HomeMy WebLinkAbout11.5.19 Email from Jeanne Cecchi - Hemp Snyder, Ashley
From: Jeanne Cecchi <jeannececchi@comcast.net>
Sent: Monday, November 4, 2019 4:30 PM
To: Connelly, Bill; Lucero, Debra; Ritter, Tami; BOS District 4; Teeter, Doug; Clerk of the
Board
Subject: FW: NEWS ON HEMP FIELDS USED TO HIDE POT PLANTS-AS WELL AS ILLEGAL POT
GROWERS POISONING OUR FORESTS
Ali"""1111P N Ilk IINI:This message originated from outside Butte County. Please exercise judgment before opening attachments, clicking
on links, or replying. Il
I HOPE MEMBERS OF THE BOARD KEEP THIS INFORMATION IN MIND WHEN MAKING DECISIONS ON THESE
MATTERS. Jeanne Cecchi, Oroville
https://www.turnto23.com/news/local-news/kcso-seizes-l0-million-marijuana-plants-in-11-hemp-fields-in-
arvin
Ken Finn, MD
Sent from my iPhone
On Nov 3, 2019, at 9:10 PM, larmac4246@aol.com wrote:
He remembers the year 2000 as
the first time Trinity County
removed over 1,000 cannabis
plants. Last year, the agency
removed over a million.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/illegal-marijuana-
growing-threatens-california-national-forests/
1
Illegal marijuana growers
poison forests these people
fight back
Despite changing marijuana laws, illegal grow sites
threaten protected land in California. These
experts are trying to stop it.
Redding, California
Deep inside Northern California's Shasta-Trinity National Forest, wildlife
ecologist Mourad Gabriel is dressed in camouflage, waiting for the raid.
He's accompanied by more than a dozen armed officers with the U.S.
Forest Service, local sheriffs office, and other agencies on a hot August
afternoon. Their plan: to seize and dismantle a nearby illegal nilur°ij Jana
grow site, hundreds of which are discovered on California's national
forests each year.
At this site—just off Route 36, east of Redding, and down a rocky forest
valley—more than 4,000 marijuana plants grow beneath sugar pine and
Douglas fir. There is also a campsite with several tents, two cisterns, and
hundreds of feet of irrigation pipe.
During the raid, officers arrest two alleged growers. Once the site is
secured, Gabriel and his partner, Greta Wengert, move in to assess the
environmental damage and clean it the best they can. For the last six
years, the pair has warned about the dangerous pesticides found at many
of these sites and the associated impact on local wildlife. Growers often
use pesticides, some of them banned and highly toxic, to protect the
marijuana plants and their camps from insects and animals.
In 2004, Gabriel and Wengert, who are married, founded the ;In iegr°: 1,
Ecol osearch Om . r, a nonprofit dedicated to the research and
conservation of wildlife. They never planned to get into marijuana work,
Wengert says. "But then all of our animals began to die." (See i#i ii .: :
o a n d eon I ed, :ed aru�d u
2
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Gabriel and Wengert first discovered the problem while working on Pacific
I ishers, a small, predatory mammal and threatened species in the state of
California. While studying causes of mortality, disease, and decline in the
population, they realized that the fishers were often dying of different
types of poison. They eventually tracked the source to pesticides on illegal
marijuana grow sites in remote forests, which are often in the fishers'
home range.
By 2012, Gabriel and Wengert had put numbers to the problem. In a , ;:uody:
published in PLoS ONE, they found that 46 of 58 fisher carcasses they
tested had been exposed to an anticoagulent rodenticide, or rat poison.
Before long, they realized other species were being exposed, including
bears, grey foxes, bobcats, mountain lions, and the
in()rM,Oyu or°uru i)o ed owl,
another threatened species in California. Some were exposed by accident.
Others seemed to have been baited and intentionally poisoned. They've
found pesticide-laced hot dogs on hooks in the forest. Another time, they
discovered a vulture that had died while feeding on a poisoned grey fox.
The carcasses were surrounded by dead flies.
"I do this work because it's a conservation issue," says Gabriel. "It's not,
`It's an evil drug,' that kind of attitude. I'm not talking about the plant
itself."
3
A growing problem
Marijuana grows have shown up on public lands for decades, though the
pesticide problem is newer. The grows are especially prevalent in the
Emerald Triangle, an area of Northern California so-called because of the
amount of cannabis, both legal and illegal, produced there. The triangle
includes Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties, where the raid site
on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest is located.
U.S. Forest Service Special Agent Stephen Frick has eradicated illegal
grows on public lands for 24 years. Frick says that at first the Forest
Service discovered these sites only on occasion. He remembers the year
2000 as the first time Trinity County removed over 1,000 cannabis plants.
By the end of the decade, there were hundreds of thousands. Last year, the
agency removed over a million.
I do this work because it's a conservation
issue. It's not, 'It's an evil drug.'
Mourad Gabriel
They find the sites mostly through aerial reconnaissance, but they believe
many are left undetected, as just a handful of Forest Service agents patrol
millions of forest acres.
In 2018, the number of new sites seemed to decrease slightly. The Forest
Service cleaned more sites then it raided, which may be because of
cannabis legalization in California (on ro: n....nary , i ). But outside the
state, the demand for black-market marijuana continues. And Gabriel says
the pesticide problem on public lands has only gotten worse, with growers
using more banned and restricted-use pesticides. (See Organic W d m )
Highly toxic pesticides
4
After the August raid, one of the alleged growers told Gabriel that he didn't
use pesticides. But the next day Gabriel found several containers of over-
the-counter pesticides, as well as a bottle containing a milky white
substance he suspected to be carbofuran, which the Environmental
Protection Agency banned in 2010. Gabriel took samples that would later
be tested at the University of California Davis, where he is a faculty
member.
Gabriel says carbofuran is so toxic that a quarter of a teaspoon can kill a
600-pound male African lion. Anticoagulent rodenticide, another
pesticide commonly found at grow sites, causes animals to internally bleed
to death.
Gabriel knows what this looks like intimately. In 2014, he and Wengert
found their dog, a rescued black Labrador mix named Nyxo, writhing on
the floor of their Northern California home. Nyxo died not long after.
Gabriel conducted a necropsy and found that his pet's insides were filled
with blood. The dog had ingested rat poison.
"It did have us take a step back and really evaluate what we're doing, and
make sure we wanted to continue doing the work we do," says Wengert.
"We decided that was not going to stop us."
The Integral Ecology Research Center isn't the only organization studying
and trying to fight this problem. Within the Emerald Triangle lives the
Hoopa Valley Tribe. Illegal grow sites have also been found on their
reservation. The tribe's fishery and forestry departments are both worried
about the environmental impacts. Tribal members fish salmon for food,
and pesticides can get into the water. Their land is also habitat for fishers
and northern spotted owls.
In 2012, Hoopa Valley forestry head Mark Higley located a tagged fisher
near his office that had ingested anticoagulant rodenticide. The fisher
staggered as it hemorrhaged and ultimately was put down. Higley has no
doubt that pesticide came from illegal marijuana cultivation. "He was
definitely poisoned," he says.
Higley initially assumed that fishers on the reservation would have more
exposure to the pesticides than owls, since owls are pickier eaters. But a
2018 Si IL by Gabriel, Wengert, and others in the journal Avian
5
Conservation and Ecology found that seven of 10 northern spotted owls
tested positive for rat poison. Gabriel and Wengert said they find poisoned
wildlife near grow sites on about half of their visits.
He remembers the year 2000 as the first time
Trinity County removed over 1,000 cannabis
plants. Last year, the agency removed over a
million.
U.S. Forest Service Special Agent Stephen Frick
A controversial drug
Eradicating illegal marijuana grows, even in the name of science, isn't
always popular. Gabriel says he has been criticized for working with law
enforcement at a time when public opinion around marijuana is shifting.
The U.S. Forest Service sometimes uses aggressive tactics to nab alleged
growers. At the August raid, a police dog bit one fleeing alleged grower in
the abdomen, sending him to the hospital. Gabriel compared the policing
to efforts by Poacher hnniers in Ai dean
"I look at this threat in North America, particularly our Western states, as
no different than the levels of chemicals and poaching that happen in
Africa," he says.
Frick says marijuana growers are sometimes armed, and that they have
found links to drug trafficking organizations in Mexico, though he admits
Forest Service efforts to document the money flow have proven difficult.
Many growers face charges of both manufacturing a controlled substance
and depredation of National Forest lands, which can result in decades in
prison. After they serve time, non-citizens can be deported.
Related: These people deal weed to survive in the Congo
Etan Zaitsu, a Sacramento-based federal criminal defense attorney, is
representing one of the men arrested during the August raid. He has
6
defended suspects arrested at illegal marijuana grows in the past and says
they tend to be day laborers or farmworkers from Mexico or southern
California who are offered enticing deals to earn more money by growing
marijuana in the woods.
"The guys getting caught are not in the cartel," he says. "They are just
farmworkers. The connection is that somebody way up above is running
the show and they are usually not present when the raids happen."
Zaitsu says his client is facing a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for
his alleged role in the illegal marijuana farm in the Shasta-Trinity National
Forest, which he thinks is far too harsh. He adds that recruiters don't fully
disclose the risks associated with the grows and that the growers
themselves often have trouble knowing the difference between more
lenient state laws and strict federal laws.
"The penalty is supposed to deter people from committing the crime but
I'm not sure we're seeing a reduction," he says. "These guys don't know
what the penalties are and they are being lied to."
Recently, the Forest Service got a boost for its eradication efforts. Its 2018
budget saw a $2.7 million increase to get rid of grow sites on public lands,
citing both a risk to public safety and the environment. But that money
doesn't go toward cleaning and restoring grow sites.
After assessing the environmental damage, Gabriel, Wengert, and their
team, with the help of the U.S. Forest Service, do what's called a
reclamation of the site, which means not only removing any pesticides
they've found but also cleaning the often thousands of pounds of trash left
behind. Resources for these efforts are slim, and sites are almost never
restored to how the forests once were.
Gabriel says illegal grow sites should be a concern to anyone who cares
about wildlife or uses public forests. "If you ever use your national forest,
and you hunt and fish and walk in your national forests, this is out there."
7