Pubdate: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 Source: The Orange County Register (CA) Copyright: 2000 The Orange County Register Contact: P.O. Box 11626, Santa Ana, CA 92711 Fax: (714) 565-3657 Website: http://www.ocregister.com/ Section: News, page 33 Author: Pauline Arrillaga, The Associated Press U.S. FORESTS A CASUALTY IN DRUG WAR ENVIRONMENT: Much Of The Nation's Marijuana Is Tilled On Public Lands, And Pesticides Used By Growers Are Poisoning Waterways And Wildlife. San Bernardino National Forest -- They were spotted from the air, as conspicuous as sharks in a school of guppies: Three plots of land, seemingly stripped of the towering oaks and manzanitas that shroud this patch of Southern California forest. These were not natural formations. They were entirely man-made - and entirely illegal. A week after the August sighting, a helicopter returned with two dozen Forest Service agents and sheriff's detectives. They cleared a landing pad and cut a trail into the site, coming first to a makeshift reservoir. Six hoses, filtering water from a creek, ran in one end; several more snaked back out the other. Moving on, the agents reached the first clearing. They'd been right. In place of the trees this forest is meant to protect stood a grove of emerald stalks, 6 to 15 feet tall. They were in full bloom - robust and ready for harvest. On two acres of prime forest land, about a half-hour from the city of San Bernardino and 11/2 hours from Los Angeles, these agents had discovered the last battle-ground in the war on drugs: a 23,000-plant marijuana plantation. As money and manpower continue to flow to the Southwest border to stop illegal drugs coming into this country, traffickers - many employed by Mexican drug gangs - are producing vast quantities of marijuana right here in the United States, on land owned by the federal government. The reasons are obvious: the land is fertile, remote and free. There's no risk of forfeiture, plantations are difficult to trace, and growers have land agents outmanned, outspent and outgunned. "We spend a lot of time and energy stopping stuff from coming into this country, but we don't really pay much attention to our own back yard," said Dan Bauer, the Forest Service's drug-program coordinator. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that more than half of the marijuana consumed in the United States is produced domestically. Much of that - no one knows how much for sure - is grown on public lands, primarily the country's 155 national forests. Pesticides used by the illegal growers poison wildlife and waterways, although the crop's danger is not just environmental. Park visitors run the risk of tripping booby traps or encountering armed gangs. After stumbling upon a marijuana farm, some visitors have been run off at gunpoint, Bauer said. Forest Service agents have sometimes exchanged gunfire with growers. The public's perception of the drug war is a border agent pulling bundles of narcotics from the bed of a truck, Bauer said. "They very rarely think of the poor forest agent crawling through the bush." In 1999, 452,330 marijuana plants were removed from national forest land, mostly in California and Kentucky. With each plant estimated to produce at least 2.2 pounds of pot, that's 995,126 pounds of marijuana, with an estimated value of about $700 million. By comparison, the U.S. Customs Service seized 989,369 pounds of marijuana along the Southwest border in fiscal year 1999, while the Border Patrol confiscated just under 1.2 million pounds. The difference: Customs has 2,900 inspectors and agents manning Southwest ports of entry; the Border Patrol has 7,761 agents patrolling between those ports. There are just 588 Forest Service agents and officers assigned to 192 million acres of national forests, a decline from 625 officers in 1996. That's nearly 330,000 acres per officer, and only one of them is dedicated full time to drug enforcement. Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug in the United States, with about 11 million users, including 8.3 percent of teens, according to government statistics. One nationwide program is dedicated to the problem of U.S. -produced marijuana - the Drug Enforcement Administration's Domestic Cannabis Eradication and Suppression Program. It receives 1 percent of the agency's $1.4 billion budget. In 1998 the DEA reported seizing 2.5 million U.S.- produced marijuana plants, including 232,000 indoor plants. However, those seizures were done in coordination with state and local agencies; the DEA doesn't track seizures done by public-land agencies. "Issues dealing with cocaine and heroin and drugs that people are dying from tend to have a higher priority as far as enforcement goes," DEA spokesman Terry Parham said. Public lands have long been targeted by marijuana producers, but investigators trace a rise in production to the 1980s, when the government enacted more stringent asset forfeiture laws. Before that, "if you were caught growing pot on your own property, you wouldn't lose your property," Bauer said. "People could grow corn rows of marijuana literally in corn fields." In the late '80s and early '90, the profile of a typical grower was a "white, hippie-type" running 100- to 1,000- plant farms, agents said. These days the mom-and-pop operations are far outnumbered by major pot plantations, ranging in size from 1,000 to 10,000 plants or more. In the Southeast, old moonshining families now run marijuana farms. But that's only part of the problem in places like Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest, which consistently ranks first among national forests in marijuana seizures. "It's a large unorganized coalition of people that live very close to national forest lands who are generally very close to the poverty level and looking for any way to try to make a dollar," said Jack Gregory, special agent in charge of the Forest Service's Southern region. In the Southwest, Bauer said, most pot operations are run by Mexican drug organizations that either ship crews across the border or hire undocumented immigrants to do the work. "Just the cost of doing business up here makes it great," said Mike Wirz, a narcotics detective with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department who works with the Forest Service to investigate marijuana groves on federal property. Wirx also said that by growing their product in the United States, Mexican cartels eliminate the extra cost and risk of paying a courier to bring drugs into the country. "This is the land of the free. This is the best thing you could ever ask for," said Wirz, who believes the federal government has played down the significance of the problem. "The United States, and even the Drug Enforcement Administration, doesn't want to admit that we're being bombarded with domestic marijuana and it's being run by non-U.S. citizens." Six months after they located the 23,000-plants pot farm in the San Bernardino Forest, Wirz and Forest Service agent Denese Stokes returned to the site. They flew in to the same helicopter pad, hiked down the same path their agents had carved into the land. The marijuana was long gone, but the destruction remained. Dried pot stalks, unusable on the market, dotted the three main growing plots and numerous smaller plots linked by an intricate network of trails. Where vegetation native to these lands remained, figures of women and Spanish phrases were carved into the trees, many of which are considered endangered. "People are of the opinion, 'Well, they're just growing a plant out there; what's the big deal?' The environmental damage that it does is horrific," Stokes said. She believes as many as eight people operated the farm, though none was arrested. They escaped amid the maze of trails they had cut into the forest. "They'll be back again somewhere," Stokes said. "They won't stop; there's too much money in it."