdoor gardens over the growing
season. But last year was much more fruitful. That year, California
narcotics officers destroyed more than one million plants in outdoor
gardens and arrested 643 people associated with those grows.

County: # of plants: # of arrests

San Diego: 395,156: 48

Mendocino: 116,911: 17

Tulare: 98,926: 61

Riverside: 76,502: 131

San Bernadino: 61,806: 84

Fresno: 46,231: 42

Shasta: 37,569: 20

Tehama: 37,266: 10

Tuolumne: 36,721: 13

Santa Barbara: 30,898: 10

[editor's intro to this week's issue]

Though this week marks our annual Fall Habitat issue, our cover story
highlights the sort of garden you wouldn't want to proudly show your
neighbors. Santa Barbara County, like many counties throughout California,
is home to illegal marijuana crops, planted surreptitiously in
little-traveled outdoor areas. However, when such area do happen to get
some foot traffic, - from, say, wayward hikers or hunters - dangerous and
potentially deadly situations could develop. This week, Arts Editor Abraham
Hyatt heads for the hills with the police to see a pot garden for himself,
and explores the drug-growing culture with all of its lows and, um, highs [6].

Once you come down off the mountain, plunge yourself into the ongoing legal
battle over rights to Santa Maria's groundwater [12].

Also this week, travel from the Far East to the Deep South to discover a
spicy Cajun martial art [18], stop by Cafe Monet for a look at local artist
Julia Rodgers' show [26], and visit with a group of drawers and painters
that prefers to create art from life [27].

Finally, drop in on our Fall Habitat section, where alternative
construction ideas, holiday decorating tips, and updates on local housing
are setting up residence. Be sure to wipe your feet first [20].

Ryan Miller, editor