Pubdate: Thu, 03 Jan 2013
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2013 Los Angeles Times
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Page: D2

ROOTS OF POT CULTIVATION HARD TO TRACE

'Cartel Grows' Might Not Involve Drug Gangs After All

WELDON, Kern County - A few minutes after 4 a.m., agents in 
camouflage cluster in a dusty field in Kern County. "Movement needs 
to be slow, deliberate and quiet," the team leader whispers. "Lock 
and load now."

They check their ammunition and assault rifles, not exactly sure whom 
they might meet in the dark: heavily armed Mexican drug traffickers 
or just poorly paid fieldworkers camping miserably in the brush.

Twenty minutes later, after a lights-off drive for a mile, the agents 
climb out of two pickup trucks and sift into the high desert brush.

The granite faces of the southern Sierra are washed in the light of a 
full moon. Two spotters with night-vision scopes take positions on 
the ridge to monitor the marijuana grow, tucked deep in a cleft of the canyon.

The rest of the agents hunker down in some sumac waiting for the call 
to move in. The action has to be precisely timed with raids in 
Bakersfield, where they hope to capture the leaders of the organization.

They have no idea how many people are up here. Thermal imaging 
aircraft circling high above was not detecting anyone on the ground. 
And trail cameras hadn't captured images of men delivering supplies 
for more than a week. Maybe the growers have already harvested and cleared out.

Word comes on the radio to go into the site.

The agents fan out in the gray of dawn. A U.S. Forest Service agent 
unleashes a German shepherd and follows it up a piney slope. After 
several minutes, the dog begins barking furiously.

"We have movement," shouts the Forest Service officer. "Hands up."

Raids more common

Such raids have become commonplace in California, part of a costly, 
frustrating campaign to eradicate ever bigger, more destructive 
marijuana farms and dismantle the shadowy groups that are creating them.

Pot cultivated on public lands surged in the last decade, a side 
effect of the medical cannabis boom. In 2001, several hundred 
thousand plants were seized in the state. By 2010, authorities pulled 
up a record 7.4 million plants, mostly on public land.

Law enforcement long called these grows on public land "cartel 
grows," and hoped to work from the busts in the forest up the drug 
hierarchy, maybe all the way to the Sinaloa Cartel or the Zetas.

But after years of raids and work with informants and wiretaps, 
agents realize the operations seemed to be run by independent groups 
of Mexican nationals, often using undocumented fieldworkers from 
their home regions.

Tommy Lanier, director of the National Marijuana Initiative, part of 
the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said there was scant 
evidence that the cartels exerted much control over marijuana growing 
in the national forests.

"Based on our intelligence, which includes thousands of cell phone 
numbers and wiretaps, we haven't been able to connect anyone to a 
major cartel," he said.

Lanier said authorities have long mislabeled marijuana grown on 
public land as "cartel grows" because Mexican nationals are arrested 
in the majority of cases, and the narrative of fighting drug cartels 
helps them secure federal funding.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom