Pot Poses Peril for Pristine Wilderness
8/27/96
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Pot poses peril for pristine wilderness
August 27, 1996
From Correspondent Jim Hill
c 1996 Cable News Network, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
LOS PADRES NATIONAL FOREST, California (CNN) --
Pristine environments already threatened by land developers, logging
companies and industrial waste now face an unusual new problem -
marijuana growers.
In an effort to avoid increasingly vigilant law enforcement
authorities, pot growers are moving deeper into the wilderness and
invading areas marked for preservation.
Authorities in the Los Padres National Forest recently uncovered an
illegal pot farm with 3,200 plants, many over 10 feet tall and heavy
with the highly prized buds.
"With the sheriff's department, Forest Service law enforcement
and the FBI putting so much pressure on these growers, now they are
going farther and farther back into the mountains to grow this
stuff," said Jim Youngson of the U.S. Forest Service.
Dope growers do all they can to make their remote plots marijuana-
friendly. Unfortunately, that usually means trouble for the native
flora.
According to an undercover drug agent, the marijuana farmers are
attentive to and very careful with their crops. But native plants --
many of them protected by law -- face an onslaught of cutting,
clearing and the use of herbicides.
A delicate system
The marijuana growers even go so far as to divert water from
natural streams to their crops through long irrigation lines, further
upsetting a delicately balanced ecosystem.
The end result is that marijuana often thrives in the very places
where nature at its wildest and most diverse is supposed to flourish.
The land where the 3,200 plants were found was designated a
wilderness area by the federal government in 1992. It was also the
fourth sizable pot farm raided in the region in the past two months.
The lure of the crop's $12 million value was too much to protect Los
Padres from the pot farmers.
Although 10 suspects are being questioned in connection with the
latest Los Padres find, it's too late to prevent the harm inflicted
by their illegal planting.