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Cultivating solutions: Police, pot advocates debate marijuana use

Dylan Darling Redding Record Searchlight

Redding, CA Nov 21, 2006 -- Bruce Mirken says he has a simple solution to the pot garden problem in the north state.

Legalize it.

"When marijuana is outlawed, only outlaws will grow marijuana," said Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project in San Francisco. "What we have is the guaranteed result of the laws we have."

Many of the law enforcement officers who spend their summers and early falls raiding the gardens and the prosecutors who try to convict the growers agree that the state’s marijuana laws should be changed. But they want to see them made more strict, putting more of a pinch on those who grow pot.

Even with tougher laws, something would need to be done to diminish the demand for pot, said Ross Butler, assistant special agent-in-charge at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s office in Sacramento.

"The real solution is to reduce people's appetite for marijuana," he said. "As long as you have people smoking it, you are going to have people growing it."

While the debate continues over whether selling marijuana should be legal, the pot garden problem in the north state persists. Over the past decade, marijuana gardens hidden on public land have grown in size and number. In addition to being illegal, the gardens are considered a public safety risk by law enforcement officials and a blight on the environment by land managers.

Law enforcement agencies continue to raid these gardens because they aren't grown to supply medical needs, they're grown for "pure profit," said McGregor Scott, U.S. attorney for California's eastern district and former Shasta County district attorney.

Conflicting laws

Part of the problem with marijuana is that it is regarded differently by state and federal governments.

Under state law, pot can be considered medicine. Since 1996, people with a doctor's recommendation can grow and possess it.

"I consider it to be a medicine," said Chris Conrad, a marijuana proponent in the San Francisco Bay area who has been studying the plant since 1988.

He has a doctor's note allowing him to use marijuana in the state and said he hopes the drug will someday be approved by the federal government as a way to treat ailments such as cataracts and cancer.

But the federal government regards marijuana as a dangerous drug. Since 1971, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has classified drugs in five categories. The federal drug schedules, or lists, determine how they should be regulated. Marijuana is a Schedule I drug, which means it has a "high potential for abuse and no accepted medical uses," said Gordon Taylor, who heads the DEA region that runs from Bakersfield to the Oregon border.

Schedule II drugs, which have a high potential for abuse but an accepted medical use, include methamphetamine and cocaine, according to the DEA.

Taylor said action needs to be taken to stop the normalization of pot through the medical marijuana movement, and the effort to reduce the demand for it needs to continue.

"That can only be done through increased education and treatment," Taylor said.

In addition to conflicting state and federal laws, there are differing penalties for marijuana cultivation. While the county of residence dictates the limit of plants for medicinal use, those convicted of cultivating thousands of plants usually don't get more than three years in state prison, said Jerry Benito, Shasta County District Attorney.

In contrast, penalties for marijuana convictions in federal court range from five years in prison to a life sentence, depending on the number of plants and whether the grower has a criminal history.

Benito said stiffer state penalties would help curb the growth of large marijuana gardens.

"When you don't have sufficient punishment, it's hard to make people not do it," Benito said.

All in the numbers

When it comes to pot gardens in the north state, it's the numbers that often grab attention -- and also get federal agencies involved.

Thousands of plants are uprooted from hillsides and drainages in Shasta, Siskiyou, Tehama and Trinity counties each year. If the cut and dried marijuana buds had made it out of the woods, they would have been sold for billions of dollars, said police officers and sheriff's deputies.

The latest report by the state Department of Justice, released Oct. 30, estimates that nearly 1.7 million plants -- worth more than $6.7 billion -- were pulled out in federally funded raids throughout the state this year.

But some question how the numbers are crunched to determine how much pot pulled from a garden would have been worth.

A pot plant is worth only as much as the amount of bud it can produce. Most law enforcement officials around the north state use an estimate of more than 1 pound of buds per plant. That puts their estimated value of one pot plant at $4,500.

Most plants produce much less than a pound, said Conrad, the marijuana proponent. A female marijuana plant -- the male plants don't produce buds -- produces about 4 ounces of usable pot, or a quarter of a pound, he said.

The going price for marijuana grown outdoors in the state is $250 per ounce, Conrad said. Using his figures, each plant would be worth $1,000. Plugging that into the Department of Justice tally of plants cuts the wholesale estimate by $5 billion, down to about $1.7 billion.

Raids go on

Regardless of how much the pot might have fetched on the streets, the federal government is willing to spend money to raid pot gardens in the hills.

Shasta, Siskiyou and Tehama counties all received $118,905 this year from federal grants distributed by the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, said spokesman Eric Lamoureux. Trinity County doesn't get funding from the office for marijuana eradication.

Greg Sullivan, a DEA special agent with the Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program, refused to say how much money was spent battling pot gardens in the north state this year.

"That's just not something the DEA is willing to release," he said.

The effort to raid and clear the gardens in the north state isn't cheap. Most raids involve a helicopter, which rents for $500 an hour, and several officers working long hours, often on overtime. It's an effort that will continue as long as there is an illicit marijuana market.

"We are going to continue to raid the gardens," said Dave Burns, a special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Redding who spends summer and early fall raiding gardens. "That's really all we can do."