Five years after California voters approved cannabis legalization,\u00a0police are still conducting militarized raids on illicit grows, especially those in the Emerald Triangle and hidden on public land. <\/p>\n
Often, police justify these raids \u2014 politically risky given a populace that favors decriminalization \u2014 by pointing to the\u00a0ecological tolls<\/a>\u00a0of the unregulated cannabis cultivation sites. For example, in a recent raid of a 9,000-plant grow in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest,\u00a0authorities found<\/a>\u00a0clear-cut trees, diverted waterways, and the ground littered with open containers of fertilizer and rodenticide.<\/p>\n But a new group called CROP is now working in California to mitigate the damage of these illicit cannabis grows and it\u2019s composed of a coalition that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: environmental organizations, law enforcement and the legal cannabis sector.<\/p>\n \u201cWe spent two years meeting with tribes, county governments, law enforcement, conservation organizations, timber companies, all the regional stakeholders affected by this issue,\u201d said Rich McIntyre, director of the CROP Project. \u201cAnd that includes meeting with the legal cannabis industry. Today, the legal industry is one of our strongest supporters.\u201d<\/p>\n Cannabis Now reached Rich McIntyre at the offices of\u00a0CROP Project<\/a> (which stands for Cannabis Removal on Public Lands) in Sacramento. He says that some representatives from the legal cannabis industry are on board with CROP in large part because the illicit market continues to undercut the prices of the legal one.<\/p>\n \u201cForty to 70 percent of all black market cannabis in California comes off public lands, and it undercuts the legal market by 50 percent,\u201d McIntyre says. \u201cI can\u00a0walk into dispensaries, and I\u2019m seeing grams for six to fourteen dollars. On the black market, it is typically half that much.\u201d<\/p>\n The CROP Project emerged three years ago from the\u00a0Community Governance Partnership<\/a>, a nonprofit that continues to be the project\u2019s sponsor, and the\u00a0California Wilderness Coalition<\/a>. Their mission:\u00a0\u201cto address seemingly intractable problem of trespass grows on public lands.\u201d<\/p>\n McIntyre sees the CROP Project\u2019s role as primarily to spread awareness about the situation.<\/p>\n \u201cOur job is to create the political coalitions to support state allocations to address the problem,\u201d he says. \u201cThis includes educating the public and lawmakers on the issue and raise the alarm that our National Forests and wildlife are being wasted and slaughtered on a landscape level.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, the CROP Project\u2019s board of advisors includes representatives of the\u00a0California Cannabis Industry Association<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Humboldt County Growers Alliance<\/a>. McIntyre also claims support from the\u00a0National Cannabis Industry Association<\/a>, noting that he\u00a0just spoke at the\u00a0California Cannabis Business Conference<\/a>\u00a0that the NCIA held in Long Beach last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n Citing law enforcement statistics, McIntyre states that 80% of \u201ctrespass grows\u201d (an official term for cannabis growing on public lands) in the state are on National Forest lands, and over 90% are controlled by what he calls \u201cdrug trafficking organizations\u201d or DTOs, another term borrowed from officials. Some of these DTOs are operating internationally, he says, and shipping illicit cannabis to markets in the eastern states through \u201cgang organizations in New York and Chicago and St. Louis.\u201d<\/p>\n CROP\u2019s activities are now primarily in the three counties of the Emerald Triangle \u2014 Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity \u2014 but McIntyre anticipates that it will expand to the rest of the state in the near future. He cites the Tahoe National Forest, in the Sierra Nevada, as a particular concern.<\/p>\n Given the long history of civil rights abuses around cannabis enforcement in Northern California \u2014 especially under the draconian\u00a0Campaign Against Marijuana Planting<\/a>\u00a0(CAMP) \u2014 the notion of cannabis industry collaboration with police will sit uneasily with many. But McIntyre says that CROP is focused mostly on raising awareness about the environmental problems and not on widespread police enforcement against cannabis growers.<\/p>\n \u201cI would say that unlike CAMP, CROP is entirely about trespass grows on federal lands,\u201d he replies. \u201cAll enforcement stops at the federal land boundary. Our only call for additional enforcement are additional rangers on the ground in National Forests to dissuade foreign drug trafficking organizations from operating there.\u201d<\/p>\n It should be noted that cannabis enforcement is not the purview of rangers, who are concerned with forestry, but the Forest Service\u00a0Law Enforcement and Investigations<\/a>\u00a0branch. And whatever the CROP Project may advocate, current cannabis enforcement certainly does not stop at the National Forest line. Private homes have also been targeted in recent raids in the Triangle.\u00a0It also appears clear that after decades of heavy enforcement have made little headway in decreasing illicit cannabis grows, law enforcement crackdowns might not be the most efficient path forward.<\/p>\n McIntyre acknowledges the government\u2019s role in creating the factors that would inspire people to grow cannabis on public land, such as property forfeiture taking away people\u2019s private land and over-regulation of small growers driving illicit cultivation.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cClearly, the difficulty and cost of entry for smaller operators in California is a factor,\u201d he says. \u201cThe taxes on cannabis in California are, in my opinion, too high, which is why 66% of the market remains illicit. And the refusal to allow more dispensaries in the state, there is only one for every 35,000 people, and most of these are located in coastal cities, is a serious limiting factor.\u201d<\/p>\n Cannabis Now also spoke to the CROP Project\u2019s regional field director\u00a0Jackee Riccio, who is based in the Arcata area of Humboldt County. While McIntyre spends most of his time at his Sacramento office, Riccio actually gets her hands dirty in the rugged back-country of the Emerald Triangle.<\/p>\n \u201cI assist on trespass grow reclamation,\u201d Riccio says. \u201cThis mean clean-up and containment of toxicants.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This work is overseen by Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations together with local law enforcement and environmental groups like Humboldt\u2019s Integral Ecology Research Center and Trinity\u2019s\u00a0Watershed Center<\/a>. Riccio takes pains to emphasize that her work is just reclamation \u2014 not \u201cremediation\u201d (which means actually cleansing the soil) or \u201crestoration\u201d (replanting trees and returning the site to exactly as it was before the damage). The contaminated soil and other waste is generally flown out by National Guard helicopters, and disposed of elsewhere. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis is very specialized work,\u201d Riccio says, but adds that she wants to get more stake-holders involved. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to get funding for training the Karuk in this work.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The\u00a0Karuk Tribe<\/a>\u00a0is one of the largest indigenous groups in California, based in the northern Humboldt town of Orleans, and with much traditional territory in the forest lands of Humboldt and Siskiyou counties. \u201cHistorically, they feel they have been very excluded from what happens on their ancestral lands, and we\u2019d like to change that,\u201d Riccio says.<\/p>\n She is hoping to get Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response (HAZWOPER<\/a>) certification for Karuk tribal members from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA<\/a>).<\/p>\n A wildlife biologist who formerly worked for the U.S.\u00a0Fish & Wildlife Service<\/a>,\u00a0Riccio said she learned about the problem of contaminated cannabis grows while offering\u00a0horse-packing trips for hunters and adventure tourists.<\/p>\n \u201cWe ran into growers on a number of alarming instances, and rivers and streams we frequented were being contaminated,\u201d Riccio said. Her company\u2019s horses are now used in reclamation expeditions. \u201cWe just hauled out a lot black polyline, which was disposed of at a waste center,\u201d Riccio says. \u00a0<\/p>\n Riccio describes what she calls a \u201cthree-prong approach\u201d to the problem.<\/p>\n \u201cOne is an organizing effort to make changes on a policy level and elevate the issue, so we can reclaim all the backlogged grow sites, as well as the new ones,\u201d she says. \u201cTwo, we want to increase the Forest Service presence in the National Forests to reduce activation of new sites. If there\u2019s no presence on the land, the grows are just going to pop up in new areas. And finally, we want to increase the criminal penalties for people who bring these toxicants onto our public lands. It is now a class B misdemeanor to be in possession of carbofurans, which means a $1,000 fine and 30 days in jail. That\u2019s not close to being a severe enough punishment when that stuff is getting into our water sources that communities drink out of.\u201d<\/p>\n McIntyre says 95% of these trespass grows are \u201cusing chemicals and pesticides that are banned in United States, such as sarin-based malathion.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n He points to\u00a0carbofuran<\/a>\u00a0as a particularly dangerous pesticide found at these sites. \u201cA quarter of a teaspoon will kill a 600-pound black bear,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is banned for use in the United States, but it is produced by a company in Pennsylvania for export to Mexico and Central America, and smuggled back into the country.\u201d<\/p>\n McIntyre claims that the rodenticides and pesticides are now widespread among wild animals, which he blames on illicit cannabis cultivation.<\/p>\n \u201cMore than 90% of mountain lions in the state are testing positive for rodenticide, primarily as a function of trespass grows,\u201d McIntyre says. This also applies to 80% of fishes in the state, and\u00a070% of northern spotted owls (because they eat the rodents). He cites another one of CROP Project\u2019s partners, the\u00a0Integral Ecology Research Center<\/a>\u00a0in Blue Lake, Humboldt County, as the source for these figures.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of dangers is that same poisons used to grow these products are ending up in water flowing off these crops, and ending up in the products themselves,\u201d McIntyre says. \u201cWhen you walk into a dispensary, you know that cannabis has been tested and screened for pesticides. With the black market, none of that occurs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0do you think law enforcement should play a role in protecting the environment from illegal cannabis grows?<\/p>\n The post California\u2019s CROP Project Responds to Toxic Threat of \u2018Trespass Grows\u2019<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Five years after California voters approved cannabis legalization,\u00a0police are still conducting militarized raids on illicit grows, especially those in the Emerald Triangle and hidden on public land. Often, police justify these raids \u2014 politically risky given a populace that favors decriminalization \u2014 by pointing to the\u00a0ecological tolls\u00a0of the unregulated cannabisContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1143,148,50,12878,12879,100,780,105,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39730,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39729\/revisions\/39730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Cannabis Industry Partners With Law Enforcement\u2028<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Land Reclamation in the Back Country\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: California\u2019s CROP Project Responds to Toxic Threat of \u2018Trespass Grows\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"