The marijuana growers disregard the law, damage the environment
and put officers in harm’s way
When it comes to the recent pot raid in Mount Madonna County Park, one thing is crystal clear: Pot shouldn’t be grown on public land.
Whether you agree with the law or not, marijuana is illegal. We’re glad that the members of the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Special Operations Division got 10,000 marijuana plants out of land that belongs to the public and chased off some very scary bad guys.
Pot cultivation in our region, it seems, is becoming more prevalent, and that’s cause for concern on a number of levels in addition to drug use.
In the most recent raid, deputies seized marijuana plants that were growing deep in the park. The confiscated plants had an estimated street value of more than $40 million. No arrests were made.
But in addition to breaking the law by growing marijuana, the pot farmers damage the park’s sensitive ecosystem.
“(The cultivators) are changing the terrain of the land, causing erosion and eventually trees falling,” Special Operations Division Deputy Joe Waldherr told reporter Jessica Thy Nguyen. “They use pesticides to keep out the rodents and also fertilizer for the plants. They also poach the wildlife for food.”
It’s big business, obviously, and difficult to make any arrest of consequence. The guard/cultivators probably don’t even know who’s behind the sophisticated operations.
Before the most recent raid, deputies had confiscated more than 70,000 marijuana plants valued at $280 million this year alone. Marijuana season is just under way, so with the latest raid, deputies are likely to surpass last year’s haul of 80,000 plants.
Criminals will go to great and dangerous lengths to protect anything that’s worth that kind of money, so we’re glad that deputies are working to keep them away from South County – especially its publicly owned lands.
We’ll leave the bigger-picture questions about the war on drugs and the illegal status of marijuana for another time. They are important issues that all of us ought to consider and debate. In the meantime, kudos to the undercover sheriff’s deputies who risk so much to protect South County from these dangerous large-scale pot-growing operations.
