The environmental damage to our national parks caused by illegal marijuana farms is tragic, but reports rarely mention the failed policies and law enforcement tactics that create this predicament in the first place (“Marijuana gardens deprive wildlife, environment,” May 20).
California”s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting claimed an impressive sounding 3 million plants “eradicated” in 2007 alone. Yet even law enforcement officials acknowledge that this represents only a small percentage of what”s growing in our parks.
By far the largest cash crop in California and in the United States, criminals have plenty of incentive to cash in on the illegal marijuana market. The huge profits offered by this market allow organized crime syndicates to easily absorb the occasional loss of a grow operation to law enforcement raids.
All these expensive tactics do is push these growing operations into places where we really don”t want them, such as our parklands and our neighborhoods.
Reporter Terry Knight writes that “there is no real answer to the destruction of national forests by the growers,” but the answer is very simple: Regulate marijuana”s production and sale as we do with alcohol, and marijuana growers would have no more incentive to wreak havoc on our national forests than wine vineyard operators do.
Dan Bernath
Assistant Director of Communications
Marijuana Policy Project
(Editor”s Note: The Marijuana Policy Project is a Capital Hill lobbyist group. The organization can be contracted at P.O. Box 77492, Washington DC, 20013, or at its website, www.mpp.org)
