Police raid bootleg pot farms to protect regulated growers
WILLITS, Mendocino County — The caravan of law enforcement trucks bounced over a dusty old logging road through redwood groves, across the Noyo River and along tracks used by the beloved Skunk Train, before stopping next to a sign that read “Family Camp.”
There, in hillside clearings cut from the forest, was the target of a raid in August by a Mendocino County Sheriff ’s Office task force: 811 bright green marijuana plants.
Digging deeper, the deputies found an illegal assault rifle and two other guns, a makeshift hash oil lab and pumps stealing water from the river — common trappings within a black market for pot that is still thriving in Mendocino, Humboldt and other northern counties despite the industry going legal.
Now, law enforcement agencies have a new focus for crackdowns that have happened with varying intensity over the years. They’re trying to protect the regulated, taxed marijuana
market as California prepares for legal sales of recreational pot starting as soon as January. For some officials, the sentiment is: The state should get what it voted for.
But as the recent ride-along with members of the Sheriff ’s Office suggested, busting illegal cannabis is as difficult as ever. Bootleg ganja has been circulating around Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties — the famed Emerald Triangle — for decades, and backwoods growing is ingrained in the culture.
Legalization of weed under Proposition 64, which passed in November, has catapulted thousands of growers into the frenzied forefront of a new retail industry, but the black market endures. For example, about 8,000 outdoor growers produce weed in Humboldt County, but only a little more than 2,300 have filed applications under the county’s medical marijuana permit process.
“What we’re seeing up here is that the temptation, the incentives for compliance, are apparently not there for a lot of people,” said Josh Meisel, a sociology professor and co-director of the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research. “So what is it that is making people not want to be licensed? Is it the cost, the bureaucracy, is it because they just want to remain under the radar?”
At least for now, law enforcement officials in Mendocino County and other areas are using a triage strategy — concentrating on unpermitted grows that are harming the environment.
“All these trees were just whacked down and piled,” said Sheriff ’s Lt. Shannon Barney, pointing out several dozen fir trees dumped on the hillside as detectives behind him chopped down pot plants and fed them into a wood chipper.
Barney said the pot operation was spotted during a flyover, and probably would have been left alone if the property owners had applied for permits to grow cannabis. It was only when authorities looked closer that they discovered the guns, the hash oil lab and the illicit irrigation pipes.
“These plants take a lot of water and they are not native here, so they are diverting water away from the Noyo River,” Barney said. “It’s a cumulative effect with each grow. The more water that’s diverted, the river goes down and the water warms up, and that harms the fingerling steelhead, chinook and coho salmon.”
Barney said as many as 75 percent of residents in some remote areas are pot growers. And, he estimated, about 10 percent of the marijuana in the county is being grown legally. Experts say California’s black market provides 80 percent of the pot sold in states where it remains illegal.
Hezekiah Allen, the executive director of the California Growers Association, an advocacy group for more than 600 medical marijuana farmers, said the forbidden trade will remain as long as there is a lucrative out-of-state market for cannabis. Growers currently make between $500 and $1,300 a pound, depending on the quality, location and time of year the pot was harvested.
“I think it’s going to be practically impossible to get rid of it until something changes on the federal level,” Allen said. “California’s marketplace is finite. There are a lot of people who would choose to be in the legal market, but can’t get in, so some folks are going to be forced into the black market for lack of a better option.”
But Lori Ajax, chief of the state’s new Bureau of Medical Cannabis Regulation, declared earlier this year that local prosecutors and law enforcement agencies must aggressively root out black-market pot for a legitimate industry to thrive. Mendocino County District Attorney Dave Eyster said he is trying to do just that.
“If you are cheating the system or not doing it right, you’ll probably come in contact with law enforcement and face possible prosecution,” Eyster said. But he added, “Does anyone really think that in January the switch will be turned on and all of our problems will suddenly go away?”
His department is relying on state and local ordinances that require growers to meet environmental standards to get a permit. So far this year, 74 sites in the county have been raided, yielding 18 arrests and 89,940 plants. A year ago at this time, 62 raids had netted 38 arrests and 152,128 plants.
Those numbers don’t include the crops hidden by cartels in state and national parks. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Marijuana Enforcement Team has seized more than 500,000 plants so far this year — an amount that, by the end of the year, may approach the haul in 2009, when more than a million plants were seized by the state’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting program, known as CAMP.
“It continues to be a large problem. The cartel groups haven’t been hindered at all,” said Lt. John Nores, who heads the Fish and Wildlife team. “It’s gone up because we’re out of the drought and we have so much water in the state.”
Beyond the cartels, thousands of hippies and entrepreneurs remain in the hills, fully or partly living off their crops.
“I know the state doesn’t have enough resources to keep track of everybody,” said Robert LeClair, a longtime blackmarket farmer in Mendocino County who is in the process of gaining proper permits and going legit. “I don’t know if the county has enough resources to do it, either.”
The hope is that taxes collected by the government can fund law enforcement efforts, which will, in turn, deter illegal operations and generate additional taxes. Wholesale prices for pot are also expected to drop with the mainstreaming of the industry, providing less incentive for bad actors.
LeClair, though, said people are always going to find a way around regulations, especially if they can profit from it. Prop. 64 gives priority licensing to existing growers, but taxes, qualitycontrol systems and environmental regulations are expected to cost thousands a year.
Even for those who wish to make good, there is confusion over what is permitted under various rules that are being formulated by state, county and city governments.
“Proposition 64 was supposed to make things more black and white,” said Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman, “but I think it has made way more gray areas.”
No arrests were made during last month’s raid, which went after adjoining properties and nabbed about 417 pounds of marijuana. But detectives questioned two people: a woman who said she was paid $20 an hour to take care of 786 plants, and a man named Chris who said he believed his own 25-plant patch was legal.
While Mendocino County exempts people growing 25 plants or less from going through the registration process, Barney said the river diversions were illegal.
Chris, a bare-chested man in dirty blue harem pants, said he had been allowed to live on the upper property for 10 years in exchange for tending to the small marijuana garden for the 83-yearold landowner.
“We’re not bad people trying to disturb the earth,” said Chris, whose 8year-old son watched as sheriff ’s detectives chopped down the plants. “We’re just living out here off the grid, trying to be ourselves.”