|
|
| Marijuana Farming Booms in California |
|
Posted by FoM on September 03, 2001 at 06:59:52 PT By Karen Brandon, Tribune National Correspondent Source: Chicago Tribune 
The annual harvest season has arrived again in California, the nation's top agricultural state, and by all accounts this year will produce another bumper yield of what is believed to be its most valuable cash crop: marijuana.The Golden State, believed to be the nation's leading marijuana producer and by far the nation's leader in eradicating the plant, is in the midst of its intensive summer and fall campaign to beat the marijuana growers to the harvest. This is why helicopters hover over remote areas of the state, searching the landscape for the emerald, almost fluorescent green color that distinguishes marijuana from practically every other plant that grows in a garden, farm or forest. Once the plants are found, agents rappel from the helicopters to cull the plants--more than 900,000 a year in the past two years. The states that traditionally vie for second and third place are Hawaii and Kentucky, which each bring in about half that number. Law-enforcement officials say marijuana cultivation once was largely a mom-and-pop operation conducted in the coastal mountain ranges of remote northern California, where the dense redwood groves are broken up by outposts of what the remainder of the country would regard as hippies. But now, they say, the dynamics have changed. Marijuana cultivation is increasingly dominated by huge, sophisticated operations producing marijuana that is said to be 20 times more potent than that available in the 1960s and '70s. "It's a corporate approach to growing marijuana," said Michael Van Winkle, spokesman for the California Department of Justice, spearhead of the state Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. Mexican drug cartels have begun planting large marijuana farms in California's Central Valley, the same region where the majority of the nation's fruits and vegetables are cultivated, he said. There, obscured by the dense brush that covers the foothills of the Sierra Nevada on the Central Valley's eastern flank, growers set up operations with tens of thousands of plants. They recruit farm workers by promising higher wages than they would make tending legal crops. The workers take care of the spring-fed irrigation systems, uproot male plants that can reduce or ruin the quality of the marijuana buds of the female and guard the operation, generally with guns and automatic weapons, from hikers who happen onto the site or interlopers who might confiscate the plants. 102,000 plants seized Five years ago, Van Winkle said, the biggest fields seized contained about 5,000 plants. But in July, officials discovered a field with more than 102,000 plants on Palomar Mountain, a peak in a San Diego County national forest that is topped by a space research observatory. The potential profit is enormous, with dried marijuana selling for $4,000 a pound, nearly the price of a pound of gold, Van Winkle observed. In 1998, when the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws analyzed the market value of the California crop, it concluded that the value of the marijuana exceeded $3.8 billion, more than the production value of the state's grapes and almonds combined. The increase in cultivation and the crackdown on growers come during a five-year legal and political battle that suggests Californians are somewhat ambivalent about the illegality of marijuana. Proposition 215, a 1996 voter initiative, made the state one of the first of nine states to allow patients to possess and use the plant with a doctor's approval. Last year, Mendocino County in northern California passed Measure G, a symbolic prohibition on arresting anyone growing 25 or fewer marijuana plants. Supreme Court ruling State officials still are deciding how to address a May ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that did not overturn Proposition 215 but said federal laws prohibiting the manufacture and distribution of marijuana superseded a patient's medical need for it. Some of the so-called cannabis clubs that emerged to distribute marijuana to ill people now concentrated on teaching patients how to grow their own marijuana. There is no ambivalence on the subject among law enforcement. Last week in Fresno, sheriff's deputies walked for hours amid acres of bitter melon, a gourd used in Asian cooking, before stumbling upon more than 300 marijuana plants growing on the same trellis with the melon vines. The marijuana plants were carefully pruned, laced to the trellis and covered by the vines to protect them from the hottest sun and law enforcement's aerial detection. Growers getting smarter The operation is typical of another trend in marijuana cultivation--growing the plant among other crops that make detection considerably more difficult. In another field, a grower had planted marijuana amid lemon grass, sprinkling lemon grass cuttings on top of the marijuana to avoid aerial detection. "These growers are getting very smart," said Rich Coningsby, a detective assigned to marijuana suppression in the Fresno County sheriff's office. "It's all very clandestine. You would smell the plants before you would see them." And though production in northern California has been eclipsed by the Central Valley, officials there also are uncovering increasingly sophisticated operations. Rusty Noe, who heads the Mendocino County sheriff's marijuana eradication team, said a two-year investigation led to the eradication in March of 29,000 marijuana plants, all grown indoors in an operation that was disguised as a ranch. "There were 15 buildings, all built to look like houses," Noe said. "They were all marijuana grow sites." Source: Chicago Tribune (IL) Related Articles & Web Site: OCBC Versus The U.S. Government Marijuana Farm Nearly Invisible on Terraced Slope Crop Seizures Could Match Last Year's Record Total Uprooted From Mountain Site 100,000 Plants Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help |
 |
| Comment #8 posted by freedom monkey on September 04, 2001 at 21:31:05 PT |
| GOD put this plant here for us to use! And hysterical nuts that think they have the power to illegalize a plant of god, are sadly mistaken...they are also egotistical powermongers that are interfering with another's choice in life. These people are very sick and mentally disturbed. LEGALIZE MARIJUANA! It's doesn't kill 400,000 a year like cigarettes; marijuana has never killed anyone. Marijuana is also not addictive, doesn't not cause brain damage, does not cause cancer, and it might be a cure to cancer!...It's been proven to shrink tumors! It is a natural plant of god that was here way before a white man ever set foot on what is now the United States! I want everyone to wake up!....Government is interfering with the WILL OF GOD by making marijuna illegal!!!!!! [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #7 posted by mr.greengenes on September 03, 2001 at 16:41:48 PT |
| Unless you watch Futurama regulary, you probably won't know what I'm talking about, but that sounds like the dark matter that Nibbler excretes that they use for space ship fuel. Now that would be some good sh*t! [ Post Comment ] |
|
Comment #6 posted by lookinside on September 03, 2001 at 15:51:47 PT:
|
| well written...please post any replies you recieve...i've noted that most of the newspapers i've written won't respond to direct criticism to their sainted selves... [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #5 posted by E. Johnson on September 03, 2001 at 15:16:12 PT |
| Dear editors, In your story on pot cultivation, your writer wrote, "Marijuana cultivation is increasingly dominated by huge, sophisticated operations producing marijuana that is said to be 20 times more potent than that available in the 1960s and '70s." When I was in journalism school, we learned that if something was "said" to be true, it was important to identify who exactly "said" it was true, and what proof had been offered by this person to support what was "said" to be true. For example, some people have "said" it is true that Bill Clinton was involved in covering up CIA drug murders in Arkansas. Your newspaper would never print such an allegation without identifying who it was who said Why is the potency of marijuana some special exception to this rule? Why is this allowed to become apocryphal information that is not held to the standards of proof that you apply to other information you print in your paper? The potency of marijuana is a scientific question, this is a question that can be settled by fact, by appealing to scientists and testing labs and horticultural and neurochemical experts. A testing lab might tell you that you can't do an accurate comparison of marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s, because the government was seizing a lot of zero-potency ditch weed that was growing wild beside the highways and that skews their sample greatly to make it appear as if the average marijuana potency in that period was far lower than it actually was. A horticultural expert might tell you that the potency of marijuana cannot be increased beyond a certain limit without killing the plant, because THC is a very heavy sticky crystalline resin and the plant can't grow if it produces too much of it. A neurochemical expert might tell you, for example, that marijuana potency is not really of great concern to society because cannabinoid receptors do not exist in the brain stem, as they do with opiates. This is why heroin addicts can die from respiratory arrest if they get too much of the drug in their system at once. A sudden increase in the This is an important public policy matter, and you'd better bring science and critical thinking into it at some point, or you're abandoning the most fundamental principles of journalism. Thank you, [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #4 posted by Patrick on September 03, 2001 at 09:04:55 PT |
| "State officials still are deciding how to address a May ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that did not overturn Proposition 215 but said federal laws prohibiting the manufacture and distribution of marijuana superseded a patient's medical need for it." This is the second time in as many days I have seen an article here mentioning the "manufacture" of marijuana. Seems to me it grows naturally. Perhaps I am mistaken. The media and the feds apparently want the uninformed public to perceive that marijuana is like heroin or cocaine and meth. The lies and the propaganda must end if you want to prevent drug abuse. So, as long as we simply grow marijuana with the family vegetables, I suppose that we are not in violation of any laws since there is no manufacturing processes involved. Just good old-fashioned freedom loving amerikans farming and communing with the earth! [ Post Comment ] |
|
Comment #3 posted by lookinside on September 03, 2001 at 08:54:49 PT:
|
| the technology required to produce pot with 100%+ thc would require the use of a neutron star...compressing the herb to densities in excess of 100,000,000 tons per cubic inch...hmmm..might be tough to carry and might burn kinda slow...sounds like something the DEA would want to look into... [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #2 posted by The Offspring on September 03, 2001 at 08:47:03 PT |
| Wow that is good dope. The Worst thing about this is the Narcs will believe what they are saying. Cannabis is not 20 times mor potent than it use to be. I heard good weed has something closer to 20% THC but I not sure. If anyone knows feel free to tell me. The more THC content in Cannabis the better it is on your health. Less smoke is better but the Narcs think potent Cannabis is harmful. I pitty them [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #1 posted by mr.greengenes on September 03, 2001 at 08:29:04 PT |
| "But now, they say, the dynamics have changed. Marijuana cultivation is increasingly dominated by huge, sophisticated operations producing marijuana that is said to be 20 times more potent than that available in the 1960s and '70s." Let's see here. TCH content of '60s and '70s is what, about 6%? 20 x 6 = 120% !!!!! 8 bales / 20 = 0.4 bales or 2/5 of a bale of 120% Thc dope. Even at 2/5 of a bale I would think the suffication and exploding model would still come into play. Once the mad botanist get the Thc content up to 100,000% Faithfully yours, Mr. greengenes P.S. What does dope with 120% Thc content look like when it is growing? Just big clumps of resin oozing up out of the gound? How could you grow something like that hydroponically? In petri dishes? [ Post Comment ] |
| Post Comment |  |
 |  |