Nearly 34,000 marijuana plants eradicated in county this week

by Heather Muller , 9/21/2007

A multiagency effort resulted in the eradication of approximately 34,000 marijuana plants this week from six locations throughout the county.

A news release issued by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office stated eight search warrants were served, three suspects arrested and 25 guns and $21,000 in cash were seized from Monday through Thursday this week.

Participating agencies included the Sheriff’s Office, Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, the Humboldt County Drug Task Force, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the Eureka Police Department and the Bureau of Land Management.

The release stated the combined efforts of the Sheriff’s Office and CAMP have resulted in the eradication of more than 200,000 pot plants during the 2007 outdoor growing season.

Sheriff’s Office personnel destroyed an additional 100,000 plants prior to CAMP’s arrival in Humboldt County, the release stated, bringing the grand total to more than 300,000 plants since the beginning of the year.

By comparison, the Sheriff’s Office destroyed only 103,000 plants during all of 2006.

The numbers were bolstered by an August raid that officials called the biggest pot bust in Humboldt County history.

Personnel from six agencies spent the better part of a week uprooting and destroying almost 135,000 plants growing in a collection of gardens at a single site along the county’s sparsely populated eastern edge.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Wayne Hanson estimated the potential value of those plants at $469 million.

As with many large grows in the county, the plants pulled in August were detected during aerial surveillance flights and were linked back to Mexican drug cartels, which officials say operate brazenly on both public and private timberland.

While Humboldt County’s numbers weren’t particularly high in 2006, then California Attorney General Bill Lockyer announced in October that CAMP set a statewide seizure record for the 2006 growing season, eradicating nearly 1.7 million plants worth an estimated $6.7 billion.

Hanson said by phone Friday that the state’s numbers would set a new record this year, with the increase “absolutelyâ€