We find more and more things that could benefit from the People’s Database.. how about number of grows found and cleaned up by District by year? Then reporters wouldn’t have to do FOIA requests.. if the data is even available.’
Here at TSW we’ve been discussing this since 2011, when we posted a warning for workers and visitors to National Forests as to what to avoid.
Here’s the story.. excerpts below. Then there was Mexican Drug Gangs invade Great Lake Forests in 2011, a link to a piece by Char Miller on marijuana grow-related rat poison and the fisher, and this link to an NY Times article in 2013. The idea was that when marijuana was legalized in California for recreational use, that that would solve the problem. Not so much, as it turns out.
Now, they’re sounding another alarm — that inadequate federal funding, disjointed communication, dangerous conditions and agencies stretched thin at both the state and federal level are leaving thousands of grow sites – and their trash, pesticides, fertilizers and more – to foul California’s forests.
Wengert has tallied nearly 7,000 abandoned sites like this one on California’s public lands. It’s almost certainly an underestimate, she said. Her team knows of only 587 that have been at least partly cleaned up.
No government agency can provide a comprehensive count; several referred CalMatters back to Wengert’s nonprofit for an unofficial tally.
Most of the sites Wengert’s team identified are in national forests, where “limited funding and a shortage of personnel trained to safely identify and remove hazardous materials” is driving a backlog in clean ups, a U.S. Forest Service spokesperson told CalMatters via an unsigned email.
The federal government, the spokesperson said, has dedicated no funding for the forest service to clean them up. And it’s leaving a mess in California.
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The federal government owns nearly half of the more than 100 million acres in California. But it’s California’s agencies and lawmakers taking the lead on tackling the environmental harms of illegal grows — even as the problem sprawls across state, federal and privately managed lands.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s policy is to clean up all grows spotted on its 1.1 million acres of wildlife areas, ecological reserves, and other properties, officials say.
Staff assist with clean ups on federal lands “when asked,” said cannabis program director Amelia Wright — typically on California’s dime. But, she said, “That’s not our mandate.”
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Where the State gets the bucks…
Fees and taxes on California’s legalized cannabis market fuel state efforts — supporting the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s cannabis program and funding tens of millions of dollars in grants for rehabilitating places damaged by cultivation. These grants can cover clean-ups and sustainable cultivation projects, or even related efforts like fish conservation.
The department has helped remove almost 350,000 pounds of trash and more than 920 pesticide containers from grows on public lands over nearly a decade.
Maybe there should be a federal tax on legal cannabis in states that have large amounts of federal land? Of course, legal is not really the problem, is it? Is it fair for legal cannabis to pay for remediating illegal grows?
In 2024, lawmakers passed Wood’s bill directing the Fish and Wildlife department to conduct a study to inform a statewide cleanup strategy for cannabis grows. The law requires the department to provide regular reports to the legislature about illegal cultivation and restoration efforts on lands both public and private.
To Wright, that’s a path forward, however prospective it may be.
“It just feels like such redemption right now for many of us,” Wright said. “It’s a one of a kind program. So we didn’t have a playbook — we’re still creating it.”
But the study, which Wengert’s organization is conducting on the state’s behalf, isn’t due until next year. Meanwhile, the bloom of illicit pot grows on private land has been demanding California’s attention, a growing problem since voters legalized cannabis in 2016.
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The California Department of Justice told CalMatters it recently identified a “substantial increase of illicit cannabis cultivations on or adjacent to public lands.” Of the 605 sites where a multi-agency state and federal task force ripped out illicit cannabis plants, roughly 9% were on public lands — up from an average of 3 to 4%.
“Everybody thought with legalization that a lot of these problems would go away,” said Wood, the former assemblymember.
But, he added, the sites remain. “It’s a ticking environmental time bomb.”
And the contamination, new research confirms, lingers.
Apparently, the FS doesn’t get funding to clean up sites, but is investigating how the sites impact wildlife.
Please don’t push the red shiny buttons, or lick the big pink things,” Gabriel joked at the mouth of a well-worn path growers had carved into the woods. (Carbofuran, a dangerous and illegal pesticide often found on grow sites, is bright pink.)
The team, Gabriel explained, wasn’t there to clean up the grow. They didn’t have the money for that. Instead, he said, shouldering his backpack and strapping on a first aid kit, they were there to document the contaminants as part of a U.S. Forest Service-funded investigation into wildlife around cultivation sites.
“This site will sit on this landscape until someone acquires some level of funding,” Gabriel said. “And no one can really push it, until we actually get that data.”
We were allowed to use carbofuran on seed orchards in the 80’s.. it is really bad stuff.
In 2018, a federal audit lambasted the U.S. Forest Service for failing to clean up — or even document — trespass grows in national forests.
The agency was finding and eradicating cannabis grows in national forests effectively. But its failure to consistently clean them up, the audit said, put “the public, wildlife, and environment at risk of contamination” and could allow growers to return more easily.
Little has changed. From 2020 through 2024, when Gabriel worked for the agency, a spokesperson said the Forest Service “prioritized reclaiming sites over investigating active grows.”
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That seems like an odd prioritization, since LEOs are not necessarily trained nor funded to do it. I wonder whether that prioritization occurs (occurred) in other places than California? It would be great if public safety (investigating active grows) didn’t compete with clean-ups. On the other hand, perhaps enough law enforcement could reduce the total number of grows and pollution? If we knew how many there were (via the People’s Database), folks could lobby Congress for funding.
But the agency said it still has received too little funding and has too few personnel trained to work with often hazardous materials. And the backlog persists. How big it is, the Forest Service wouldn’t say. After declining an interview request and taking two months to reply to emailed inquiries, a spokesperson said CalMatters must submit a public records request.
The Forest Service now is shifting the responsibility for cleanups to individual forests. That, too, contributes to the backlog, the spokesperson said.
U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he has tried repeatedly to direct more funding to cleaning up trespass grows on federal lands, but with little success in Congress.
“We have tried just about everything,” said Huffman. “It’s clearly not enough.”
Now, under the Trump administration, the Forest Service is even more understaffed. A spokesperson said while law enforcement staffing “has remained steady,” roughly 5,000 non-fire employees “have either offboarded or are in the process of doing so” through “multiple voluntary separation programs.”
Huffman put it more starkly. “They’ve been gutted,” he said. “The Forest Service right now has a sign on the door that says, ‘We’re out of the office. We’re not sure when we’ll ever be back.’”
I’m not sure that the 5000 non-fire employees (about the same that were hired in the last few years) would have made a difference if there is no funding. If there were funding, it could be contracted out to companies that are experts at cleanup.
Few organizations are qualified to do science-informed cleanups, and none work as widely as Wengert and Gabriel’s.
California’s Cannabis Restoration Grant Program is paying the team more than $5.3 million to conduct the legislatively mandated study on cleaning up grow sites, and also to train and support tribal teams and other organizations to do this work.
The study, and the training, include best practices for handling and disposing of hazardous waste, Gabriel said. More teams means more competition for the pot of state-allocated money, but he wants more allies in the fight.
Seems like another area where states and feds should work together.. but when do we worry about “state control” in cooperative efforts and when not? Only in some states and only for some kinds of projects?
Just like fuel treatments, couldn’t the states and feds agree on what to track and track it the same way? Number of grows identified, number of grows remediated, for the FS by forest, accumulated over state, private and federal lands?
Homeless camps and trash are often displaced by recreational trail use. Usually from mountain bikers. Maybe some portion of this mess could be addressed through recreational development? Sounds like a huge problem. Maybe ICE should be put to work in the woods, as well.
The damage was done a decade or more ago. If it were an “issue” the Center for the Study of the Whatever would be chasing EAJA pots of gold. Google “Dr Mourad Gabriel: Fisher study and anticoagulant poisoning.”
Nobody gave a damn 15 years ago. The USFS cops were not enough to carry out more than a couple day late and a dollar short raids a year. And those always end up with a EPA hazardous waste disposal demand the Congress will not fund. Democrat or Republican: “marijuana is a legal drug.”
Meanwhile, the cartels advanced their business interests in Oregon, in counties with dominant land USFS and BLM O&C owned. No timber sales. Sheriff’s departments with so little funding from government lands and no ‘in lieu’ revenue sharing. Weed growing in rural SW Oregon had the counties with no deputies to cover even rural crimes and vehicle accidents. Federal drug grow sites raids? LMAO. Lost GPS dependent tourists in deep snow? No deputies and few USFS “emergency personnel.” Few? ZERO. Ranger stations closed in winter. Campgrounds locked and pump handles removed from campground wells. PreFab pit toilet locked up. Two days after Labor Day.
A 3500 Barred owls shot experiment to allow habitat recovery for Northern Spotted Owls. 42% or so we are told, of the BOs had anticoagulant residue in their tissue. All from behind locked gates far from civilization and rural residential areas. 12 NSOs “found” (no admission of accidental shooting of ESA protected NSOs.) and ALL had anticoagulant residue in tissue.
Dr Gabriel reported all those years ago that every grow site he saw had broadcast pesticide baits still working, empty and half full Spanish language pesticides illegal to own or use in the US. Endangered Humboldt martens? Any predator, mammal or avian, will notice a rodent with a belly full of Warfarin stumbling around seeking water as it bleeds out internally, and kill it. Easy peasy. There was a BLM study in Wyoming with two nearby prairie dog villages…One got pesticide baits. The other none. Each had hawks, other raptors, cruising to get a dog for lunch. After poisoning the one village, ALL the raptors were over that town like ants on a Hersey bar. And then ferruginous hawk nests were examined and the young were mostly dead and or dying.
Now the drug cartels rent isolated and other end of the road properties amidst the local greenhouse and row crop farm areas and grow illegal, untaxed weed with labor violations when busted that would break a legitimate farmer. No sanitation. Rudimentary cooking. No refrigeration. Electric bill paid. Employees illegally here not. Venison scraps and hides. Illegal irrigation in the green house with no water right. streams dewatered. And absolutely zero interest from the tyrannical urban majority. They are getting cheap weed, and the suckers were the people who tried to be marijuana legal growers. Only the federal laws still regard it as an illegal drug and earnings can be seized in the federally insured banking system. So the legal weed is a “cash and carry” business and gee, generating maybe 10% of the experts’ estimated permit, licensing, and taxing income. The savings not mentioned is all about the sheriffs, elected, and the urban police chief, hired, addressing a federal criminal exercise and a state total disinterest in any prosecutions. The Mob wins. The innocent lose. And the underclass still preys on the middle class, the rich maintain heritable wealth, and governments expand their command of the regulatory state with more regulations to “protect wildlife”, and socialist welfare spending that has denigrated work, destroyed the Black family of a married husband and wife. Slipped the illegal rental house issue to the back, and on my summer early morning walk in “old town,” the backyards have one or more Latino men peeing on the bushes because the one bath home with three bedrooms, and a single car garage with 8 bunk beds houses 4 times the residents allowed. The good Catholic Hispanic family has uncles, cousins, adult brothers crashing at “Teo’s” house and paying a fee to stay there, to bathe there, to cook over a coleman stove in the garage and food in the garage sale refrigerator and a cousin doing laundry all day. There hasn’t been a house fire from the aunt, the grandmother, sister and mother cleaning the grease off the kitchen walls and floor with gasoline and the pilot light to an appliance igniting the explosion. Not for at least 20 years. The men working for a labor contractor get to work in a brother in law’s car, and each of the five riders paying $5 a day to be able to ride the few miles out of town to today pruning berry fields or orchards. No federal clear cuts and no tree planting. Hot competition for the Weyerhaeuser-Plum creek work. All the I’d dotted, t’s crossed, and no idea if the actual pay is anywhere near the state mandated wages.
The contractors are all US Dept of Commerce, SBA Title 8(a) minority contractors SBA educated who got their start doing forestry work when the feds sold clear cuts. Pile slash. Dug fire trails, planted trees. precommercial thinned. And in 1998 when all the contracts from before the Clinton NW Forest Plan were completed, work dried up and the walled compounds that dot rural Oregon that are Hispanic contractor owed now have taller cement walls. Now it is about nursery crops, row crops, general farming, far less dairy, and hand picking fruits and berries.
Automation and when times are tough, who knows what jobless undocumented folks do to eat and sleep warm. Homeless and Houseless is an Anglo drug, post military service, and mental illness issue. The number of Native Americans, Black, are likely less than their percent of the state population. Way too many middle age white men. Cartel customers for affordable weed that is unpermitted, unregulated, unrestrained, and under reported supports the trade in the opiates and the other lab created deadly drugs. Land use and support for public services in counties with more than half the land in USFS or Interior ownership gets less each month. The troubles grow each month. NGOs are the “cartels,” the Mob, the threat to civility and reason, and the federal land managers are and have been part of the problem and the problem is government, by government for government. “I has met the enemy and he is us.” Pogo (or close to it) and Eric Hoffer: ” Academics are preparing students remarkably well for the past.”s And the most revealing things I ever learned was in high school when I was assigned to write a discussion of “Human growth patterns, birth to maturity.” 1959. Oregon State University library and Corvallis City Library references. Buzzy Hartman had dropped out of Harvard and come back to Oregon to work with a man with an electronics shop to build a computer to use punch cards to do the State of Oregon payroll. including higher ed schools state owned. I learned the reality that boys are born to be slower growing and learners than girls. Girl brains have better neural connectivity. Girls are fast tracked to maturity in physical, intellectual and emotional maturity and boys best serve the village being the young eyes, ears, and anomaly noticing danger warning system dependent upon being distracted by anomalies of motion, movement, color, shapes. And fewer reach even adolescence due to early deaths due to no fear. Biologically not a reproductive crisis. Said a few billion sperm, to one egg a month.
All of what I learned explained why over millennia, boys were educated with boys to ensure the succession of power, wealth, and social stability. And girls were also taught, with other girls, far different subjects and responsibilities. Peasants scratched a subsistence living. So I concluded that co-ed schooling was not about equality. I was about ease of education. Men educated men, and women younger women. The age of electric appliances freed up women to be teachers and also be a mom when not at school. Men stopped going to schools of education unless they were athletes wishing to be coaches.
Asking an age 6 boy to be equal in learning works for some, and is a societal disaster for all too many. Unable to keep up with girls no matter how hard they try, too many give up. Age 10-12. Drop out due to truancy and literacy limits. See they can never catch up. Defeated. Run in packs. Unable to work unless a non English speaking migrant. They are all 18 and have 12 dependents on the W-2, I-9 form.
So why hasn’t the world imploded? The males that are left at the end of adolescence get a late physical and mental growth spurt, many after high school age. And not only catch up, but exceed female accomplishments. Alas, the half or even third that are too late with too little no longer die in 100 year wars. Die in farming and industrial accidents. Nor do girls die in early age child birthing gone bad at rates once accepted.
Co-ed grade 1-8 in a one room school in the occupation of the “wilderness” worked and it worked because of 8 grade levels being taught and younger kids able to absorb older grade learning of interest and older kids passing on how and what they had learned. Very communal and often 5 families or fewer involved in the one local school. “Grade level” learning was available. Bright kids were not limited and not so bright had community help. Besides, it was grade 1-8, but age 5 or 6 to age 18attended. Many were unable to attend all the school year. Farm work, helping mom with babies and food prep and preservation.
Thus, the centuries of single gender education was evolution. Co-ed a now proven failure. Oregon at the bottom of achievement in public K-12 free public education nationally. And Mississippi atop the list and an ongoing political disappointment that Mississippi Republicans have not voted for vouchers and school choice. November is coming. Black voters the most upset. And the state has the highest percentage of black kids in school.
Illicit marijuana was a published threat to federal land, water and wildlife habitats a decade ago. Co-ed free public school failures 50 years old news. Fire and forests older than that. Welfare dependency and federal rules for being qualified to receive the aid destroyed families just as long gone Senator from NY Moynihan predicted it would over 50years ago.
“Peas porridge hot. Peas porridge cold. Peas porridge in the pot, nine days old.” When do the monks self immolate? Who to blame? Which messenger do we shoot?
If anyone bothers to read these brain-dumps they might find the racial and gender culture references irrelevant to this blog (and probably inappropriate most places). This is a pattern that might warrant blocking this poster.