Global Ganja Report

A big multi-agency "reclamation" effort on national forest lands in the Emerald Triangle points again to the serious environmental impacts of outlaw cannabis cultivation. Will this be the last gasp of this sort of thing now that California has legalized?

It's an ominous sign that even as California is on a countdown to cannabis legalization, to take effect in January, big pot raids continue in the Emerald Triangle. The most recent to make local news came on Aug. 22, when the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office Drug Enforcement Unit launched a three-day operation in the Conklin Creek area of Petrolia.

On Colorado's northeast plains, advocates of secession from the state have managed to put the question before voters in 11 counties this November —potentially bringing a split-the-state initiative to statewide vote by November 2014. As Weld County Commissioner and leading secession proponent Sean Conway explained to reporters, an "advisory" vote at the county level would require local lawmakers to request that state legislators introduce a constitutional amendment allowing the northeastern counties to go their own way. That would require two-thirds approval by both houses. Failing that, proponents could put the measure to statewide vote by collecting 80,000 signatures. Finally, the initiative would have to be approved by the US Congress. So it is an arduous process—but proponents are clearly dead serious.

The number of cannabis plants eradicated by law enforcement has dropped over the past years from a record high of over 10 million plants in 2009 and 2010 to under 4 million in 2012, according to newly released statistics. DEA figures put the 2012 total at 3,933,950. DEA officials attribute the decline in part to the budget cutbacks in California, which resulted in "the decreased availability of local law enforcement personnel to assist in eradication efforts."

A market glut and paranoia about criminal cartels getting into the act coincide with the end of the CAMP program. Can Northern California's cannabis industry remake itself along ecological and community-rooted lines?

With the 2012 fall harvest season, Northern California's legendary cannabis-growing Emerald Triangle—centered around the counties of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity—is at a turning point. And as the old cliché goes, the Chinese character for crisis is made up of the characters for danger and opportunity.

The current juncture is ripe with both.

For years, police forces in the Emerald Triangle and elsewhere around backcountry California have been hyping an increasing presence in the region's forests of Mexican and Russian cannabis grow ops linked to criminal mafias and cartels based abroad. Now, refreshingly, a Los Angeles Times story of Jan. 2, "Roots of pot cultivation hard to trace," takes a dispassionate look at the question. The piece opens with a slightly lurid lead about camo-clad federal agents ready to "lock-and-load" in a stake-out on National Forest land in Kern County, fearing attack by Mexican cartel gunmen. But at the end, the piece basically tells us not to believe the hype:

For 28 years, the now-defunct state Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) sent teams of state, federal and local officers aboard helicopters into Northern California's remote forests to hunt down and destroy cannabis grows. But this year, Gov. Jerry Brown cut CAMP from the state budget. The program has been restructured under direct federal leadership—and the new moniker of Cannabis Eradication and Reclamation Team (CERT). The DEA and other federal agencies are now working with local law enforcement, with no involvement from the effectively shuttered state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.

More than 26,000 cannabis plants from what authorities called a "sophisticated grow operation" were eradicated on Hoopa Valley tribal land in California's Humboldt County on Aug. 7. The Hoopa Tribal Police worked with the Sheriff's office, the Humboldt County drug task force, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US Marshals Office, the California Department of Justice Narcotics Enforcement, the Bureau of Land Management and the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, according to a statement from the office of the sheriff. The Hoopa Valley Tribe, already hit hard by the methamphetamine plague, expressed outrage that large-scale growers had trespassed on their lands.