Pubdate: Wed, 01 Sep 2010
Source: Albany Democrat-Herald (OR)
Copyright: 2010 Lee Enterprises
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/HPOp5PfB
Website: http://www.democratherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/7
Bookmark: http://mapinc.org/Area/Mexico

THE CARTELS TOUCH OREGON

It's one thing to read about the war among drug cartels in Mexico. 
It's another to be reminded once again -- by reporting, as the paper 
did Saturday -- that Mexican drug cartels are reaching into Oregon in 
a very direct, tangible and dangerous way.

Linn County Sheriff Tim Mueller says that a major marijuana 
plantation in the woods of Linn County was apparently linked to a 
Mexican drug cartel.

The place was raided on Aug. 20. Deputies and other officers found 
900 plants along with an elaborate watering system. The men who ran 
it, though, fled into the brush and got away.

In Mexico, the news reports tell us, the cartels are fighting about 
the drug routes into the United States. If so, what's to keep them 
from starting to fight about their plantations in Oregon?

This is no game. It is not just a rougher side of some harmless 
recreation. On Aug. 11 in Jackson County, a Mexican national armed 
with a shotgun, who had been working at a pot plantation, was shot to 
death when law enforcement raided the place and he made a move as 
though to fire.

Last week a grand jury in Medford took five minutes to find the 
shooting justified. But for good reasons, authorities kept 
confidential the names of the deputies who fired at the man. District 
Attorney Mark Huddleston said officers in California had become 
targets for the cartels' retaliation in similar circumstances.

It goes without saying that stomping out the tentacles of foreign 
drug operations has to be a top priority of law enforcement, and not 
just locally.

The Oregon attorney general has been eager to conduct himself as the 
top law enforcement official in Oregon. If he hasn't done so already, 
let him launch an initiative that finds and destroys all similar 
plantations in Oregon and catch the men that operate them.

This situation seems almost like an armed foreign invasion. That 
means it would warrant involvement by the National Guard and whatever 
equipment it has, including helicopters, to locate the pot farms deep 
in Oregon woods, and then call in units to surround them with enough 
troops so that the operators cannot escape.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom