Pubdate: Sun, 27 Feb 2000
Source: The Orange County Register (CA)
Copyright: 2000 The Orange County Register
Contact:  P.O. Box 11626, Santa Ana, CA 92711
Fax: (714) 565-3657
Website: http://www.ocregister.com/
Section: News, page 33
Author: Pauline Arrillaga, The Associated Press

U.S. FORESTS A CASUALTY IN DRUG WAR

ENVIRONMENT: Much Of The Nation's Marijuana Is Tilled On Public Lands, And 
Pesticides Used By Growers Are Poisoning Waterways And Wildlife.

San Bernardino National Forest -- They were spotted from the air, as 
conspicuous as sharks in a school of guppies: Three plots of land, 
seemingly stripped of the towering oaks and manzanitas that shroud this 
patch of Southern California forest.

These were not natural formations. They were entirely man-made - and 
entirely illegal.

A week after the August sighting, a helicopter returned with two dozen 
Forest Service agents and sheriff's detectives. They cleared a landing pad 
and cut a trail into the site, coming first to a makeshift reservoir. Six 
hoses, filtering water from a creek, ran in one end; several more snaked 
back out the other.

Moving on, the agents reached the first clearing. They'd been right.

In place of the trees this forest is meant to protect stood a grove of 
emerald stalks, 6 to 15 feet tall. They were in full bloom - robust and 
ready for harvest.

On two acres of prime forest land, about a half-hour from the city of San 
Bernardino and 11/2 hours from Los Angeles, these agents had discovered the 
last battle-ground in the war on drugs: a 23,000-plant marijuana plantation.

As money and manpower continue to flow to the Southwest border to stop 
illegal drugs coming into this country, traffickers - many employed by 
Mexican drug gangs - are producing vast quantities of marijuana right here 
in the United States, on land owned by the federal government.

The reasons are obvious: the land is fertile, remote and free. There's no 
risk of forfeiture, plantations are difficult to trace, and growers have 
land agents outmanned, outspent and outgunned.

"We spend a lot of time and energy stopping stuff from coming into this 
country, but we don't really pay much attention to our own back yard," said 
Dan Bauer, the Forest Service's drug-program coordinator.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that more 
than half of the marijuana consumed in the United States is produced 
domestically. Much of that - no one knows how much for sure - is grown on 
public lands, primarily the country's 155 national forests.

Pesticides used by the illegal growers poison wildlife and waterways, 
although the crop's danger is not just environmental. Park visitors run the 
risk of tripping booby traps or encountering armed gangs. After stumbling 
upon a marijuana farm, some visitors have been run off at gunpoint, Bauer 
said. Forest Service agents have sometimes exchanged gunfire with growers.

The public's perception of the drug war is a border agent pulling bundles 
of narcotics from the bed of a truck, Bauer said. "They very rarely think 
of the poor forest agent crawling through the bush."

In 1999, 452,330 marijuana plants were removed from national forest land, 
mostly in California and Kentucky. With each plant estimated to produce at 
least 2.2 pounds of pot, that's 995,126 pounds of marijuana, with an 
estimated value of about $700 million.

By comparison, the U.S. Customs Service seized 989,369 pounds of marijuana 
along the Southwest border in fiscal year 1999, while the Border Patrol 
confiscated just under 1.2 million pounds.

The difference: Customs has 2,900 inspectors and agents manning Southwest 
ports of entry; the Border Patrol has 7,761 agents patrolling between those 
ports.

There are just 588 Forest Service agents and officers assigned to 192 
million acres of national forests, a decline from 625 officers in 1996. 
That's nearly 330,000 acres per officer, and only one of them is dedicated 
full time to drug enforcement.

Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug in the United States, with about 
11 million users, including 8.3 percent of teens, according to government 
statistics.

One nationwide program is dedicated to the problem of U.S. -produced 
marijuana - the Drug Enforcement Administration's Domestic Cannabis 
Eradication and Suppression Program. It receives 1 percent of the agency's 
$1.4 billion budget. In 1998 the DEA reported seizing 2.5 million U.S.- 
produced marijuana plants, including 232,000 indoor plants. However, those 
seizures were done in coordination with state and local agencies; the DEA 
doesn't track seizures done by public-land agencies.

"Issues dealing with cocaine and heroin and drugs that people are dying 
from tend to have a higher priority as far as enforcement goes," DEA 
spokesman Terry Parham said.

Public lands have long been targeted by marijuana producers, but 
investigators trace a rise in production to the 1980s, when the government 
enacted more stringent asset forfeiture laws.

Before that, "if you were caught growing pot on your own property, you 
wouldn't lose your property," Bauer said. "People could grow corn rows of 
marijuana literally in corn fields."

In the late '80s and early '90, the profile of a typical grower was a 
"white, hippie-type" running 100- to 1,000- plant farms, agents said. These 
days the mom-and-pop operations are far outnumbered by major pot 
plantations, ranging in size from 1,000 to 10,000 plants or more.

In the Southeast, old moonshining families now run marijuana farms. But 
that's only part of the problem in places like Kentucky's Daniel Boone 
National Forest, which consistently ranks first among national forests in 
marijuana seizures.

"It's a large unorganized coalition of people that live very close to 
national forest lands who are generally very close to the poverty level and 
looking for any way to try to make a dollar," said Jack Gregory, special 
agent in charge of the Forest Service's Southern region.

In the Southwest, Bauer said, most pot operations are run by Mexican drug 
organizations that either ship crews across the border or hire undocumented 
immigrants to do the work.

"Just the cost of doing business up here makes it great," said Mike Wirz, a 
narcotics detective with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department who 
works with the Forest Service to investigate marijuana groves on federal 
property.

Wirx also said that by growing their product in the United States, Mexican 
cartels eliminate the extra cost and risk of paying a courier to bring 
drugs into the country.

"This is the land of the free. This is the best thing you could ever ask 
for," said Wirz, who believes the federal government has played down the 
significance of the problem. "The United States, and even the Drug 
Enforcement Administration, doesn't want to admit that we're being 
bombarded with domestic marijuana and it's being run by non-U.S. citizens."

Six months after they located the 23,000-plants pot farm in the San 
Bernardino Forest, Wirz and Forest Service agent Denese Stokes returned to 
the site. They flew in to the same helicopter pad, hiked down the same path 
their agents had carved into the land.

The marijuana was long gone, but the destruction remained.

Dried pot stalks, unusable on the market, dotted the three main growing 
plots and numerous smaller plots linked by an intricate network of trails. 
Where vegetation native to these lands remained, figures of women and 
Spanish phrases were carved into the trees, many of which are considered 
endangered.

"People are of the opinion, 'Well, they're just growing a plant out there; 
what's the big deal?' The environmental damage that it does is horrific," 
Stokes said.

She believes as many as eight people operated the farm, though none was 
arrested. They escaped amid the maze of trails they had cut into the forest.

"They'll be back again somewhere," Stokes said. "They won't stop; there's 
too much money in it."