It’s that time of year—spring is coming, and while local vintners and gardeners figure out ways to dial back their water consumption during an emergency drought, illegal marijuana farmers are presumably out in the local mountains scouting for the best grow areas on publicly owned lands.
These aren’t your garden-variety stoners. In recent years, big marijuana growing busts in the Malibu area have occurred about once per year, with as many as three in one year (2011). The street value of the confiscated plants has run as high as $100 million.
The local pot farm problem is a relatively recent one. After 9/11, when national security tightened, Mexican drug cartels found that too much of their product was being seized at the U.S./Mexican border. They decided it would be smarter to grow the marijuana here. Mexican farming operations began in the isolated forests of northern California, but quickly expanded to the south.
Although the first local busts of Mexican-style growing operations occurred in 2005, in both Malibu Creek State Park and off Kanan road, law enforcement agencies didn’t have specific funding for these types of operations until later.
“The funding wasn’t there for managing this issue before 2009,” said Craig Sap, Angeles District State Parks Supt. “To get funding, it took law enforcement directly dealing with it, a public safety component with the possibility of unwitting hikers stumbling on these operations, and the fact that it was occurring on state and national public lands.”
Planting season usually begins in April and runs until November, according to local officials. The most popular places to farm weed in the local Santa Monica Mountains are well-hidden and off the beaten path, often on steep slopes under thick brush – usually deep in Trancas and Zuma Canyons, National Park land near Kanan Dume Road, Malibu Creek State Park and Topanga State Park. (An exception was in 2009, when growers tended a site 25 feet behind the LAPD Topanga Station.)
While the farmers typically live on locations while the plants are growing, the remote locales of the sites make it easy for them to tell when law enforcement is coming, and they are usually long gone by the time a tactical team actually reaches the site.
In the last decade, only two arrests were reported—in 2010, authorities caught one U.S. resident and one Mexican national on a grow site in Malibu Creek State Park near Piuma Road.
Consistent with the level of profits, and the industry in which the farmers work, their methods are particularly brazen. The fact that California is experiencing a severe drought is not expected to keep growers away this season.
“We have year-round springs, and they get creative,” Sap said. “They know where all the Las Virgenes Water District lines are, and have even run lines from [housing] subdivisions.”
“They come in, drop people off, scar up the land, put in irrigation, dam up streams and water sources, divert the water through irrigation piping, and add chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides,” Sap said.
Once the plants are harvested, much is left over.
“They leave everything behind so they can return again in the future,” Sap said. “They often leave hundreds of pounds of trash which continues to poison the watershed.”
Law enforcement has become much more proactive when it comes to searching for marijuana plantations.
“We actively patrol and look for water sources, PVC pipe, irrigation, and areas where vegetation has been trimmed and thinned,” said Darcy MacDonald, district ranger for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. “And even after a particular site has been eradicated, we keep checking it, because sometimes they’re re-occupied.”
When a grow site has been discovered, an inter-agency tactical team of LA County Sheriffs Marijuana Eradication Team (MET), State Parks, National Park Service (NPS), U.S. Forest Service and Mountains Resource Conservation Authority (MRCA) will swoop in to the site by land and air.
There’s always hope of catching the growers in one of these raids, but even when they don’t, the force is tasked with cleaning up and hauling away all plants, equipment, chemicals and trash from the site, which can weigh as much as two tons.
The NPS says the public should report suspicious activity like drip irrigation lines in streams, supplies or food left at roadside pullouts, seedling or food cartons, propane tanks and camping equipment in unusual locations.