Big bucks spent to bust harmless marijuana growers
Wow the government sure spends huge amounts of money to bust harmless marijuana growers.
- Two spotters with night-vision scopes take positions on the ridge
- Thermal imaging aircraft circling high above was not detecting anyone on the ground
- trail cameras hadn't captured images of men delivering supplies
- A U.S. Forest Service agent unleashes a German shepherd
- Based on our intelligence, which includes thousands of cellphone numbers and wiretaps
- A helicopter comes with a net to lift the marijuana out.
- It takes two more [helicopter] flights to get the trash out.
- two aircraft, 43 agents, seven scientists and land managers take part in the operation
- This raid of a marijuana farm cost the taxpayers $35,000 to $40,000.
This is why I like to call the "War on Drugs" a jobs program for cops.
The war on drugs is big money for the cops, judges, prosecutors, and prison guards that fight it.
There is also big bucks for the "War on Drugs" for all the companies
in the military industrial complex that supply the military tools to
fight the "War on Drugs".
Source
Roots of pot cultivation in national forests are hard to trace
By Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times
December 26, 2012, 12:23 a.m.
WELDON, Calif. — A few minutes after 4 a.m., agents in camouflage cluster in a dusty field in Kern County. "Movement needs to be slow, deliberate and quiet," the team leader whispers. "Lock and load now."
They check their ammunition and assault rifles, not exactly sure whom they might meet in the dark: heavily armed Mexican drug traffickers, or just poorly paid fieldworkers camping miserably in the brush.
Twenty minutes later, after a lights-off drive for a mile, the agents climb out of two pickup trucks and sift into the high desert brush.
The granite faces of the Southern Sierra are washed in the light of a full moon. Two spotters with night-vision scopes take positions on the ridge to monitor the marijuana grow, tucked deep in a cleft of the canyon.
The rest of the agents hunker down in some sumac waiting for the call to move in. The action has to be precisely timed with raids in Bakersfield, where they hope to capture the leaders of the organization.
They have no idea how many people are up here. Thermal imaging aircraft circling high above was not detecting anyone on the ground. And trail cameras hadn't captured images of men delivering supplies for more than a week. Maybe the growers have already harvested and cleared out.
Word comes on the radio to go into the site.
The agents fan out in the gray of dawn. A U.S. Forest Service agent unleashes a German shepherd and follows it up a piney slope. After several minutes, the dog begins barking furiously.
"We have movement," shouts the Forest Service officer. "Hands up."
::
Such raids have become commonplace in California, part of a costly, frustrating campaign to eradicate ever-bigger, more destructive marijuana farms and dismantle the shadowy groups that are creating them.
Pot cultivated on public lands surged in the last decade, a side effect of the medical cannabis boom. In 2001, several hundred thousand plants were seized in the state. By 2010, authorities pulled up a record 7.4 million plants, mostly on public land.
Law enforcement long called these grows on public land "cartel grows," and hoped to work from the busts in the forest up the drug hierarchy, maybe all the way to the Sinaloa Cartel or the Zetas.
But after years of raids and work with informants and wiretaps, agents realize the operations seemed to be run by independent groups of Mexican nationals, often using undocumented fieldworkers from their home regions.
Tommy Lanier, director of the National Marijuana Initiative, part of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said there was scant evidence that the cartels exerted much control over marijuana growing in the national forests.
"Based on our intelligence, which includes thousands of cellphone numbers and wiretaps, we haven't been able to connect anyone to a major cartel," he said.
Lanier said authorities have long mislabeled marijuana grown on public land as "cartel grows" because Mexican nationals are arrested in the majority of cases, and the narrative of fighting drug cartels helps them secure federal funding.
He doesn't rule out that some of the cash flowing south of the border makes its way to members of those groups. He just doesn't believe they are actively directing activities up here.
"We've had undercover agents at the highest level of these groups, breaking bread and drinking tequila," says Roy Giorgi, commander of the Mountain and Valley Marijuana Investigation Team, a multi-agency organization headquartered in Sacramento. "Even at their most comfortable, the leaders never said, 'Hey, we're working for the Zetas.' "
In Giorgi's jurisdiction, the majority of the people arrested or investigated are originally from the state of Michoacan, where marijuana growing and immigration to the U.S. are entrenched.
In their hometowns, growers have to sell their marijuana to cartels for a fraction of what they could make in California. When they come north, they see opportunity in the state's vast wilderness. They have the know-how and perseverance to set up clandestine farms and live for months at a time in extremely rugged spots. Loncheros — lunchmen — often make weekly supply runs in the middle of the night, bringing food, beer and fertilizer. The workers wear camouflage, often sleep in the brush-covered tents, cook on propane stoves in crude kitchens and supplement their food by poaching deer and other wildlife.
Giorgi says these organizations can still be well-financed, heavily armed and dangerous.
Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman realized at a community meeting in 2010 how bad the situation was in the Mendocino National Forest when five of the eight people who went to the microphone said basically: "I was out in the national forest … herding cows or sheep or hiking or fishing. And someone shot at me. So I'm not going into the national forest."
The following summer, Allman helped lead a task force on a three-week purge of pot from the area. They pulled out 632,000 plants, 42 miles of irrigation line and 52 tons of garbage. Agents arrested 132 people and confiscated 38 guns.
Is the forest safe today? "I'll put it this way," Allman said. "I'd go camping in the National Forest, but I wouldn't let my sister go."
Would he camp unarmed? "No."
A Mexican-born grower working just outside Mendocino National Forest said the cartels may not run the grows, but the criminal ties to Mexico are vastly complex and dangerous. He hears stories all the time of drug gang shakedowns, and workers held captive in the forest, with threats to their families back home.
"There was a guy working right here," he said, pointing over the hill from his grow, "he thought he was working in Texas."
The grower operates in the quasi-legal medical marijuana world and has contacts on the public land grows. He asked to remain anonymous because he feared for his safety.
He said he thinks law enforcement has little grasp of what's going on because no one arrested will put their family at risk to speak with them, even for a lighter sentence.
Lanier said agents are making progress. This season, they have seized about 3 million plants, less than half the number of last year. But with such a shadowy enemy, success is hard to gauge.
It's not clear if the numbers mean fewer plants are being grown on public land, or just fewer are being found. Since the state Campaign Against Marijuana Planting was disbanded last year, agents spend less time on aerial surveillance. And local sheriffs in pot-growing counties like Mendocino and Humboldt have far less resources devoted to seeking out and eradicating plants than they had in the past.
"It's hard to know if there's less being grown if you're not looking," said Humboldt County Sheriff Lt. Steve Knight.
::
The investigation into the Kern County grow, just south of the Sequoia National Forest, began when a game warden spotted spilled fertilizer at a road turnout that had been a drop-off spot for marijuana growers four years before.
The warden set up surveillance and saw a Jeep Cherokee dropping off supplies several times. Two wardens pulled over the driver, Francisco Barrazarivas, for speeding one night in July. While one officer conducted a field sobriety test, the other placed a GPS device on his car, according to an affidavit filed with the search warrant.
Barrazarivas drove to a house in Bakersfield and was seen transferring two dark bags to a sedan, which was unloaded five houses up the block.
That second house was associated with a man named Ignacio Gomez, an illegal immigrant from Michoacan suspected to be the leader of a group that grows marijuana on public lands in Kern and Tulare counties, according to a Forest Service report included in the affidavit.
The raids come in the early morning Aug. 3.
In all, two aircraft, 43 agents, seven scientists and land managers, and eight volunteers would take part in the joint operation — at a cost of $35,000 to $40,000.
Two young men in camouflage are pulled out of a brush-covered tent. A Glock pistol is found in one of their sleeping bags, but neither man tried to grab it. They are the fieldworkers.
Game wardens trudge down the canyon with their guns drawn. They pass another tent and kitchen area overflowing with trash. Strung up on sticks is some type of salted game meats.
About 50 yards down in the canyon, they find 450 brilliant green marijuana plants all but glowing amid the dry summer brush. Many more stalks have already been harvested.
The scene is an ecological mess. Cottonwood trees and willows have been cut down to let in sunlight. Bags of fertilizer and trays of rat poison are strewn about. A dead hawk lies on one footpath. A coyote carcass is rotting up the hill.
A volunteer clean-up crew starts pulling up the hoses and rubbish. A helicopter comes with a net to lift the marijuana out. It takes two more flights to get the trash out.
Word comes on the radio that no one at the Bakersfield houses was arrested in relation to the grows. Gomez and Barrazarivas were gone.
The two men arrested in the woods are Cruz Soria, 27, of Bakersfield, and Mairo Correa-Garcia, an 18-year-old illegal immigrant from Michoacan.
Correa-Garcia's lawyer, Dale Blickenstaff, said later that the young man told him he had been in the United States for a year and was working in Washington state, then came to Bakersfield when he heard there were better opportunities.
He was recruited to work for $100 a day — great pay for farm labor — and had been up on the grow site for a month.
Soria is now awaiting trial. Correa-Garcia pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in federal prison.
Neither one told investigators whom they were working for. They said they didn't know.
joe.mozingo@latimes.com
California inspired -- and now inspired by -- other states' marijuana legalization measures
Source
California inspired -- and now inspired by -- other states' marijuana legalization measures
By Josh Richman
jrichman@bayareanewsgroup.com
Posted: 12/24/2012 04:29:40 AM PST
Many marijuana activists always thought California would be the first state to legalize the drug for recreational use, but their dreams faded in 2010 when the state's voters rejected Proposition 19.
Yet the legalization measure's poor timing, lackluster funding and vague regulatory plan offered vital lessons that allowed activists in Colorado and Washington state to succeed last month where California had failed. Now activists in the Golden State are, in turn, scrutinizing those states' successful campaigns to prepare themselves for another California measure down the road.
"This isn't over until we say it's over, and we won't say it's over until we win," said Dale Sky Jones, chairwoman of the Coalition for Cannabis Policy Reform.
Jones, executive chancellor of Oakland's Oaksterdam University (a cannabis industry training school) said California's next effort is already under way. Proposition 19's backers hosted a summit meeting Dec. 7 at Oaksterdam with the people behind five other legalization measures that failed to make it onto the ballot in the past two years. The groups agreed to work together to avoid competing measures.
"The coalition in California is now stronger than ever and bigger than ever and moving forward," Jones said, adding that activists will probably put their full effort behind a measure on 2016's presidential election ballot, though it hasn't ruled out 2014.
California's pot activists might have better
luck next time, said Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon University professor whose research focuses on marijuana legalization. "The general trajectory of support nationwide is increasing and reaching a tipping point," he said.
Los Gatos-Monte Sereno police Chief Scott Seaman, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, said law enforcement agencies are watching Colorado and Washington, too -- with the expectation that the federal ban on marijuana will make those states' laws unworkable. And that, he said, would be for the best.
"I am deeply concerned for our youth, who could misinterpret legalization as permission for them to engage even more in consumption," he said.
Alison Holcomb, campaign director for Washington's Initiative 502, said Proposition 19 offered encouragement. Only 46.5 percent of voters supported it, yet it still got more votes than Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman in November 2010. And that was in a nonpresidential election, with limited funding in a state with some of the nation's costliest media markets. "That gave us a lot of hope this could be done sooner than advocates had thought possible," Holcomb said.
But Holcomb, the American Civil Liberties Union of
A man, who identified himself as "Professor Gizmo," lights up a pipe minutes before the law legalizing the recreational use of marijuana went into effect in Seattle, Washington December 5, 2012. REUTERS/Cliff Despeaux (Cliff DesPeaux)
Washington's drug policy director, said Washington activists also looked at California's exit polls and newspaper editorials. Not one editorial board backed Proposition 19, she said, "not even in San Francisco or Berkeley."
To win endorsements and voter support, they realized, their initiative needed to propose a full statewide regulatory system for production, distribution and taxation, instead of a hodgepodge of local statutes as Proposition 19 would have allowed, Holcomb said.
Also, they saw Californians had worried about legalization's impact on safe driving, so they drafted their measure to include DUI standards for THC, the chemical in marijuana that gets people high.
Similarly, the backers of Colorado's Amendment 64 talked to Proposition 19's proponents soon after the 2010 defeat, said Colorado campaign co-director Brian Vicente. They, too, saw the need for a state-run regulatory program rather than a local patchwork.
"This was regimented in terms of how we laid out that marijuana should be taxed like alcohol, and that made a lot of sense to people," he said, noting that earmarking a big chunk of the projected tax revenue for schools also helped.
Vicente also credits Amendment 64's success to its being on the ballot in a presidential election, which attracts more young and minority voters. "Those voting blocs really support ending the drug war," he said.
Colorado and Washington voters 21 and older are now free to inhale as they wish, but Carnegie Mellon University's Caulkins -- a former co-director of Rand's Drug Policy Research Center in Santa Monica -- said the bigger deal is what will come over the next year as the two states enact laws regulating production, distribution and sales, as the initiatives require. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration won't kick in every stoner's door, but could target big, for-profit marijuana farms and stores, he predicted.
In an ABC News interview that aired Friday, President Barack Obama said recreational marijuana users in the two states should not be a "top priority" of federal law enforcement. But that's similar to what he has said about people using marijuana as medicine in 18 states, including California, that allow it.
Yet the federal government still pressures or prosecutes growers and sellers in medical marijuana states, so the president's words offered no assurances that the same won't be true in Colorado and Washington.
"It sounds like the same failed policy and selective prosecution will continue," Jones said.
Caulkins agreed. "This is an election that absolutely did not resolve the issue" of whether the feds or states will be in charge of marijuana laws, he said. "It just put it in play."
Josh Richman covers politics. Contact him at 510-208-6428. Follow him at Twitter.com/josh_richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.
175 people sent to federal prisons for breaking imaginary laws???
If you are naive enough to think you will get a fair trial if you are mistakenly
arrested for something you didn't do you better read this articles.
In this article 175 people have been convicted of imaginary crimes and sent to prison for those imaginary crimes.
The article also make you wonder how competent the private attorneys people paid to
represent them are.
Same question for the public defenders that probably represented many of these people for free.
Source
Hundreds of federal prisoners could be freed
By Brad Heath USA Today Wed Dec 26, 2012 10:40 AM
WASHINGTON -- An internal U.S. Justice Department review has identified at least 175 federal prisoners who must be either released or resentenced because they have been kept locked up improperly.
The review, which followed a USA TODAY investigation, found that some of those prisoners should never have been sent to prison because they had not committed a federal crime; others received sentences vastly longer than the law allows.
All of the problems stem from a misunderstanding about which North Carolina state convictions were serious enough to outlaw gun possession or require extended prison sentences under federal law.
The number of prisoners who will ultimately be freed or given shorter sentences is likely to be significantly higher than 175 because the examination by federal prosecutors was confined to the smallest of North Carolina’s three federal court districts. Justice Department spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle said “many more” cases could be upended by the time prosecutors and federal courts resolve them all.
USA TODAY’s investigation in June identified 60 people who were imprisoned even though an appeals court said that what they had done was not a federal crime. Still, USA TODAY found that Justice Department lawyers did almost nothing to notify the prisoners -- many of whom did not know they were innocent -- and asked federal judges to keep them locked up anyway. The Justice Department reversed that position in August.
Since then, federal judges have ordered the government to free at least 32 prisoners, and have taken 12 more off post-prison supervision, court records show. Some had served up to eight years in prison before they were freed.
“That’s a huge number,” said University of San Francisco law professor Richard Leo. He said it is uncommon for any federal convictions to be overturned, let alone for so many to happen in a single episode.
The Justice Department’s examination, completed in September but never made public, is the first estimate of just how big that number could be. Ripley Rand, the U.S. Attorney in Greensboro, N.C., where prosecutors conducted the review, said as many as a third of the gun cases his office prosecuted in recent years could be thrown out. So many prisoners have filed legal cases challenging their convictions that he has assigned three prosecutors to them full time.
Prosecutors in the state’s other two districts did not conduct a similar case-by-case review, and don’t yet know how many of their own cases are in jeopardy. Instead, officials said they are working with defense lawyers to identify cases that should be overturned.
Among those prisoners is Travis Dixon, who was convicted in 2006 of illegally possessing a .44-caliber revolver. Court records show none of his prior state convictions was serious enough to make owning a firearm a federal crime. Justice Department lawyers agree; in September they asked a federal court to overturn his conviction and let Dixon go.
But Dixon is still in federal prison in South Carolina while he waits for a judge to act on the request. “I’m just not understanding why they’re taking this long,” he said in an e-mail.
Another prisoner, Marion Howard, was freed only after he wrote a letter to the judge asking her to “please rule on my case before the holidays” so he could get home to see his family. The judge freed him on Dec. 5.
Federal law bans people from having a gun if they have previously been convicted of a crime that could have put them in prison for more than a year. In North Carolina, however, state law set the maximum punishment for a crime based in part on the criminal record of whoever committed it, meaning some people who committed crimes such as possessing cocaine faced sentences of more than a year, while those with shorter records face only a few months.
For years, federal courts there said that didn’t matter. If someone with a long record could have gone to prison for more than a year, then all who had committed that crime are felons and cannot legally have a gun, the courts maintained. But last year, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals said judges had been getting the law wrong, ruling that only people who could have faced more than a year in prison for their crimes qualify as felons.
The decision meant that low-level state convictions should not have been enough to outlaw gun possession or to justify extra-long prison sentences for people who went on to be convicted of federal crimes.
It will take at least a year to untangle all the cases like those, Rand said. His office’s 20 criminal lawyers have been swamped by so many prisoners challenging their sentences that they have been forced to delay some other criminal prosecutions. “It’s definitely been a huge burden,” he said.
The secret CIA police - Global Response Staff or GRS