Pubdate: Thursday, September 25, 1997 Source: San Francisco Examiner Pot growth soars, as do raids of harvests By Eric Brazil OF THE EXAMINER STAFF Northern California's marijuana harvest won't be over until first frost, but law enforcement officials have already reached two conclusions about the 1997 crop: *There's more pot being grown. *Mexican nationals have made big inroads into growing what used to be a strictly local cash crop. Hard numbers support the first conclusion. Pot raiders are destroying more plants than at any other time in the '90s. In Mendocino County, authorities have never grabbed more. It's the first harvest since Proposition 215 legalized marijuana for medicinal use in California. The second conclusion is based mainly on circumstantial evidence: cultivation methods similar to those used in Mexico, and debris like stale tortillas, Mexican flags and Spanish literature found at raided pot gardens. But Special Agent Bill Ruzzimenti, who supervises marijuana investigations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, has no doubt that the trend is real. "Mexican organizations are coming in and taking over," Ruzzimenti said. "These are polydrug organizations with the wherewithal and access to money and the established distribution systems (for heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines) to set up illegal marijuana gardens." He said the Mexican growers were also "taking advantage of illegals (undocumented workers). They say, "Work for us, and we'll give you a green card and keep you in the states,' which is just a crock." "This is total racist bull," countered Ed Denson of the Humboldt County Civil Liberties Monitoring Project in Redway. "Everyone I know up here who's growing marijuana is a lifetime resident, and they seem to be growing it for the (medical marijuana) clubs," said Denson, a member of the Humboldt County committee charged with figuring out how to implement Prop. 215. "Where are all these Mexican drug lords? We never see them." Authorities predicted a big jump in the marijuana harvest when Prop. 215 passed last November despite allout opposition from Attorney General Dan Lungren and California's law enforcement establishment. That prediction has materialized in the thinly populated mountains of Humboldt, Mendocino, Trinity and Del Norte counties the socalled "Emerald Triangle." "There's more being grown and in a more blatant style this year," said Humboldt County Sheriff's Lt. Steve Cobine, who has flown over those mountains scouting pot gardens to raid for a decade. "It's easily recognized from the air, compared to what's been going on in the past." California's pot cops the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting had eradicated 116,500 marijuana plants as of Tuesday morning, compared with 94,221 for all of 1996, CAMP director Walter Kaiser said. It's the first time this decade that CAMP raiders have destroyed as many as 100,000 plants and they've done it with a budget of $500,000, compared with budgets of $2.3 million to $2.9 million during the 1980s. CAMP employs local cops and uses federal and state funds. The peak of the harvestraiding season when dealers are selling the last of the previous harvest coincides with a spike in the perpound price of highgrade sinsemilla marijuana to about $5,000. "It's a seasonal thing, a period of scarcity," said Dennis Peron, founder of San Francisco's Cannabis Cultivators Club. "In another month (when the harvest is in), the price will drop." Law enforcement has also observed a trend in the size of marijuana gardens. "We're starting to see outdoor gardens with 1,000plus plants, more than we've seen in the past 10 years," Ruzzimenti said. "We're getting industrialsized gardens of 3,000 to 4,000 plants, which is really against the norm" of small gardens raided during the past five years, said Pat Lyng, assistant regional special agent for law enforcement for the U.S. Forest Service in California. David Burns, who is in charge of antimarijuana operations for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Northern California, said that "over the last four years there's been a distinct trend for more Mexican growers to be involved" in the industry. "Some areas are almost all Hispanic, and others are dominated by freezedried hippies." The marijuana acreage increase and the growing influence of Mexican nationals are evident in Mendocino County, local authorities say. "We're actually sitting on the largest total (of plants destroyed) we've ever seen," said Sgt. Ron Caudillo of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department." The presence of Mexican nationals in the Mendocino County marijuana business was first noticed in 1992, and now they have become dominant, Caudillo said. "You can tell by the difference in cultivation and the style of cultivation," he said. "Once you get into an operation, you can tell whether it's a Mexican grow or a whiteboy grow. Traditional growers will take the time to plant one per hole, put it into buckets or bags, have drip irrigation to each one and sometimes a fence around each. With a Mexican grow it looks like rowcropping, like a little miniorchard," he said. Cobine said he had been impressed with the care Mexican growers took with their operations in Humboldt County. Once, during a longrange surveillance of a marijuana garden, "I watched them (appear to) repeatedly fall down while they were carrying bags down a trail, and I finally figured out that they were picking up dry cow pies and depositing them on the trail to make it look like a cow path," Cobine said. "That's the kind of real meticulous stuff they do. They get dropped off by a boss man and walk in with all their equipment" and stay there. Caudillo and Cobine said that Mexican marijuana gardeners in contrast to locals tended to live in or near their gardens. "Local growers have learned not to leave a whole lot of evidence behind them," BLM's Burns said. "Mexican growers tend to be bigger, and there's a difference in the way their gardens are constructed and concealed. They tend to make small tunnels (through bushes or branches concealing the plots), and you have to get on your hands and knees and crawl into the gardens. Local growers use foot trails." Although the woods are full of tales of violence associated with outlaw marijuana growing, this year's experience seems to be fairly benign, said Caudillo, who's office right now is at the center of local pot eradication efforts. "We haven't had any violence so far," he said. But appearances may be deceiving, said DEA's San Francisco spokesman Stan Vegar. "In the Fresno area, a lot of people are turning up in the fields with holes in them," he said. "These killings are unsolved, but it sounds like somebody took care of business. It's not as blatant as crack violence it seems to be within their own groups. Hopefully, that won't spread." Burns said that in his experience "more Mexican growers tend to be armed than local growers, and there's a greater level of violence associated with them. From a law enforcement perspective, as well as that of users of public land, that should be of some concern." David Fratella, a spokesman for Californians for Medical Rights, which spearheaded the passage of Prop. 215, said the socalled Mexican menace was a law enforcement fantasy. "This really does sound like propaganda to make the whole problem sound worse than it really is," he said.