Authorities in search of marijuana growing are turning their attention toward California’s agricultural heartland — the nation’s richest farmland — which they say is the new hot spot for illicit growers, their guns and toxic pesticides. Officials blame medical marijuana laws.

At a news conference Wednesday, authorities announced results of a summer-long enforcement effort in the state’s agricultural heartland: 175 local and federal arrests, along with 100 guns, $4,869 in cash and 400,000 plants seized across hundreds of thousands of acres.

“These grows are not about medical marijuana,” said U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner. “They are large amounts cultivated for commercial purposes and sold to people often outside of California.”

The crackdown involved federal prosecutors and agents from six sheriff’s offices across the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley.

“Make no mistake: This isn’t about medicine. This is about money,” Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said. “Almost every grower we take down has some connection to a cartel in Mexico. They aren’t here to make a little money. They are here to make a lot of money.”

Do you realize that if marijuana were legal these people would just be like any other farmer, not hurting anyone? Marijuana prohibition makes them criminals, so millions in taxpayer money is spent in keeping them from farming. Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood is right, this “is about money.” Agencies like his get plenty of money from the feds in return for their cooperation in enforcing prohibition laws.

“As they infiltrate each and every county, it brings a criminal element,” Merced County Sheriff Mark Pazin said about the grows. “If you use that as the central point you are bringing in the other riffraff. You’re bringing in people hooked on this poison. Those are the unintended consequences of drug cartels coming in and procuring acreage in the breadbasket of America.”

I’ll pass by Sheriff Pazin’s silly and ignorant comment about cannabis being poison when it is in fact a non-toxic plant. He says that marijuana grows bring a criminal element, completely ignoring the fact that the profits to be made from selling marijuana is what brings the criminals, inflated profits that wouldn’t exist if marijuana were legal.

More money wasted trying to keep a plant illegal.

- Joe Klare

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