Marijuana Farms Take Root In National Parks

Arnold Moorin, the DEA’s special agent in charge in Seattle, says the people running these pot farms are just middle managers.

“It’s all controlled by the Mexican cartels in Mexico, where the command and control sits,” he says.

But other DEA officials are reluctant to use the word “cartel.”

Gordon Taylor is the DEA’s assistant special agent in charge in Sacramento, and he has years of experience investigating pot farms in California. He says the large-scale farms on public land are run by networks.

“Most of these groups are headed by Mexican nationals that live in the United States illegally,” he says.

But he stops short of calling them “cartels.”

“When I hear somebody use the term ‘drug cartels,’ what that means is the identified drug cartels that are operating down in Mexico,” Taylor says. “We have not seen direct evidence tying [the marijuana gardens on public lands] to the cartels down in Mexico.”

via Marijuana Farms Take Root In National Parks : NPR.

Clandestine marijuana grows on public lands are an environmental problem.  Growers often terrace the land, use diesel generators that leak fuel into the soil, and divert water to irrigate the grows.  Many don’t care for the land like a professional farmer would be required to do by law.

So our society made a choice.  Rather than allow marijuana to be farmed like every other product, from the tobacco in cigarettes to the hops in beer, and insure that marijuana growers have decent farmland to use and strong environmental regulations to follow, we decided that we should only let criminals farm marijuana in any secret public location they can find.  We decided it would be more fruitful to attempt nationwide eradication of a weed species than to provide regulations for controlling  it.

If declaring a widely-growing weed illegal was all it takes to be rid of it, we’d have outlawed crabgrass and dandelions.  Prohibition does not reduce drug use and production, it just creates harder drugs and crime.