Illegal Immigrants Tilling Mexican Drug Cartel Pot Plantations In U.S. National Parks, Forests

August 8, 2008 2:39 p.m. EST
Linda Young - AHN Editor

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - Increasing numbers of drug dealers have switched from smuggling drugs into the United States to growing them here, often on public lands with some Mexican drug cartels threatening violence to vacationers or park rangers who accidentally stumble into drug grow areas.

The problem isn't new. There have been reports for years of drug dealers growing marijuana in national parks and forests, even setting up meth labs on public land. But now federal officials say that marijuana grow farms tucked miles inside national forests and tended by illegal immigrants are feeding some of Mexico's most violent drug traffickers.

"People who farm now are not doing this for laughs, despite the fact Hollywood still thinks that. They're doing it to make a lot of money," John Walters, director of the National Drug Control Policy, told CNN, according to reports Friday.

Walters was talking about thousands of marijuana plants worth about $40 million that officials found inside California's Sequoia National Forest, at a distance of a two- to four-hour hike from the nearest road.

But there was more.

Federal, state and local officials reportedly have spent the last week in the area destroying marijuana plants with a street value of more than $1 billion and have arrested 38 people and found 29 automatic weapons, high-powered rifles and other guns.

Armed men guard the marijuana gardens and workers set up camps in the 1.2 million acre forest, living in tents.

"They come into our own national parks and risk the lives of sheriffs and others," Walters said.

In 2006, marijuana grow operations in a national park near San Diego were deemed a threat to tourists and park rangers who unknowingly strayed into those areas. At that time, the U.S. Justice Department said that no matter how hard law enforcement tried to enforce marijuana prohibition that criminal elements found ways to circumvent the law, and increasingly were doing so on public lands.

In 2003, Time magazine reported that some marijuana plantations were planted only a few hundred yards from popular tourist areas, which exposed tourists to armed combat between marijuana growers and Forest Service rangers raiding plots planted with pot in national parks and forests.

The same article reported that a park ranger in Arizona was shot and killed by marijuana cultivators in Arizona.

But drug dealers haven't confined themselves to only growing marijuana in the nation's parks and forests. The same Time article reported that from 2000 to 2003, that 192 meth labs had been discovered in Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest and dismantled.
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