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.

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A huge wildfire ablaze in  Santa Barbara County over the last week has been linked to a clandestine marijuana grow operation in the Los Padres National Forest. As we often point out, prohibition is to blame for these destructive illegal gardens because it leaves this popular agricultural product in the hands of criminals with no regard for the environment instead of legitimate farmers.

Orange County Register columnist and author of "Waiting to Inhale, the Politics of Medical Marijuana" Alan Bock writes in his blog post that the proliferation of these sites on public lands is a result of misguided asset forfeiture laws:

So it’s not surprising that faced with the loss of property whether a crime was proved against them or not  or charges were even filed, marijuana growers began to use land that they didn’t own and couldn’t be seized. The best bet was not some poor innocent’s land, but government land, of which there is more than an abundance in the western states, which couldn’t be forfeited because the government already owns it. So the national forests became the preferred venues for large marijuana grows, the forests were in some cases degraded and became less useful to the public they were supposed to benefit — and now we have a major wildfire allegedly started by marijuana growers.

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