Cartel Weed Could Be Poisoned

Now since 2004, have there been plans implemented to clean up and also restore waterways and all the different? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. And so now there's like a whole, they realize this is an issue and so there's precedent. Very much so. And that largely came from what we saw, you know, in those early years. The 2004 first stop on, down there on Dexter Canyon Creek and then what we had on Sierra Zul when my partner was shot in 2005. About then we started to also see the band poisons in these grows, like the carbofurion bottles and just to give a background, this stuff is so deadly. It was made as an insecticide or a denticide just to kill anything that you put on any type of agricultural product. And it was made originally back in I think like the fifties for legitimate agriculture. And then they found out how toxic it was and EPA banned it from use or even possession. That's a felony to have it in the country and use it anywhere without special licenses through legitimate channels here in America. And they banned it like 15 years ago because it was so nasty. But because it does keep everything off the marijuana plants, I mean, nothing can even get near it without dying almost instantly. They still get it in third world countries. They can get it in Mexico and it gets smuggled across the border with the grow groups, the drug trafficking groups, because it's so effective regardless how poisoned it is. And we were starting to see more and more of that stuff as we were starting to ramp more of a specialty to doing this job more thoroughly and safely and get into the cleanup. Now, this is one of the many things I brought this up with Dan Crenshaw the other day and I talked about you and because he's against federally making marijuana federally legal. And I said one of the problems with it being illegal is this. And I was explaining these grow ops that for the rest of the country where marijuana is illegal, the vast majority. Like what was the number that you said the percentage that was grown in California that's illegally sold through the rest of the country? 70-80%. So it's 70-80% of the entire marijuana population or marijuana product that you're buying if you live in a place like South Dakota, wherever it's, I don't even know if it's legal in South Dakota, wherever it's illegal. They're buying it from here. Exactly. And it's because, one of the reasons is because our state laws say that, well, first of all, we're close to Mexico so the cartel members can come up really quickly. And then the other problem is that our state laws, when we made marijuana legal recreationally here we severely lowered the penalty for an illegal grow op. It became a misdemeanor, correct? That was the thing. When we started the department special team, the spec ops marijuana enforcement team that Hidmore goes into, part of my job as being the co-founder of that and the team leader was outreach. So I was speaking to legislative groups before we legalized under Prop 64 and then the tighter medicinal marijuana laws that came about that same time. And I was talking to anybody, conservation groups that you and I would be part of, preservation animal rights groups, high school kids, assemblies, right? Watch out if you're using weed, make sure you're not using this stuff because it's so nasty. Things like that. And my whole point was if we're going to regulate guys, we see it coming. Let's just regulate smart. Let's not lessen any penalties for the trespass grow that the cartels are doing in our public lands and private lands and also the other gang groups and there's other groups to a smaller extent. But unfortunately when we did regulate and all that was passed two years ago, they did water it down. So public land cultivation went to, like you said, a felony to a misdemeanor. And if you're a juvenile cultivator on public private land and one of these juvenile cartel members and there's a lot of young ones learning, it's an infraction. And that took a lot of emphasis away from that part of the problem and left us out there basically alone with a couple other agencies to fight it. Well for the average person, that would sound, before you knew about the cartel grows, that would sound like a good idea. Well hey, if marijuana is legal, what's the big deal? Exactly. The other problem is these people that are buying this marijuana in the rest of the country, it's highly likely that they're going to have some of that pesticide on it. Right. And how bad is that stuff? Has that stuff ever killed someone from smoking this illegal marijuana? We don't know if it's killed anybody directly because by the time it gets distributed throughout the country, it does dissipate a little bit, but it's still highly toxic. To put it in perspective, about three years ago we had two federal officers back east, not even in California, in a public land grow that had all that toxic on it. So they have cartel grows out there? They do. They do. They actually... On East Coast. We have them in about 25 to 27 other states to a much lesser extent. And something we need to look at is California, I mean we're one of only six Mediterranean climates on the whole globe, so we are a great weed growing state just like our wine industry, man. We got great weather for it. So we can grow outdoors and indoors, I mean February to almost December, right? And that's why it's grown here and that's why the black market, both in the private land communities and the cartels are everywhere across the country with this stuff, but they'll go wherever they can to diversify the network. So we do have it in other states to a much lesser extent. And then something we need to remember is even though about half the country has these grows in them to a lesser extent than California, these same groups are under the same enterprise they're doing human trafficking, doing gun running, you know, to fuel the fight down in Mexico, methamphetamine production, and now the new synthetic fentanyl that's just killing thousands, especially on the East Coast, are coming from these groups. So it's all one enterprise and of course we focus on the cannabis issue because that's what's affecting our wildlands and our waterways. It's right at the hub. So yeah, it is. It's nationwide. It's not a California problem and we made really, really careful even though we're talking about a team in California, game wardens, we're trying to tell a nationwide story because the nation needs to know.