Pubdate: Sun, 26 Nov 2006 Source: Record Searchlight (Redding, CA) Copyright: 2006 Record Searchlight Contact: http://www.redding.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/360 WAR ON ILLICIT POT FARMS HAS SUNK INTO A QUAGMIRE We're Not Winning the War on Drugs. Two decades ago, the state government launched the Campaign Against Marijuana Production (CAMP). Agents fanned out through the woods and took to the skies to find and destroy illegal pot gardens, especially in Northern California. The results were dramatic. In its third year, 1985, officers uprooted nearly 170,000 marijuana plants from isolated patches. Growers even appeared to get the message, or at least they grew more cautious. By 1990 the number of plants found dropped to about half the peak, and it stayed at that manageable level through most of the '90s. Those Were the Days. This year, agents in Shasta County alone yanked up nearly 240,000 illegal pot plants. Statewide, the figure approached 1.7 million -- 10 times the 1980s peak. State officials' reaction? A declaration of victory. "The record-breaking numbers reflect CAMP's continued, remarkable success in ridding California of illegal large-scale marijuana gardens," state Attorney General Bill Lockyer said last month in announcing this year's results. He would have a point if there were any evidence that the problem was whipped, that illegal growers were getting the message and taking their business elsewhere. But even the cops who take on the tough and dangerous job of stopping pot farming guess they find only 20 percent to 30 percent of the illicit crop. Is There a Solution? U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott, the chief federal prosecutor for the region and former Shasta County district attorney, suggested that the increase was in part caused by tougher law enforcement -- not in the northern mountains, but on the southern border. Since it's become harder to smuggle drugs from Mexico, cartels have simply started growing dope up north. Even if Scott is correct, though, relaxing our border controls isn't in the cards these days. Shasta County District Attorney Jerry Benito says tougher sentences for growing marijuana are needed, especially for the massive gardens that are increasingly common in Northern California. We must punish lawbreakers, but as it happens the state's prisons are already so full that federal judges are threatening to free prisoners to relieve the overcrowding. Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who died last week, advocated treating marijuana the way we do alcohol -- taxing and regulating it to keep it out of the hands of children, keeping intoxicated drivers off the road, but otherwise letting adults do what they want to their own bodies. Well, Friedman's free-market views on the economy greatly influenced such leaders as Ronald Reagan, but Americans aren't quite ready to apply them to drugs. (In anything-goes Nevada, an initiative to legalize marijuana won 44 percent of the vote in this month's election.) But the lens of supply and demand clarifies the issue. As long as there's a demand -- and neither the law nor good sense has stopped pot smokers yet -- somebody will provide the supply. In other words, helicopters will be scanning the north state's forests for pot patches for a long time to come. - --- MAP posted-by: Elaine