Palace Hotel Red-tagged?
Public Hearing: CR FB
Headlines of the Day
Dog Gone
Drink v. Rent
How to Irrigate
Seed Saving
Swinishness
Bank of Cannabis
Rich v. Poor
Santa Rosa Fluoride
Charlie’s Birthday
Still Waiting
Mari-water
Interior of Palace Hotel, pre-rehab
WE’RE SEEKING confirmation of rumors that Cal-Osha has red-tagged the long defunct Palace Hotel in central Ukiah. The stately old structure is supposedly being rehabilitated and has received numerous work extensions from the City of Ukiah. But the current owner, a Marin County realtor named Eladia Laines, apparently lacks the resources to get the work done.
THE COLLEGE OF THE REDWOODS PUBLIC HEARING on the recommendation to “suspend” operations at the local campus will be this Monday, February 17th, at the Fort Bragg Town Hall at Noon. Doors are expected to open at 11:30 a.m. The meeting will end promptly at 2:00 p.m. Those wishing to speak must complete a Public Comment/Speaker’s Request Card and turn it in to staff at the hearing. Cards will be provided at the meeting or you can download one at this link.
There will be time for fewer than 40 people to speak. Please yield to students and others most affected by the closure and to those with a point of view that has not already been expressed. Keep in mind the mission of all California community colleges is to serve students desiring to transfer, acquire vocational training, or learn basic academic skills. Personal enrichment and lifelong learning interests are not priorities in California at this time. Speakers will be strictly limited to 3 minutes. A staff member will serve as time keeper and will display placards at “1 minute,” “30 seconds” and “stop.” Sheriff Allman will assist if any speaker does not adhere to the 3-minute time limit. There will be no discussion, and no action taken at this meeting. If speakers have questions, they will be asked to submit them in writing, or if simple, staff will write them down. Answers to the pertinent questions will be posted on the website. The college is sending someone to videotape the meeting so trustees who are not in attendance can view it. A copy of the video will be available on the college’s website prior to March 4 when a vote on the recommendation is expected to be taken in Eureka. I’ll post a link when it is available.
Barbara Rice, Trustee
HEADLINES OF THE DAY:
• From the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, their most exciting hed ever: “Dogs found chewing on dead man’s body in Mendocino County.” Wow! For the toothy details see Tiffany Revelle’s story from the Ukiah Daily Journal reprinted below.
• Second interesting lead headline appears in Saturday’s Ukiah Daily Journal: “Bicyclist struck in street a homeless man.” Hmmm. How about writing it backwards? Man, homeless in street, bicyclist struck. Or maybe, since it was a homeless man on a bike who got hit by a car when he swerved into traffic, Bike Bum Hit by Car on North State.
DEAD MAN FOUND ATTACKED BY DOGS
Sheriff says dog bites on body were not cause of death
by Tiffany Revelle
A man was found dead after a passer-by reported seeing two dogs attacking his body in a clearing by railroad tracks near a trailer park home just south of Calpella Friday morning, according to the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office.
The man wasn’t identified Friday, and the cause of his death is under investigation. “He had multiple injuries consistent with dog bites,” Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman said.
A driver in the area called the Sheriff’s Office dispatch center at 10:41 a.m. Feb. 14 and reported seeing a man lying in the ground in a clearing beside the road in the 5000 block of North State Street, and two dogs attacking his body, according to the MCSO.
Sheriff’s Animal Control officer Torsten Werner responded and saw a Rottweiler and a pitbull standing over the man’s body. He yelled to get the dogs’ attention and the Rottweiler charged aggressively at him. Werner reportedly shot at the dog twice and hit the Rottweiler at least once, killing the animal, according to the MCSO.
The other dog, described as a white pitbull, ran from the area and was not found after “an exhaustive search of the area,” according to the MCSO.
A 12-year-old boy who lives next door to the trailer home where the dogs were kept behind a tall fence and was out of school on Valentine’s Day, said he heard the two gunshots around 11 a.m. Friday morning. The boy said he had never seen the dogs out of their fenced yard, and that they only barked at people who came especially close to their fence.
Sheriff’s detectives and Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office investigators also responded to the scene, and the cause of the man’s death is under investigation. “At this time, investigators do not believe the adult male died as a result of an animal attack, although evidence of animal activity on the adult male’s body was evident,” the MCSO stated.
Detectives are working to identify the man, and an autopsy is scheduled for Tuesday. Animal Control officers took the Rottweiler from the scene to be autopsied as well, according to the MCSO. Detectives have not yet determined who owns the dogs.
Anyone who spots the white pitbull or a dog looking like it is urged not to approach the animal, but to call MCSO dispatch at 463-4086. Anhyone with information about the incident is urged to call the MCSO tip line at 234-2100.
In a separate incident later the same day, authorities responded to another dog attack and shooting on Coyote Road just east of North State Street, according to Allman. He said no one died, but one man was injured. No further information was available about the second incident Friday night.
(Courtesy, the Ukiah Daily Journal)
LOTS OF AMERICAN controversies can’t be talked about in realistic terms. If, for instance, you constantly describe all the people living on the streets as “homeless,” it ignores basic distinctions: Yes, there are major shortages of low-income housing. But a lot of the distressing public behavior attributed to the “homeless” doesn’t have anything to do with shelter. It occurs because people are allowed to be helplessly drunk or strung out on drugs in public. And there is another large bloc of people living outside because they’re crazy. All three groups need to be hospitalized, which is what we used to do with people incapable of caring for themselves, but what we are unlikely to ever do again because the upper income people in this country don’t tote their fair share of the social load.
A HOMELESS GUY explained his homelessness to me. “I get social security and some food stamps. The cheapest rental I can find in Mendocino County is about $700 a month, and that’s in Willits but I’d probably get kicked out because I can be loud when I’m drunk. I can’t drink and pay rent both. And I’m not going to stop drinking. I either find a free place to stay or I live on the streets.”
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY: “You must consider that in times of drought, you cannot and should not water top down to the roots. So much water is lost in evaporation alone, esp in dry conditions. Deep water is a must. For trees, Drive a porous pipe down 2.5 to 3ft and water at that level. For veges, drip line and cover the soil in straw. Use common sense and we can get through this. Stop using chemicals on the soil and rather grow what is native to the soil you have.”
AV FOODSHED THIRD SUNDAY POTLUCK IS FEB 16. The workshop this month is The Magic, Wisdom and Politics of Seed with Tom Melcher.
Potluck 5:30. Seed Saving Workshop 6:30
This event is co-sponsored by the AV Grange and is held in their building in Philo.
Also, if you would like to read the latest in our series “Connecting With Local Food” you can find it at www.mendocinolocalfood.org
This one is about Acorn Ranch (the new endeavor at the old Stanley Johnson Ranch on Hwy 128) by David Ballantine.
“AS LONG AS WE’RE YOUNG, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the scene, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you’ve come to. There’s no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you’ve lived this long, it’s because you’ve squashed any poetry you had in you.”
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline
FEDS ISSUE BANKING REGS FOR MARIJUANA-RELATED BUSINESSES – But California May Not Qualify Due to Lack of State Licensing
Cal NORML Release Feb 14, 2014
The Dept of Justice has announced new federal guidelines for providing financial services to marijuana-related businesses under the Bank Secrecy Act : “BSA Expectations Regarding Marijuana-Related Businesses.” The guidelines repeatedly call on financial institutions to check for state licensing. Because California doesn’t have a state licensing system, only local ordinances regulating medical marijuana collectives, it’s questionable whether these guidelines apply in California. (Note that a bill to establish a state MMJ licensing system, AB 604 by Tom Ammiano, is pending in the State Senate). The guidelines reiterate that DOJ enforcement is focused on assuring compliance with the so-called Cole Memo priorities, namely preventing distribution to minors, diversion of revenues to criminal enterprises, diversion to states where marijuana is illegal, growing on public lands, drugged driving, violence and use of firearms, etc. The memo goes on to direct financial instutions to conduct due diligence in assessing customers. In specific, it states: In assessing the risk of providing services to a marijuana-related business, a financial institution should conduct customer due diligence that includes: (i) verifying with the appropriate state authorities whether the business is duly licensed and registered; (ii) reviewing the license application (and related documentation) submitted by the business for obtaining a state license to operate its marijuana-related business; (iii) requesting from state licensing and enforcement authorities available information about the business and related parties; (iv) developing an understanding of the normal and expected activity for the business, including the types of products to be sold and the type of customers to be served (e.g., medical versus recreational customers); (v) ongoing monitoring of publicly available sources for adverse information about the business and related parties; (vi) ongoing monitoring for suspicious activity, including for any of the red flags described in this guidance; and (vii) refreshing information obtained as part of customer due diligence on a periodic basis and commensurate with the risk. With respect to information regarding state licensure obtained in connection with such customer due diligence, a financial institution may reasonably rely on the accuracy of information provided by state licensing authorities, where states make such information available. Cal NORML director Dale Gieringer called the new federal guidelines a welcome development, while urging the legislature to promptly enact a state licensing system along the lines proposed in AB 604. Full text of the guidelines may be found at <http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/pdf/FIN-2014-G001.pdf>
POOR BUT SHE WAS HONEST
by Anonymous
She was poor but she was honest,
Victim of a rich man’s whim,
First he loved her, then he left her,
And she lost her honest name.
Then she ran away to London,
For to hide her grief and shame;
There she met another squire,
And she lost her name again.
See her riding in a carriage,
In the Park and all so gay:
All the nibs and nobby persons
Come to pass the time of day.
See the little old-world village
Where her aged parents live,
Drinking the champagne she sends them;
But they never can forgive.
In the rich man’s arms she flutters,
Like a bird with broken wing:
First he loved her, then he left her,
And she hasn’t got a ring.
See him in the splendid mansion,
Entertaining with the best,
While the girl that he has ruined,
Entertains a sordid guest.
See him in the House of Commons,
Making laws to put down crime,
While the victim of his passions
Trails her way through mud and slime.
Standing on the bridge at midnight,
She says: ‘Farewell, blighted Love.’
There’s a scream, a splash — Good Heavens!
What is she a-doing of?
Then they drag her from the river,
Water from her clothes they wrang,
For they thought that she was drownded;
But the corpse got up and sang:
‘It’s the same the whole world over;
It’s the poor that gets the blame,
It’s the rich that get the pleasure.
Isn’t it a blooming shame?’
A SONOMA COUNTY WRITER SAYS NO TO FLOURIDE
Sonoma County Supervisors,
I beseech you, please, NO FLUORIDATION.
I am 69 next month. I have been a workout guy since I was 25. I spent nearly 30 years as a distance runner, and have done about every style of workout you can imagine. Along with this goes healthy diet, clean living and plenty of clean WATER. That’s why I am six foot tall and one hundred sixty pounds, and wear 33 waist jeans that are LOOSE. I take care of myself. It’s a job!
I cannot remove the fluoride from the water if you deliver it fluoridated. NO ONE CAN! How NASTY is that? Think on that…you cannot remove this aluminum waste garbage once it is inserted in the water using any viable water cleaning system that is available. NONE!! The BEST filters available will only remove a portion of it, and those filters would run about eighty dollars every quarter of the year. That’s a waste of money.
Leaving the fluoride in; here’s where it goes in a senior like me that drinks at least a GALLON of clean water every day. (I use British Berkefeld system with Black Berky filters replaced annually. I have TWO of them in our home). IF the water is fluoridated, my kidneys will have to process all that material. They will not process all of it. The rest will end up IN MY AGING BUT STILL VERY ATHLETIC BONES. This will result in my bones becoming BRITTLE much sooner. This will MESS UP MY LIFE and probably SHORTEN IT.
Please, get the kids some tooth brushes and do some oral hygiene training in the schools. Ten million and a million a year to benefit WHO?
Alabama was the first state to fluoridate. They quit it long ago; Texas, too. Why? RESULTS STUNK! It was a waste of money.
This will be the SR parking meters revisited with serious health hazards as a bonus. Talk about a LOSE LOSE deal.
Please, stick with fixing the roads and getting us out of the power company.
I’ll let you know right now if you pass this, don’t take it personal, but I’ll bust my butt to dethrone every one of you that votes FOR this thing. I am talking especially to YOU, SUSAN GORIN!
Nowhere in your job description do you have the authority to MEDICATE the population.
Sincerely, a Sonoma County Resident
CHARLES DARWIN’S BIRTHDAY IS TODAY
I AM WAITING
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting
for someone to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep through the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped’ onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Great Divide to ‘be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty’s clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am waiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti
THE US GOVERNMENT IS HELPING ILLEGAL POT PRODUCERS DESTROY CALIFORNIA’S WATER SUPPLY
By Gwynn Guilford
Heavy rains in California in recent days have partly alleviated the drought that parched the state in January. The dry spell is merely exacerbating a long-developing problem in northern California, however: The huge volumes of water used to grow marijuana, as well as the noxious fertilizers and pesticides gushing into streams, are pushing local watersheds to their breaking point. “Marijuana cultivation has the potential to completely dewater and dry up streams in the areas where [cannabis farmers are] growing pretty extensively,” Scott Bauer, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), tells Quartz. He describes encountering waterless streambeds littered with dead fish.
Pot is not the only water-guzzling business that’s booming in the Emerald Triangle, as Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties are known. Wineries are too. The problem is that the government treats them differently, says Gary Graham Hughes, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), a non-profit group.
The paradoxical status of marijuana in the US — it is legal to grow and sell in some states, but remains illegal under federal law — makes it hard to regulate. In theory, Californian state or local regulators should be able to set environmental standards for cannabis cultivation, the way they might with grapes or timber. But the federal government won’t let them. As a result, growers enjoy unregulated use of water, and the resulting easy profits have helped attract operations that are increasingly industrial in scale — and run by growers who are unrepentant about sucking the Emerald Triangle dry.
Pot is one heck of a valuable crop. The farm value of cannabis grown in California for local consumption is probably between $2.5 billion and $5 billion a year, according to Dale Gieringer, an economist at California Norml (CA Norml), a pro-legalization non-profit, assuming a price of $2,500 per pound. The out-of-state export market could be even larger, he says.
It’s especially valuable for the otherwise downtrodden Emerald Triangle economies. In Humboldt, occasionally called the Silicon Valley of weed, some 4,000 commercial growers generate at least $400 million in annual sales. That compares with the $66 million made by Humboldt’s timber industry in 2011 (pdf, p.3), the last year for which data was available.
…but the “green rush” is putting a strain on the land
It hasn’t always been a cash crop. The Emerald Triangle’s cannabis growing dates back to the 1970s, when a wave of liberal activists settled there, dropping out of society to go “back to the land.” They found the terrain unusually ideal for growing cannabis. But they grew it alongside other garden produce, seldom in any large scale — and rarely destructively (these hippies were some of the framers of the modern US conservation movement, after all).
California’s legalization of medical marijuana in 1996, as well as steadily rising prices, encouraged their offspring, some less ecologically conscientious than their parents, to enter the business. But it’s in the last few years that things have changed dramatically. From 2009 to 2012 the amount of land cultivated for pot in the Emerald Triangle nearly doubled, to 221 acres, according to the CDFW. An aerial view shows once-dense forests now pocked with “grows,” as pot farms are called. And they’re getting bigger and bigger, says Bauer, with industrial grows now raising 2,000-5,000 plants.
Many within the industry point to the expanding presence of outsiders: Everyone from Kentuckians to Bulgarians is flocking to the area. Some of this trend, which locals liken to the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s, is due to a worry that the recent legalization of weed for recreational use in Washington and Colorado might drive down prices. “People come to Humboldt to grow as much as they can to get that one last hit before it goes legal,” says Tony Silvaggio, an environmental sociologist at the Center for Study of Cannabis and Social Policy (CASP). “Every year it goes bigger and bigger.” But another reason is simply that weed is incredibly profitable to grow. Its illegal status, says Silvaggo, inflates its price, and cannabis growers don’t have to pay taxes, rights to water and land use fees the way “legal” industries do. The water cost is a biggie. A single plant of marijuana needs about six gallons (22.7 liters) of water per day to grow. That means industrial grows need between 12,000 and 30,000 gallons of water per day.
This has exacerbated the water crisis…
The dry summer months happen to be the peak of the April-October pot-growing season. Conscientious growers — typically, long-term residents — invest in tanks to gather and store water during the winter, when it rains more. Unethical growers irrigate by damming streams and using diesel pumps to suck water to their sites. They also tend to pump runoff fouled with dangerous fertilizers and pesticides back into the water supply.
To get a better sense of context, consider the case of the Outlet Creek basin, one of the headwaters of the Eel River and a habitat for Chinook and coho salmon. Outdoor cannabis cultivation in Mendocino’s Outlet Creek watershed consumes an Olympic-sized pool worth of water each week, on average. And that’s just for 160-square-mile (414 square kilometers) swatch of the total Eel River watershed, which spans nearly 4,000 square miles. That concentration of activity is happening all over the 8,800 square miles of Emerald Triangle watersheds. Here’s an analysis Silvaggio and Mother Jones did using Google Earth in early 2013:
… and the US government “is directly to blame” Cannabis cultivation need not be so bad for the environment. Other local industries, like wineries and timber, have the potential to be worse. While state and local agencies have dozens of workers in northern California focused strictly on protecting the environment from vintners and loggers, no one’s doing that for cannabis growers. But don’t point fingers at local regulators, says CA Norml’s Gieringer. The “US government is directly to blame for [ending] established efforts to regulate outdoor growth,” he says. That’s seems like a pretty extreme statement — at least until you hear about what happened in Mendocino.
The Feds cut short Mendocino’s experiment with cannabis regulation…
The story starts in 2010, when Tom Allman, Mendocino’s sheriff, began charging medically licensed marijuana growing collectives $1,050 for cultivation permits, monthly inspection fees of around $500, and $25 for a serial-numbered zip-tie that growers were to attach to each plant (pdf, p.5), certifying that the produce met environmental and public safety standards. The regulation also capped the number of plants per individual at 25, and per collective at 99. In an interview with PBS in 2011, Allman explained that his motivation was remove the gray area around cultivation in order to honor what California voters had mandated when they legalized medical marijuana, and to free up his officers to focus on crime. “We’re taking money from people who want to follow the law, … and we are using that exact money to go after the people who are breaking the law,” said Allman. “[I]f we can remove the gray, if we can remove the inconsistencies, if we can have people not confused about the marijuana laws, then I have succeeded.” He didn’t succeed immediately. Growers were initially suspicious that the police would rat them out to the Feds; in the first year, only 18 people signed up. But by the end of 2011, the program had enlisted nearly 100 growers, bringing in $663,000 in fees in 2011 — and important source of revenue for an office that normally relied on federal funds.
Those fees helped finance Allman’s aggressive campaign against illegal “trespass grows“ — meaning those on public land — including some that were illegally damming streams and piping water for irrigation. Allman and his officers eradicated 642,000 illegal marijuana plants in Mendocino county 2011 — more than one-third of what the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) typically eradicates each year in all of California. (For comparison, California is about 44 times bigger and 440 times more populous than Mendocino county.) It helped consumers too, since they could purchase marijuana guaranteed not to contain scary pesticides. And licensed growers were able to “reintegrate into the county and not feel like outlaws,” as county supervisor John McCowen put it. But though Mendocino created clear categories of legal and illegal growers, the federal government didn’t see it that way. DEA agents raided farms of Mendocino’s most prominently law-abiding growers — a crackdown on “significant drug traffickers,”said US attorney Melinda Haag. Then 2012, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Mendocino’s records of all participants in the program, which the county’s lawyer said was a breach of medical privacy guarantees. This was a huge blow to the trust forged between growers and Mendocino police. The federal government insisted that Mendocino shut down the program, threatening to prosecute officials individually if they granted permits. In March 2012, Mendocino finally gave in. “That,” explains CANorml’s Gieringer, “put an end to the attempt to regulate outdoor cultivation in California.” … and there’s a cynical theory about why
The federal government isn’t allowed to participate in anything that treats marijuana as legal. But nothing about Mendocino’s zip-tie program required federal involvement — so why did the Feds crack down? Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the DEA, said he wasn’t familiar with Mendocino’s zip-tie program. However, he says that the DEA is almost exclusively focused on major operations. “You’ll rarely if ever see the DEA show up and bang on someone’s door if they have five plants,” Payne tells Quartz. While Gieringer, Silvaggio and others who support legalization argue that Mendocino was a successful effort at bringing order to the market through legalization, Payne argues that such systems would paradoxically increase the market share of illegal growers. “There are a lot of… myths that [marijuana is] safe, that’s it’s okay if it’s regulated. We think it’s dangerous, and one reason is that it’s proven to be a significant source of revenue for the most violent organizations in the world, [such as] the Mexican drug cartels,” he says. “Any time you have a regulated system, you’re going to have taxes and fees. We would see drug trafficking organizations undercut the so-called legal market to the extent that cartels were even more emboldened by dropping their prices because they’d be able to sell even more.” If Payne’s theory is right, legalization would give the DEA even more illegal activity to crack down on. But what if it turned out, instead, that an expanding legal market enticed some growers out of the black market, thus driving down prices and pushing smaller illegal growers out of business — and at the same time, generating revenue for local police to go after trespass growers more aggressively, the way Sheriff Allman did? To test those theories you’d need an experiment, and the run of Mendocino’s experiment was probably too short to tell either way. However, a cynical interpretation of the DEA’s attitude is that it fears widespread adoption of programs similar to Mendocino’s would harm the interests of federal agencies, like the DEA, that depend on the “War on Drugs” for funding. Here’s the reasoning. Around 60% of the $24.5 billion (pdf, p.19) the US federal government allocated in fiscal year 2013 for drug-control programs went toward disrupting the supply of illegal drugs. Two factors on which Congress evaluates the success of the DEA and its partner law-enforcement agencies are the number of plants eradicated (pdf, p.64-5) — or “plant count,” as it’s known — and the number of organizations whose operations they disrupt, says Payne. Some 53% of the outdoor plants (pdf) the DEA eradicated in 2012 were in California. That isn’t particularly surprising, given that California grows between a quarter and two-thirds of the rest of the country’s pot, according to sources close to the industry.
Now, what if the whole of California adopted Mendocino’s zip-tie program, creating clear classes of law-abiding and illegal growers? The program would take smaller illegal growers out of business or turn them legal, which would likely bring down California prices. But because the export market would still pay a premium, the biggest trespass grows — which are mainly producing for export out of California — would stay in business, and as Payne says, those are what the DEA focuses on. The surviving operations would be the bigger and better-organized ones that are more dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming to raid. That would make it harder for federal agencies to eradicate the same number of plants and disrupt the same number of operations as they had in the past. And eventually, legalization in California’s current export markets — meaning, other states — will cause local production capacity to expand and reduce the risk premium. Falling prices will close more and more of these Emerald Triangle trespass grows. When that happens, it will be harder for illegal growers to stay in business by undercutting legal ones in a market where consumers and retailers have gotten used to regulated, quality-controlled legal weed.
The Office of National Drug-Control Policy (ONDCP) — the White House office that coordinates federal anti-drug efforts, including the DEA — has a dual mandate, to reduce both the supply and demand of drugs. It’s being undermined on the demand side, as support for legalization is rising fast — especially for medical use, now legal in 15 states and the District of Columbia — and so are rates of marijuana use by teens. The mandate to eliminate supply is therefore crucial to being able to justify the ONDCP’s increasingly endangered budget, which shrank nearly 20% (pdf, p.232) in the latest fiscal year. As for the DEA, the Department of Justice, which oversees it, explicitly identifies legalization as a “performance challenge“ (pdf, p. 21-2).
What this all boils down to, according to the cynical interpretation, is that successful local-level regulation in California would threaten to deprive federal anti-drug agencies of a large source of their income, and set an example for other states. That could further undermine federal policy, and the agencies’ budgets. The War on Drugs is now supposedly about the environment…
If this reasoning seems too much like a conspiracy theory, consider that the federal government has long cited the threat to public safety posed by violent “Mexican cartels“ (pdf, p.72) to justify its aggressive tactics and hefty budgets. Only last year did Tommy Lanier, director of the ONDCP’s National Marijuana Initiative, quietly admit, “Based on our intelligence, which includes thousands of cellphone numbers and wiretaps, we haven’t been able to connect anyone to a major cartel.” In the 2012 National Drug Control Strategy, which is published by ONDCP, the sole rationale given for eradicating marijuana cultivation in the US was to stop “violent transnational criminal organizations“ (pdf, p.28).
This, argue some, is of a piece with new federal government talking points emphasizing that cannabis crackdowns are needed to protect the environment. Dominic Corva, head of CASP, says this newfound passion for conservation is more about justifying the anti-marijuana policy in the face of growing public acceptance of marijuana. “Before it was ‘cannabis is bad,’” says Corva. “Now it’s ‘environmental degradation caused by cannabis is bad.’” The DEA’s Payne says that his organization has long paid attention to environmental destruction by trespass growers. “The environmental impacts — those are obviously concerns for anyone [in regard to] what these drug trafficking organizations are doing to our public lands,” he says. But, he also says, “we’re not environmental experts — we go after drug traffickers.” …but it isn’t exactly being fought that way
If the end result is that the DEA reduces the cannabis industry’s environmental abuse, does it matter if the way it goes about it is by treating the industry as something to be wiped out?
In all fairness to the DEA, it isn’t supposed to be regulating water pumps. Indeed, saddling an anti-drug agency with environmental policing seems a perverse way of doing things, especially when other federal agencies are refusing to do it. Take, for instance, the National Forest Service. Once focused on regulating (and promoting) economic development on forested land, the agency has shifted more recently toward protecting the environment (pdf, p.3), including watersheds. Part of its job is to research how commercial industries like logging affect the environment in forests. However, it has steadfastly rejected EPIC’s requests that it do the same for marijuana cultivation. “The best way to minimize impacts to affected resources is by discouraging this criminal activity through aggressive law enforcement,” says the US Forest Service (pdf).
Even if the DEA had the capacity to target the most egregious environmental abusers, it wouldn’t be sufficient, says EPIC’s Hughes. “These are really profound environmental harms that need more than just a bust to be dealt with,” he says. He argues that public land management should be prioritized over law enforcement.
CASP’s Silvaggio says that the DEA’s focus continues to be on destroying plants and arresting easy targets — low-level workers. That means it’s disrupting industrial grows basically by creating minor staffing headaches. And, if the growers subsequently replant, they end up using even more water.
On top of that, law-enforcement officers don’t generally know a lot about managing the environment, and lack the staff who does. That means they sometimes lean heavily on local volunteers to clean up pot-growing sites after a raid, says EPIC’s Hughes. Because that risks putting volunteers in harm’s way — one died on the job in Sep. 2013 — law enforcement operations tend to stay away from the bigger, riskier grow sites in remote, hard-to-access areas, he adds, meaning those grows continue to do environmental damage.
Busting trespass grows, the main focus of the DEA’s work, also does nothing to limit damage to the water supply from growers on private residential land. Compared with public-land grows, those account for a majority of cannabis cultivation in the area, says CDFW (pdf, p.25) and others close to the industry.
So what’s the future of the Emerald Triangle “green rush”?
There’s a glimmer of hope for northern California’s streams yet. The federal government recently showed signs of relaxing its “enforcement-only” position: It said it plans to scale back the practice of using legal marijuana businesses’ bank records to prosecute them. (That practice has forced many growers to use cash only, which encourages crime.)
And California’s new state budget proposal earmarks $3.3 million (pdf, p.108-119) to “improve the prevention” of destructive water use by marijuana cultivators and to protect endangered species. It’s not clear whether the budget, if approved, will be earmarked for enforcement only — meaning, to help state water and wildlife departments join the federal campaign against trespass grows that are polluting or overusing water, for example — or for education, community outreach and other types of programs, which might violate federal law.
Bauer of the CDFW, thinks the budget will finally give him the staff needed to educate growers on winter water storage and other best practices. Busts, he says, won’t be the priority. On the other hand, EPIC’s Hughes is skeptical that the new budget would fund anything besides the usual — enforcement. “The state and the counties I believe are still running scared… because of the threat that the Feds will come down and say that [they] are involved with an illegal activity.” In other words, he argues, northern California and its water supply “will continue to pay the environmental fallout of the Drug War.” (Courtesy, qz.com)