www.kansascity.com | 09/15/2008 | Cameras enter fight against marijuana
A lone man enters a grove of giant marijuana plants, yanks them out and stacks his harvest.
But a camera hidden near the illicit field caught it all. These days, even the ground can have eyes as police and pot growers engage in a high-tech battle.
Police on both sides of the state line use covert cameras to watch outdoor fields and arrest growers. Marijuana growers in some states battle the cameras by wearing identity-hiding masks as they work their fields. Some even install their own cameras.
It’s a fight that’s going on nationwide. The U.S. Forest Service this year even bought two drone airplanes to find pot fields in California forests.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation started using a few cameras in 1995 to watch fields and now has about a dozen of them, said Jeffrey Brandau, a KBI special agent in charge.
Thanks largely to the cameras, Brandau said, “Now it’s hard to find any outdoor groves — it’s like they disappeared.”
In 2000, Kansas police confiscated 2,795 cultivated outdoor plants. Last year, they found 1,674. And from Jan. 1 to Aug. 31 of this year, they recorded only eight such plants confiscated statewide, KBI numbers show.
Police think the bad guys have responded to their field cameras — and market forces — by moving indoors and growing far stronger pot. Now, as police turn their attention and high-tech tools to those indoor marijuana-growing operations, some growers are using increasingly sophisticated means to dodge them.
So, your efforts to enforce prohibition of marijuana have led to more potent marijuana? Thank you?
The cops close down the border, so the marijuana grows move to our national parks. The cops plant cameras to watch us in the wilderness, so the marijuana grows move indoors to suburban homes. The cops use power monitoring to detect indoor grows, so the growers steal power or use generators. The cops use thermal imaging to detect indoor grows, so the growers insulate houses and dig deep basements. A big arms race between cops and growers.
And over that whole period of time, marijuana gets more potent, there’s more of it around, and the price stays relatively stable and artificially high. Cops get jobs and shiny new toys, growers get big profits, and everybody who wants to get high is getting high with the best weed ever grown. Who’s winning this Drug War, anyway?
Sometimes I like to throw a drug warrior this question: “Suppose you had a magic wand and suddenly marijuana no longer exists. How does that make the world a better place? Do you believe there would be less heroin addicts? Do you believe drug-related crime would disappear? Do you think suddenly workplace productivity would go up? Do you think SAT scores would rise? What is the problem you think you’re trying to solve by eradicating marijuana?”
Remember, this isn’t just about stopping you from smoking weed. This is also about wiping a plant species off the face off the earth! Calculated premeditated extinction. Aside from bugs like polio, I can’t think of any government in history has ever before enacting a policy for the purposeful extinction of a species.
