A plane crash in Colorado took the lives of one current and one former law enforcement officer on Friday. Pueblo County Sheriff’s Captain Leide DeFusco and retired Pueblo police captain John Barger were both in the plane when it crashed in the San Isabel National Forest. Barger, who was flying the plane, has been described as an experienced pilot and a flying enthusiast. Contact with the plane was lost at about 9:30 a.m., while the wreck was found around 7:00 p.m., and the precise cause of the crash is still under investigation. The crash site, in Custer County, was in rough terrain and difficult for rescue crews to access.

Whatever the immediate cause of the crash, however, our failed marijuana policies certainly played a part. The sheriff’s office reports that the two were searching for marijuana plants that day. Marijuana grow sites in the Wet Mountains had been raided just weeks earlier, and the two men were looking for suspected additional sites nearby. Flying low over unfamiliar terrain to look for hidden cannabis plants is one of many drug war tactics that put officers in unnecessary danger. This includes not only the hazards of low-altitude flying, but the threat of violence from marijuana growers.

Planes on anti-drug missions have certainly been shot down in the past, presumably by those involved in the illicit drug trade in attempts to defend their investments, and illicit marijuana growers on public land are “typically armed” and connected with organized crime, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office.

Perhaps the police should focus on more serious crimes, so that instead of trying to find plants hidden in the mountains, they could simply interview victims and witnesses to track down perpetrators, without resorting to such adventurous spy tactics. If private, peaceful activity like growing marijuana were outside the definition of crime, unfortunate incidents like this would not occur, nor would there be an incentive for dangerous criminals to operate on public lands far from prying eyes.

Read more

Read more

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to pass a resolution today declaring illegal marijuana cultivation on federal lands to be an “unacceptable threat to the safety of law enforcement and the public,” and calling upon the nation’s drug czar “to work in conjunction with Federal and State agencies to develop a comprehensive and coordinated strategy to permanently dismantle Mexican drug trafficking organizations operating on Federal lands.”

Speaking on the House floor yesterday, Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) agreed with the goals of H. Res. 1540, but said the only way to accomplish such objectives would be to eliminate “the failed policy of prohibition with regard to marijuana and replac[e] it with regulation.”

“I have no doubt that marijuana plantations, as the resolution states, pose a threat to the environmental health of Federal lands, that drug traffickers spray unregulated chemicals, pesticides, and fertilizers, but I submit that the best way to address that is to incorporate this into a meaningful and enforceable agricultural policy for the country with regard to the regulatory structure for the production of marijuana,” said Polis, whose home state of Colorado has emerged as a national leader in the regulation of medical marijuana. “… As long as [marijuana] remains illegal and as long as there is a market demand, the production will be driven underground. No matter how much we throw at enforcement, it will continue to be a threat not only to our Federal lands, but to our border security and to our safety within our country.”

Steve Fox, director of government relations for the Marijuana Policy Project, today joined Rep. Polis in endorsing the underlying rationale of the resolution and suggesting that accomplishing the goals detailed in legislation will require an entirely new strategy by the federal government.

“Passage of this resolution will send a clear message to the drug czar and others that our current strategies for combating illegal marijuana production are not working and that a new direction is needed,” Fox said. “There are two choices here: continue the failed prohibitionist policies that encourage Mexican drug cartels to keep growing marijuana on federal lands, or embrace a new path that would acknowledge the reality that marijuana is not going away, but its production and sale can be sensibly regulated in order to reduce the harm caused by its illicit production on federal lands.”

UPDATE: The bill passed overwhelmingly yesterday, with the only "no" votes being cast by Reps. Polis, Barney Frank, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko -- who, as we've discussed in a previous post, receives hundreds of thousands of federal dollars annually to pursue eradication efforts -- told the Redding Record-Searchlight that the vote "sends a very clear message that Congress recognizes the impact and the problems with illegal marijuana growing and dangers on public lands."

But unless Congress and the drug czar's office agree to consider regulating marijuana in order to shut down its illicit production, there's little chance all this chest-thumping will lead to any new, more effective strategies. In the perceptive words of Scott Morgan, "If you don't want Mexican gangsters growing marijuana in the woods, then it's time to allow people who aren't Mexican gangsters to grow marijuana somewhere that isn’t the woods."

Read more

The cost of pointless marijuana eradication efforts in California went up Wednesday when sheriff’s deputies shot and killed an unidentified man while hiking around in the woods looking for clandestine grow sites.

It is currently unknown whether this man was involved in marijuana cultivation, whether he was armed or fired at deputies, or even if there was any marijuana found nearby. Authorities are being typically tight-lipped about the entire incident.

What is known, beyond any doubt, is that eradication efforts are a complete failure, despite a huge fiscal and human cost.

Every year, state and local law enforcement agents suit up in camouflage and spend weeks going on hiking trips or flying around in helicopters looking for marijuana. They spend vast amounts of money trying to find more marijuana than previous years, in order to be eligible for federal funds that they, in turn, spend on finding more marijuana the next year.

And sometimes, people die. Whether in shootouts with criminal cultivators (and possibly innocent hikers) or in accidents in the rugged terrain, people are hurt and killed every year during eradication efforts.

And yet, both legal and illicit marijuana is still plentiful in California. So what is worse, the “problem” or the “solution?”

According to one local business-owner, the answer is obvious:

"We see something like this every once in a while, you know, there's a lot of these marijuana patches out this way," said Howard Miller, 69, owner of the Junction Bar and Grill Restaurant at 47300 Mines Road, which claims to be "as close to the Old West as you can get."

"The marijuana patches don't bother me," Miller said. "But I don't like the shootouts."

Perhaps the cowboys in camouflage do, since they consistently rally against the one thing that would eliminate illicit growing on public land and end this tragic farce: taxing and regulating marijuana.

Read more

Bruce Ross at the Redding Record Searchlight takes issue with my post about a recent Wall Street Journal article, which showed once again how marijuana eradication efforts are counterproductive, but that law enforcement engage in them still because the federal government pays them to. I’ll reserve further comment, and let readers reach their own conclusions. You can read our back-and-forth exchange below:

Bruce Ross: “It’s not about the money.”

Mike Meno of the Marijuana Policy Project reads this weekend's Wall St. Journal story about how Shasta County is continuing -- using federal money -- its campaign against marijuana growing to mean that the county is only doing it for the money, arguing that it's a minor problem and a law the sheriff wouldn't even be enforcing but for the federal dollars.

Well, he gets paid to argue for the legalization of marijuana, so of course he'd think that. But if he knew a bit of the history that any attentive county resident would have picked up over the past decade, he'd know that illegal marijuana growing has mushroomed beyond all previous records in recent years. I vividly recall how in 2005, the Colorado-based environmental magazine High Country News ran a cover article about remote public forests being exploited by growers -- Ground Zero for the trend? Shasta County.

That year, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting uprooted more than million plants statewide, doubling its haul from the previous year, and about three-quarters of that was on public lands, including national parks. Shasta County was the No. 1 county for seizures of illegal pot, with more than 200,000 plants found.

That was '05. And in 2009? The haul was more than 600,000 plants. And growers are still planting mega-gardens.

In other words, there's a very large problem. Overwhelmed federal land managers and local authorities lobbied their bosses and Rep. Wally Herger to supply more federal resources to fight the problem. The facts made persuasive arguments. That is why the federal government is devoting substantial money to fighting marijuana in Shasta County. And they're not using that money to hassle individual smokers or those growing and using under Prop. 215's medicinal guidelines.

Would this problem largely disappear if marijuana could be grown legally? Probably so, and I've written as much a few times.

But the implication that it's not a real problem in our woods today, and that Tom Bosenko's crews are mercenaries who are only chasing pot growers for the federal cash, is ignorant and dishonest.

And here was my response:

Bruce,

Of course I agree that illegal marijuana grows are “a very large problem,” but even the least astute observer would realize it’s a problem law enforcement cannot—and more importantly, have failed to—solve through eradication. The figures you cite prove my point. Each year officers go into the woods to find and dig up more marijuana, and each year criminals are simply encouraged to grow more, thereby worsening the problem. Repeating an action again and again while expecting different results, the maxim goes, is the very definition of insanity. This is why it’s so outrageous that the federal government continues to throw money at such counterproductive efforts. As you (correctly) pointed out, the only true solution is to regulate marijuana and eliminate the need for illegal grows altogether.

It’s also interesting that you leveled the charge of being “ignorant and dishonest” at someone who simply blogged about the story, rather than at the story’s actual author—a writer at the esteemed Wall Street Journal—whose excellent reporting left no doubt whatsoever that police continually engage in this Quixotic quest simply to obtain federal funds that help them keep their departments afloat. Just take the story’s first two paragraphs:

IGO, Calif.—Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko, his budget under pressure in a weak economy, has laid off staff, reduced patrols and even released jail inmates. But there's one mission on which he's spending more than in recent years: pot busts.

The reason is simple: If he steps up his pursuit of marijuana growers, his department is eligible for roughly half a million dollars a year in federal anti-drug funding, helping save some jobs. The majority of the funding would have to be used to fight pot. Marijuana may not be the county's most pressing crime problem, the sheriff says, but "it's where the money is."

Seriously, did you even bother to read the article before writing your post? Sheriff Bosenko himself says the eradication funds are "$340,000 I could use somewhere else in my organization … That could fund three officers' salaries and benefits, and we could have them out on our streets doing patrol." Instead he’s obligated to spend those funds on an objective he knows is unreachable and that he himself says is not as important as the many other issues he needs to focus on. Let that sink in: The sheriff himself (not me) is saying he’d like to focus on other problems and—in direct contradiction to what you wrote—the only reason he’s “chasing pot growers” is for the money. Is the sheriff being “ignorant and dishonest” as well?

Your beef is not with me, Bruce. It’s with the wasteful and irrational policies that allow these illegal grows to continue.

And then his response to my response:

Mr. Meno,

Pardon my ill temper. I've never met you. I have no reason to think you're anything but an honest guy.

But you also don't know what you're talking about if you think the feds just showed up one day offering money if local sheriffs wanted to chase pot growers out in the woods. The pressure was very much from the ground -- and not just from law enforcement but even more so from the local heads of federal land-management agencies who saw a long-standing problem spread beyond their abilities to control.

To which I say (once again), let's finally put an end to that longstanding problem, and regulate marijuana.

Read more

People often wonder why local law enforcement agencies will spend so many resources cracking down on marijuana. As this weekend’s superbly reported front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal explains, it really all comes down to money.

IGO, Calif.—Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko, his budget under pressure in a weak economy, has laid off staff, reduced patrols and even released jail inmates. But there's one mission on which he's spending more than in recent years: pot busts.

The reason is simple: If he steps up his pursuit of marijuana growers, his department is eligible for roughly half a million dollars a year in federal anti-drug funding, helping save some jobs. The majority of the funding would have to be used to fight pot. Marijuana may not be the county's most pressing crime problem, the sheriff says, but "it's where the money is."

[…] To make sure his office gets the federal funds, Sheriff Bosenko since last year has spent about $340,000 of his department's shrinking resources, more than in past years, on a team that tramps through the woods looking for pot farms.

As we've stated many times before, marijuana eradication programs are not only horribly ineffective at reducing the supply of marijuana, but even worse, they force law enforcement to commit massive amounts of resources and manpower to marijuana offenses at the expense of much more serious crimes. That’s why it’s so insane for the federal government to encourage and reward this type of misallocation. As the Journal article points out, California police departments are expected to lose $100 million in state funding this year, presumably leading even more departments to take up the eradication cause.

But if officials want to end illegal grows and see more money in state coffers at the same time, they need stop the madness and tax and regulate marijuana the same way we do alcohol, allowing the state to reap untold millions, possibly billions in new tax revenue while providing law enforcement with sufficient funding and sensible priorities that will allow them to focus on more serious crimes.

Now why can’t the federal government offer incentives with those kinds of results?

Read more

As summer nears its end, marijuana “eradication” efforts are in high gear – and nowhere more so than in California, whose effort is called the “Campaign Against Marijuana Planting” – CAMP for short.

And as usual, the news is filled with stories of CAMP raids like this one, in which whopping numbers of marijuana plants are seized. These are habitually accompanied by breathless tales of criminal gangs despoiling forests and wilderness areas with their marijuana growing operations.

Missing from these reports is any recognition of the evidence that CAMP actually makes these problems worse.  Maybe that’s because stories like this one from CNN and this one from the New York Times quote only government sources.

Other than completely failing to “eradicate” marijuana, how does “eradication” make problems associated with marijuana cultivation worse? Take a look at the charts at the bottom of the CAMP page linked above. As the number of plants seized skyrocketed starting in 2002, a key shift occurred: Where once the majority were seized from private land, in recent years the overwhelming majority of seizures have been on public lands – those very national forests the “eradicators” claim to want to protect.

The charts only go through 2006, but the trend has continued. In 2008, CAMP seizures set an all-time record of nearly 3 million plants, with 70 percent seized on public lands.

“Eradication” campaigns appear to have literally driven the growers into the hills.

Two years ago, MPP challenged California Attorney General Jerry Brown – who oversees CAMP -- to provide evidence that the program reduces marijuana availability, cultivation in dangerous or environmentally sensitive areas, availability of marijuana to young people, or involvement of criminal gangs in marijuana production and distribution.

He did not respond.

Read more

Is there something in the water over at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy that turns every new drug czar into a babbling idiot? If not, how else can one explain the latest statement from new ONDCP honcho Gil Kerlikowske? Has he somehow been possessed by the spirit of his predecessor, John Walters?

While never a reformer, Kerlikowske had a reputation for being pretty rational while he was police chief in Seattle. But a story in Wednesday's Fresno Bee quotes the drug czar as saying, "Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit."

Bear in mind that this is from an administration whose declared policy is not to attack state medical marijuana laws (even though the law authorizing ONDCP requires the director to "take such actions as necessary to oppose any attempt to legalize the use" of any Schedule I drug). And bear in mind that Mr. Kerlikowske's scientific judgment has been contradicted by, among others, the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association, American Nurses Association, American Academy of HIV Medicine, etc., etc., etc.

Click here to use our online action center to send a message to the president about his drug czar's statement.

Distressingly, Kerlikowske made the remark while tagging along on the latest adventures of California's marijuana "eradication" drive, for which he seems to have become an enthusiastic cheerleader. This is a campaign that, despite a 2,000% increase in plant seizures over the last dozen years, has produced zero reduction in marijuana availability. But it has had one notable impact: Until 2001, the majority of plants seized were on private lands. Now, nearly three-quarters are on public lands -- often environmentally sensitive areas located in national parks and forests. "Eradication" campaigns have literally driven growers into the hills, multiplying the environmental damage.

So the new drug czar is touting policies that make the problem worse while spouting unscientific nonsense. John Walters lives.

Read more

Well, the federal government's National Drug Threat Assessment for 2009 is out, and -- who'dda thunk it? -- "Marijuana availability is high throughout the United States." This is despite record seizures of marijuana plants in 2007, as well as an all-time record number of marijuana arrests, over 872,000. Indoor cultivation -- often in converted homes and other dubious locations -- has increased "because of high profit margins and seemingly reduced risk of law enforcement detection."

This year's Monitoring the Future survey confirmed marijuana remains widely available, with 83.9% of high school seniors saying that marijuana is "easy to get" -- a figure that remains virtually unchanged since the survey began in 1975.

The western U.S. remains a hotbed of domestic marijuana cultivation, yet the Drug Threat Assessment reports that only 2% of law enforcement in the Southwest  region(stretching from Southern California  to Texas and Oklahoma) report marijuana as being the greatest drug threat in their area, while in the Pacific region (Northern and Central California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Nevada) only 1.1% see marijuana as the greatest threat.

Read more

We're actually going to miss John Walters when he finally leaves his post as drug czar. He and his minions keep making our points for us -- and apparently don't even know they're doing it. Take, for example, this post from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy's blog, reproduced here in full:

In Case You Missed It: Leno and O'Reilly on Medical Pot in San Francisco

Our recent post on the large and undocumented number of medical pot clubs in California gained a national audience last night, with Jay Leno referencing the phenomenon during his opening monologue:

“And in a stunning announcement, the Office of the National Drug Control Policy reports that San Francisco now has more medical marijuana dispensaries than it does Starbucks.  Well, yeah.  That’s because marijuana is a lot cheaper than Starbucks.”

Also, in case you missed it, Bill O'Reilly's program discussed the problem as well.  Watch the video here. 

Oh dear. After a marijuana arrest every 36 seconds in 2007 -- over 872,000 altogether -- and record marijuana seizures in California this year, they think the idea that marijuana is cheaper than Starbucks coffee is a good talking point for prohibition?

Read more