Pubdate: Thu, 21 Nov 2013
Source: Chico News & Review, The (CA)
Copyright: 2013 Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.newsreview.com/chico/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/559
Author: David Downs

BLAME THE POLICY, NOT THE PLANT

How America's War on Marijuana Destroys the Environment

The photo looks like something out of a horror film: A long, thin
animal lays dissected on a white table. Metal tools pull the animal's
skin back to reveal its jellied, maroon-colored insides-all soupy,
slick and lumpy. It's the remains of a Pacific fisher, an 8-pound
member of the weasel family that's now hovering near extinction,
thanks in part to illegal marijuana farming in the vast forests of
California.

Fishers eat forest mice, and forest mice nibble the green stalks of
still-maturing pot plants. So illicit growers, who toil deep inside
California's forests, spread powerful rodenticides-rat poison-on the
ground near their cannabis crops. The mice eat the poisonous
anticoagulants, get sick, and then the fishers eat the mice. Soon
after, the furry forest weasels are melting from the inside out.

Mourad Gabriel, a UC Davis doctoral student who has been researching
the health of fishers across the state, showed me the photo, which he
took as part of several years of research on the animal. Gabriel's
studies show that about 86 percent of fishers in California have been
exposed to rodenticides, and that the percentage has been increasing
in recent years.

The habitat range for fishers also overlaps nearly perfectly with
known illegal marijuana grows on public and private lands in the
state. Called "trespass grows," they've been found in medium-to
old-growth forests in remote areas that range in elevation from sea
level up to 6,000 feet, including the foothills and forests near Chico.

Hard-line drug warriors in California and in Washington, D.C., along
with environmental groups and the media, have seized upon Gabriel's
work this year. And, largely because of him, the Pacific fisher has
become the 2013 mascot for environmental degradation wrought by
pot-farming.

But some Northern California officials who are on the frontlines of
combating trespass grows say they're only a symptom of a much larger
problem: the drug war itself.

Blame pot-or blame the war on pot?

"My jaw dropped when I saw that study," said Brad Henderson, who plans
habitat conservation for the California Department of Fish and
Wildlife, referring to Gabriel's research.

In one study of 58 dead fishers, 79 percent had been exposed to
rodenticides, and four died as a direct result of the
anticoagulants.

Gabriel also documented the first incidence of a mother fisher
transferring the poison to her offspring through her milk.

In another study, a male fisher was found dead in a marijuana trespass
grow on July 31, with a pesticide-laden hot dog still in his throat.
(The fisher didn't choke on the hot dog. He was poisoned by an
insecticide "associated with a marijuana cultivation site," Gabriel
wrote in one of his studies.

"It means there's no place safe for wildlife in California," Henderson
explained. "You can go way into the backcountry, and you got
anticoagulant in predators."

New federal laws in the works would stiffen fines for trespass grows.
State officials are also assembling a 40-agency task force to tackle
the problem.

And the media-including Mother Jones, The New York Times and The
Associated Press-has piled on coverage of the environmental dangers
posed by trespass farms, including dead fishers; fish kills in streams
sucked dry by pot-growing; illegal logging, grading and chemical use;
and the lack of erosion controls.

"I think it has reached a fever pitch," said Gabriel of the news
coverage. "I think it's an escalating fever. We haven't hit the top of
it. We're just scratching the surface. The more we scratch, the higher
that fever is going to climb."

In fact, an increasing number of law-enforcement officials in the
state and throughout the nation are now pointing to the environmental
destruction caused by trespass grows as justification for continuing
the war on drugs and increasing government spending to stamp out
marijuana production.

Amplified by a willing national media, the environmental harms caused
by pot have become "the new reefer madness," said well-known marijuana
historian Dominic Corva.

Others say the war on drugs itself is to blame for the environmental
damage wrought by cannabis grows.

Butte County Supervisor Bill Connelly, a conservative who describes
himself as "definitely not an environmentalist," shares this belief.
He contends that ramping up the war on pot because of trespass grows
will ultimately fail to either eradicate the farms or protect Mother
Nature. As a result, he's calling for the legalization of marijuana
nationwide, joining a cadre of unlikely advocates on the right,
including current Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Downey.

They argue that if pot becomes legal, then marijuana production will
come out of the shadows and into the light, where pot will be grown
legitimately on traditional farms like other crops. At that point,
there'll be no need for growers to head deep into the woods to produce
weed, poisoning animals in the process.

Although cannabis remains illegal under federal law, Americans consume
an estimated 2,500 to 5,000 metric tons of marijuana each year,
according to data from the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. About 30
million Americans smoke or eat cannabis products annually, and about 6
million people use pot daily. Weed is the second-most popular
recreational substance in the nation, behind alcohol.

Two-thirds of the pot consumed in the United States comes from Mexico,
while about one-fifth of it is grown domestically, according to RAND
estimates. California produces more weed than any other state and,
according to a 2010 Central Valley California High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area program report, may account for as much as 79 percent
of all domestically grown marijuana.

The federal drug war also has had a huge impact on Northern
California, said Corva, a Sarah Lawrence College professor who spent
several years in Humboldt County doing an ethnographic history of
pot-growing, and now also runs a cannabis-cultivation think tank in
Seattle. Big swaths of this region were ravaged and abandoned by
logging in the 19th and 20th centuries, and then some of those areas
were resettled by back-to-the-land hippies in the 1970s, Corva said.
Many liberal activists had dropped out of society after the upheavals
of the 1960s, and for them, dope was just another plant in the garden.

Today, $1 out of every $4 in Humboldt County's economy can be traced
to the weed industry, and the area's rise to dominance in marijuana
production can be traced directly to the drug war.

Make no mistake: People grow pot for the money-either to save cash by
growing what they personally need or to make money by selling it
themselves, exporting it to other states or cultivating it for
medical-pot collectives. Americans spend an estimated $15 billion to
$30 billion per year on weed. The value of the nation's cannabis per
square foot is five times greater than that of poppies or coca,
according to RAND.

Currently, a pound of Mexican marijuana costs $50 in Mexico, $500 when
it crosses the border, and up to $1,400 by the time it reaches New
York. And a pound of high-grade California indoor-grown marijuana
sells for $2,000 here and for $4,000 on the East Coast.

Research shows that traffickers make about $1 for every mile they
drive east from California. But that figure doesn't reflect the actual
cost of producing marijuana; rather, it reflects the risk involved in
doing so. As much as 90 percent of the cost of pot is its risk
premium, according to RAND. About 750,000 people are arrested annually
for violating marijuana laws, and 40,000 people are in state or
federal prison for it. In 2010, the government seized roughly 10
million outdoor plants.

Corva said raising the price of drugs was one of the chief goals of
the drug war. The thinking was: Price increases would dissuade
impoverished users. What actually happened was the potential for
intense profits drew the impoverished into the drug trade.

Today, pot is one of the top 15 cash crops in the United States, RAND
reports. And it's no longer confined to just Northern California.
There are black-market plantations hiding throughout the state's 20
million acres of national forest, as well as in large tracts of
private and tribal lands.

Media portrayals of marijuana farming over the decades typically
focused on the guns and violence associated with drug cartels. But in
2013, environmental harms became the central focus of the war on pot.

"We don't grow tomatoes in Yosemite"

>From above, the forests of Northern California appear to have chicken
pox.

Patches of rusty-colored boils dot the rugged, sun-beaten timberlands
of southern Humboldt County. Swooping down into the region from the
God's-eye view provided by Google Earth, the rusty patches expand to
reveal clear-cut hilltops.

Humboldt State University environmental sociologist Anthony Silvaggio
counts 600 of these patches covering the southern section of the
county, each one centered over bald mountaintops arrayed with outdoor
pot plants and greenhouses.

"And that's not all of them. ... There are hundreds more," he
said.

Zooming in and out on each site on his computer, Silvaggio noted how
the farms are collectively sucking fragile watersheds dry. Then
there's the illegal logging and the rampant use of animal poisons-plus
insecticides, herbicides, fungicides-and high-nutrient fertilizers.
When the fall and winter rains come, uncontrolled erosion follows. A
toxic brew of chemicals and dirt washes downhill into protected areas
like the Eel River.

The destruction is happening all across California
now.

Created in November 2012, Silvaggio's research video got picked up by
Mother Jones in February of this year and retitled "Google Earth
Reveals Devastation Caused by Marijuana Growers." A story by The New
York Times followed. The Associated Press piled on, and Dan Rather
recently toured the region in a helicopter for a report on AXS TV.

In Butte County, Connelly, whose District 1 includes Oroville and the
eastern foothills, where marijuana growing is rampant, has taken
reporters to trespass grows on steep, 45-degree hillsides on private
land. The illegal farms are studded with denuded trees and littered
with poisons and fertilizers. During one tour, he looked downhill and
described the fall rains sweeping it all-the chemicals and the toxic
soil-down into the creeks, rivers and lakes.

"It definitely has gone up in the last few years," he said of the
number of trespass grows.

But are the impacts from pot-growing larger, or are we just paying
more attention to them? The answer appears to be both.

As far back as 1983, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting made
mention of environmental damage associated with forest grows, said
Silvaggio. "The problem is not new. Everyone has known about this
problem for many decades."

For example, the back-to-the-landers who seeded Humboldt's pot
industry were tree-hugging environmentalists first, and they have long
been furious about the second wave of growers who moved in to wreak
the same type of havoc as the loggers once did. Groups such as the
Environmental Protection Information Center, Friends of the Eel River,
and the Mattole Forest Futures Project have been advocating for clean
pot-growing techniques-including water reclamation, erosion control
and organic growing methods-since the 1990s. They've gotten a number
of environmental groups in Northern California fired up about the
issue for at least a decade.

The clamor for more eco-conscious pot-growing hit a new peak in 2008
with the Hacker Creek diesel spill that fouled a whole watershed.
"That broke the code of silence right there, and then people came
out," Silvaggio noted.

But experts say what has really amplified the issue this year are two
factors: Federal law enforcement has made environmentalism a new
platform of the marijuana war, and the coverage by the media-which
never tires of stories that combine shadowy, violent drug cartels with
weapons, weed and helicopters-can now add cute dead animals to the
mix.

Humboldt State University sociologist Josh Meisel said he caught a
glimpse of the federal government's new messaging on pot two years ago
in a meeting with Tommy LaNier, head of the White House's National
Marijuana Initiative. According to Meisel, LaNier said federal
authorities "recognize that public opinion has shifted, and they can't
wage this battle on the historic platform of it being an issue of morality."

According to Meisel, LaNier said, "The public doesn't buy that
anymore. We aren't going to win this as a battle of morality. We have
to wage it in terms of the environmental destruction."

And in a podcast produced by the U.S. Forest Service in August 2009,
then U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said he wanted to build a
coalition based on the environmental harms of pot-growing.

"What seems to be missing from the regular media-reporting on the
whole issue is how much damage is occurring to really pristine land,"
Kerlikowske said.

LaNier said in the same podcast: "We need to bring in ... the Sierra
Club, environmental individuals; we need to bring in as many people,
to get them on our side to go to Congress and say, 'Hey, this is
enough. Those are pristine lands that were set aside for the use of
the public, not for the production of marijuana.'"

The shift in strategy is traveling up and down the chain of command.
For example, in a 2013 report on the results of a Central Valley
marijuana sweep dubbed Operation Mercury, Benjamin B. Wagner, the U.S.
attorney based in Sacramento, trumpeted the seizure of a half-million
marijuana plants and the prosecution of 84 suspects.

But, instead of focusing on charges of drug trafficking, violence or
weapons, Wagner's office highlighted the environmental damage that the
suspects had allegedly caused.

One 26-year-old Mexican citizen who was caught growing 16,205 plants
in Sequoia National Forest "caused extensive damage to the land and
natural resources," Wagner's office stated.

"Native vegetation was cut to make room for the marijuana plants, and
trash and fertilizer containers were scattered throughout the site,
including in flowing streams."

Another Mexican citizen who was convicted of growing 8,876 pot plants
cut down native oak trees: "The soil was tilled, and fertilizers and
pesticides, including a highly toxic and illegal rat poison from
Mexico called fosfuro de zinc, or zinc phosphide, were spread
throughout the site," Wagner's office noted.

And even on the White House's Web page on marijuana, the environment
gets its own section, in which the administration states, "Outdoor
marijuana cultivation is harmful to the environment."

Corva laughed when I read him the White House's statement. "That's
ridiculous," he said. "Outdoor is better.

"Where does this come from?" he continued. "Sensationalist coverage of
the exception rather than the rule, and also the conditions of
prohibition, basically."

Meisel added: "There's nothing about growing dope that has to involve
massive amounts of energy, dangerous chemicals, water diversion,
disrespect to your neighbors and killing animal species-just like we
don't have to do that growing tomatoes. And we don't grow tomatoes in
Yosemite.

"These are unintended consequences of the policy, not the
plant."

Prohibition's failure

Meisel said that the greenwashing of the war on pot "has become a tool
to break the back of the legalization movement," referring to the
decision by drug-war enforcers to shift their rhetoric from the
supposed dangers of smoking weed to the environmental damage caused by
trespass grows in order to gain support among environmentalists for
the war on pot. "It's a strategy to undermine local growing across the
board, as opposed to going after people who are violating
environmental laws."

Norms have shifted around marijuana consumption, Silvaggio said.
"Presidents have smoked weed. But there's a need to keep it illegal.
There's this particular function it provides-that is law-enforcement
money.

"So they've switched tracks," Silvaggio continued. "And this track has
proved very useful."

But the way to halt environmental harms caused by growing pot isn't
through a new campaign against weed: It's through legalization,
taxation and regulation of cannabis, said Downey, the Humboldt County
sheriff, during a public meeting with North Bay Congressman Jared
Huffman on Aug. 29. "I've never been a big fan of legalization,"
Downey told the crowd. "But right now, I think that's the most logical
way to end this drug war."

After all, it was the drug war that sent growers into the forest in
the first place. And farming in the woods offers no particular
advantage for growers-other than allowing them to avoid detection by
law enforcement.

"Are they up there for the dry weather, great soil and ample water?"
asked celebrity growing instructor Ed Rosenthal. "No, they're up there
because it's hard to get caught."

Legalizing marijuana and growing it on traditional farms, alongside
other crops, also will eliminate the risks currently associated with
pot production and distribution-and likely will reduce costs
dramatically. According to RAND estimates, fully legalized,
commercially farmed high-grade pot would cost just $20 per pound to
produce. And low-grade weed would cost only $5 per pound. With profit
margins so low, there simply would be no incentive to spend four
filthy months growing weed in bear-infested backwoods, Silvaggio and
other advocates of legalization point out.

Plus, farming marijuana out in the open would be much better for the
environment-there would be no need, for example, to siphon water
illegally from creeks and streams. And pesticide and insecticide use
could be regulated-like it is for any other crop.

"If it was grown like corn or hemp, it would be regulated, including
the discharge of chemicals and the amount of water used and the way
you grade," said Connelly. In addition, organic pot-growing likely
would sprout as a major industry.

And because cannabis is a highly productive plant, it wouldn't take up
that much farmland. According to a RAND study, just 10,000 acres of
intensively farmed land could grow all the dope Americans consume each
year.

California's estimated share would total only 1,600 acres. By
comparison, the state currently dedicates about 150,000 acres to
pistachio growing each year.

The relaxation of pot prohibition has already caused price drops in
California, Colorado and Washington, but this half-solution has caused
existing farmers to plant more to make up for lost profits. It's going
to take a true market crash from national legalization and regulation
to halt wildland growing forever. "I think we'd see a decrease slowly
in environmental harms, and then it would be minimal," Silvaggio said.
"Long term, we'd see a recovery in the ecosystem."

"Prohibition has failed and it needs to end," he continued. "If we
didn't have prohibition, we would see this problem go away."