.
"24 tributaries of
the Eel River in Mendocino and Humboldt counties went dry last summer _
and all of them had been used to water pot operations."...
3/26/14, "Growers of thirsty pot are under fire in drought-struck California," McClatchyDC.com, by Rob Hotakainen
"In drought-hit California, marijuana growers are feeling the heat,
accused of using too much water for their thirsty plants and of
polluting streams and rivers with their pesticides and fertilizers.
State
officials say a pot plant sucks up an average of 6 gallons of water per
day, worsening a shortage caused by one of the biggest droughts on
record. They say the situation is particularly acute along California’s
North Coast, where the growing pressure to irrigate pot threatens salmon
and other fish.
“This industry _ and it is an industry _ is
completely unregulated,” said Scott Bauer, a fisheries biologist with
the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “What I just hope is
that the watersheds don’t go up in smoke before we get things regulated
and protect our fish and wildlife.”
California is also the most
popular state for pot producers to grow crops in U.S. forests,
accounting for 86 percent of the nearly 1 million plants federal
officials seized in 2012.
“Those are lands that you and I own,”
said Rep. Mike Thompson, a California Democrat. “And when people are
growing dope there and guarding their operations with guns and the
likes, and sometimes with booby traps, we can’t use the land that we
own. It happens all over.”
The situation is a complicated one in
California, which passed the nation’s first medical marijuana law in
1996, allowing people to possess and grow pot, even though the federal
government still bans the drug.
Medical growers who tend their
crops on private property object to getting lumped in with the illegal
growers who are trespassing on federal lands. They say they’re a scapegoat in the debate.
“It’s
really easy to point fingers at a very large cash crop that’s
completely unregulated. It’s one of the main cash crops of the state,”
said Kristin Nevedal of Garberville, Calif., the founding chairwoman of
the Emerald Growers Association. She doesn’t grow marijuana herself but
she’s the spokeswoman for the group, which has about 400 members.
Public officials are taking aim at both the legal and illegal growers in many ways.
In pot-rich Mendocino County, the sheriff’s department is cracking down on growers who steal water. In
Sacramento, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown proposed in his January budget
to spend $3.3 million to enforce pot cultivation rules to protect water
and endangered species.
As part of a drought-fighting plan
on Capitol Hill, Thompson and 13 other members of the U.S. House of
Representatives from California want to give the Drug Enforcement
Administration $3 million to get rid of the large pot operations in
public forests.
In 2012, U.S. officials discovered illegal pot
plots in 67 national forests in 20 states, including 252 sites in
California. Washington and Colorado, the only states that have legalized
marijuana for recreational use, ranked second and third, respectively,
followed by Idaho, Georgia and Kentucky.
At raided sites,
authorities have found widespread damage, including miles of irrigation
lines, propane tanks, and rat poison and other toxic chemicals that end
up in streams.
California Democratic Rep. John Garamendi, a
co-sponsor of the drought bill, said the forest growers were “operating
without any environmental awareness.”
“They’re using the water
illegally. They’re using the land illegally. They’re growing an illegal
product,” Garamendi said. “And they’re probably protecting that product
with illegal weapons.”
Nevedal and other pot backers said the ultimate solution was for
Congress to fully legalize the drug, which she said would eliminate the
need for growers to hide in the wilderness and truck in their water.
“When
logging was unregulated, we saw horrific environmental consequences,”
she said. “And it’s so easy for the media to pick up stories of grow
sites that have been raided or busted. It’s really hard to show a
contrast of folks who are really doing a good job. What is being put out
is the small percentage that are really blowing it.”
Ellen Komp,
the deputy director of the California chapter of NORML, the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said the fracking of
natural gas was guzzling up “tremendous amounts of water” in the state
and that grape producers used much more water than the marijuana growers
did....
For
biologist Bauer, who’s been using Google Earth images to study the
scope of the operations, the link is clear. He said 24 tributaries of
the Eel River in Mendocino and Humboldt counties went dry last summer _
and all of them had been used to water pot operations.
Bauer
said it was common to see marijuana growers driving pickups with water
tanks. And he said state officials last summer had chased down reports
of trucks with 5,000-gallon tanks siphoning water from already-low
rivers.
“That was happening all over the place _ and good luck
trying to catch them,” he said. “We did catch one person doing it. We
tried to capture others, but they’re pretty wily.”
Thompson
recalled one brazen theft in Napa Valley two years ago, when a pot
grower laid a pipe across two property lines to hook into a neighbor’s
electrical system to pump water to his crop.
Thompson, along with
Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and three other
House members from the state, wants the U.S. Sentencing Commission to
create new penalties for environmental damage caused by pot cultivation.
But he said the popularity of marijuana in some parts of the state had
made it difficult to get juries to convict anyone on pot-related
charges.
“It’s hard, because a lot of times if someone is
arrested, it’s in an area where a lot of this is prevalent, and it’s not
always the easiest thing to get a jury of your peers to convict you,”
Thompson said.
Neither Thompson nor Garamendi said they were ready
to fully legalize marijuana, though both acknowledged that it would
make it easier to control growers.
“In Washington state and
Colorado, the growing of marijuana becomes legal and regulated. That’s
not the case in California,” Garamendi said.
Thompson said he was
ready for a debate on the topic. That’s likely to happen in 2016, if pot
backers succeed in their plans to get legalization on the state ballot. “If it were legal and regulated, you wouldn’t have the growers ruining the countryside,” Thompson said.
For
now, Bauer hopes state lawmakers this spring will approve the
governor’s plan to add another 18 people to the Department of Fish and
Wildlife and the State Water Resources Control Board to confront the
issue. Bauer said the state particularly needed more game wardens and
scientists.
With no end in sight for the state’s long drought, Bauer is expecting more dry streams."...
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