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.

Last Tuesday I posted a story, “Dispute Grows Over Medical Marijuana Plants“, in which a legal medical marijuana-using cancer patient received complaints about her outdoor garden from her neighbor, Mr. Jack Lennon of Vancouver, Washington.  The Vancouver police checked out Mr. Lennon’s allegations that she was growing “a lot more than 60 days” worth of medicine, as per Washington’s state medical marijuana law, and that they were “the biggest plants I’ve ever seen.”  The police found her outdoor grow to be completely within the law.

However, Jack Lennon’s complaint also led to a news story on the local FOX affiliate, KPTV 12 in Portland.  The news story mentioned the name of the street on which Jack Lennon and the cancer patient reside, and filmed the story with the cancer patient’s home featured prominently throughout the report.

Friends and family and the patient herself, self-identified as Tracie, have followed-up on my initial post with updates in our comments section.  According to Tracie:

I am not sure why Jack decided to take this action. I have in the past given him Blazer Tickets, a cell phone, and my husband sold him his first car. We have always been close to Jack, his brother and mother. Why Jack all of the sudden became an expert without asking me first, is beyond me.

Jack has now been informed that there is no illegal activity taking place on my property, and that if he, or anyone else on my block bother me, the Vancouver Police Department will site them for harassment.

Again, thank you to all those that care. I am starting to feel better…good day today. Have another round of chemo on Thursday, so keep me in your prayers.

Unfortunately, thanks to the media attention by KPTV FOX News 12 and Jack Lennon or Vancouver, Washington, this cancer patient named Tracie now lives in a house that the entire Portland metro area knows has a cannabis growsite in her back yard.  Sunday night, a family friend writes:

Unfortunately the lady growers’ home was robbed yesterday morning sometime between the hours of 3:30am and 7:00am. There had been no problems since May until the news story…

[S]ecurity has been beefed up, however, one of Jack’s friends, (This was confirmed with Jack’s mother) posted the lady’s name and address on another site with the comment “looking for a new drug dealer?”…

Almost half were stolen, but I am guessing not by a medical patient. And it had to be by someone who our 3 dogs know…

Then, early on Monday morning we received another update:

The house was robbed again by high schoolers but one was caught and taken by Vancouver Police Department. He was caught by the added security and told us he heard about the marijuana from the Fox Channel 12 news story with Jim Hyde.

So thanks in no small part to Jack Lennon of Vancouver, Washington, not being man enough to privately address his concerns about a secret outdoor marijuana garden to his frail, cancer-stricken female neighbor, she now gets to scramble to find medicine so she won’t vomit uncontrollably from her next chemo treatment.  Thanks to KPTV FOX News 12 and their lack of concern for the medical privacy of a cancer patient, residents of a peaceful Vancouver nighborhood now must worry about late-night thieves prowling around their back yards and alleyways.

Jack Lennon of Vancouver, Washington, the late great John Lennon wrote lyrics for people like you: “Instant karma’s gonna get you!”

Download audio file (john-lennon-instant-karma.mp3)

Now, we here at the Stash, unlike Jack Lennon of Vancouver, Washington, will not post Jack Lennon’s address and strongly discourage any harassment of Mr. Lennon.  We believe in minding our own business and letting people be, even inconsiderate cowards who run to the police rather than talking to cancer-suffering neighbors.  However, KPTV FOX 12 Portland is a news media organization that should know better.  You may address your complaints to:

KPTV Fox 12
News Director/Station Manager
Patrick McCreery
14975 NW Greenbrier Parkway
Beaverton, OR 97006-5731
tel (503) 906-1249
fax (503) 548-6920

USATODAY.com
CHICAGO — Mexican drug cartels are stepping up marijuana cultivation in U.S. national parks and on other public land, endangering visitors and damaging the environment, law enforcement and National Park Service officials say.

John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, says 75%-80% of marijuana grown outdoors is on state or federal land. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says there were more than 4.8 million marijuana-plant seizures at outdoor sites in 2006.

Tighter border controls make it harder to smuggle marijuana into the USA, so more Mexican drug networks are growing crops here, Walters says.

“We are finding more marijuana gardens in the park year after year,” says Jim Milestone, superintendent of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in Northern California.

“We’re dealing with some bad characters,” Milestone says. “We are arresting people … who have criminal records in Mexico, and almost all of them are here illegally with false papers.”

The number of marijuana plants confiscated on public land in California grew from 40% to 75% of total seizures between 2001-2007, says the state’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting task force.

Hunting and cleaning up after pot growers diverts resources at a time when parks face chronic funding shortfalls, says Laine Hendricks of the non-profit National Parks Conservation Association.

When will the government ever learn the basics of supply and demand?  The American people demand pot.  Good, bad, or indifferent to it, it’s a fact.  Where there is demand, there will be supply.  Cut off the smuggling routes from Mexico, then the suppliers will move here and use our parklands.  Crack down on the parklands, the suppliers will buy suburban homes and grow indoors.  Crack down on the grow houses and the people will just grow their own.  At every step along the way, each crackdown creates scarcity and risk, which leads to high prices and profits.  A lucrative supply market with no legal way to resolve disputes then uses violence and terror to resolve disputes.

Also, it is important to note that of this 75%-80% outdoor weed supply, 98% of that is feral ditchweed hemp that can get nobody high and isn’t being cultivated by any bad characters.

Look, I smoke pot every day and I don’t want criminal gangs exploiting our national parks and state lands!  That’s why I support an end to adult marijuana prohibition, so farmers can grow it like any other crop and I can buy it in a well-regulated manner like any other intoxicant.  I don’t like guys with guns setting up booby traps in the forest, leaking generator diesel fuel in the environment and degrading our forest lands.  That’s why I’d note that you very rarely find moonshine stills secreted in the woods these days, and you never find clandestine tobacco or hops farms in the national parks.

Officers, dogs searching for two suspects who fled deadly pot raid in Saratoga hills – San Jose Mercury News
In a wild turn of events in what was expected to be a routine pot farm eradication today, state and local officers encountered three armed men, killing one and chasing two through heavily wooded canyons in the Saratoga hills.

Dozens of officers and three K-9 dog teams were still searching in the evening for the two men in a wooded area near Peach Hill and Villa Montalvo.

Only the sketchiest picture of what happened during the raid was available because the officers involved in the shooting were still being interviewed: Deputies and state drug officers saw the three armed men when they hiked into the pot farm, shots were fired and one man was killed.

“We don’t know who shot who and who shot first,” said Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Lt. Dalia Rodriguez. “We won’t know that until we get the ballistics tests back; it could very well be a cross fire.”

After the shooting, the sheriff’s department activated its emergency response team, which drew in officers from several other police agencies, including San Jose, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Mountain View and California Fish & Game.

The alert brought 80 officers to the scene, who secured the area and started searching for the two men.

“I didn’t expect somebody was going to get killed,” Stone said. “But that’s the way it happens with these guys. They hear somebody coming and they bolt off.”

Today’s fatal shooting during a raid on a Santa Cruz Mountains pot farm is the second in recent years.

In 2005, Armando Quintana Aguilar, 33, of East Palo Alto was shot and killed by Santa Clara County sheriff deputies in an exchange of gunfire after authorities raided a marijuana farm above Los Gatos.

A state Fish and Game warden was also shot in the legs during the incident.

In 2005, CAMP (California’s “Campaign Against Marijuana Planting”) uprooted 540,989 plants and killed a man.  In 2006, CAMP uprooted 1,675,681 plants.  In 2008, they’ve killed another man and certainly uprooted another few million plants.  And yet, about 2.3 million Californians still regularly smoke pot!  And people still plant millions of plants illegally on public and private land!

You know what you never find growing illegally on public or private land?  Hops, grapes, and tobacco.  Nobody ever gets shot garding a hops plantation, a tobacco farm, or vineyard.