SCIEN CEXTECHN OLOG Y
rightp
nd gaii
:ognitid
iursd;iy. February 24,2000
THE BATTALION
National forests fall prey to
najor marijuana growers
ANTA (AP) — Ablati
used induction into the
1960s because the
ard wouldn’t address
vas returning to the 11
7 '^'tWr ‘"bvimfl SAN BERNARDINO NATIONAL FOREST, Calif,
day alter receiving as in , „ , - . .
sardon — hey were spotted Irom the air, as conspicuous
' sharks in a school of mippies: Three plots ofkind, seem-
:on King, 63, fled hist , ^ j x-. u . • i j •. .i .
ah. A ■ i An t idy stopped of the towering oaks and man/anitas tliat
Albany, Ga„ in 196lafe ^^^ ofSo uthem California forest.
„nce 10 mon S1 "!* Thesewerenotnaturalfonnations.Theywereentire-
e years, he made aim Iman . made
as a professor in tup A week after the August sighting, a helicopter returned
iis daughter is a memhi ith two dozen Forest Service agents and sheriff’s de-
- nt - , stives.They cleared a landing pad and cut a trail into the
Monday, President Clii ^coming first to a makeshift reservoir. Six hoses, lil-
King a pardon sohea ring water from a creek, ran in one end; several more
o Albany tor the fe iaked hack out the other.
y of his oldest brother,G Moving on, the agents reached the first clearing,
king Jr. hey’d been right.
’s family — inclufa Inplace ofthe trees this forest is meant to protect stood
■ Oona, a member ofBria grove of emerald stalks, six to 15 feet tall. They were in
f Commons —planned; I bloom.
the Atlanta airport Wah On tw o acres of prime forest land, about a half-hour
noon, when King wasscli rom the city of San Bernardino and 1 1/2 hours from Los
rrive from London, t Ingeles, these agents had discovered the latest battle-
Et express to you how ell jound in the war on drugs: a 23.000-plant marijuana
y is,"’ nephew CheveneS dantation.
>re his family left Alto As money and manpower continue to flow to the
Atlanta. “I’m suretoali iouthwest border to stop illegal drugs coming into this
won’t actually sink ini traffickers are producing vast quantities of mar-
im home.” ^ juana right here in the United States, on land owned by
interview withCNNMc ^federal government.
indon King said hewafa Thereasons arc obv ious: the land is fertile, remote and
great expectations ” ^ e ' ^ iere ’ s 110 r ' s * < °* forfeiture, plantations are difficult
a little bit numb butFnta Iotrace ' ^ = roucrs have land agents outmanned, out-
''said King.apoliticalffl ^ cnta,u ' ou ^ ul ) nc( ^'
at Lancaster Uoivm*. " Wcs P a,d t a lot 01 tl " ,c l iU ’ d cna P' ? t0 PP'"8 »tuft from
ud that he expected to I ™«»g »«»this countty. but we don t really pay much
, c . , u , ,, , attention to our own back v ard, said Dan Bauer, the bor
ed States radically Ira „ . , , ...
, , • , estServices drug program coordinator,
from when he was last W ^ ..... . , ^ ,
.. . , The White House Office of National Drug Control
the memorv of leaving i n r . , . .1 ■ r.i
... . - Policy estimates that more than hal I ol the manjuanaeon-
’ n B ain 11 • sumed in the United States is produced domestically,
e are very e ementa hij ^ j $ g r0U1l on p U h|jc lands, primarily the coun-
e you a human being, ^ sl55nationalforests _
I that was strippeflaway. pesticides used by the illegal growers poison wildlife
08. King, will had heei ^ waterways, although the crop’s danger is not just en-
.une by his draft board ,(, v i ronm ental.Park visitors run the risk of tripping booby
master s degretwuffl 'traps or encountering armed gangs. After stumbling upon
iol of Economics amm- a marijuana farm, some visitors have been run offal gun-
nee. was told to repoitl l/v ; nL Bauer said, adding that Forest Service agents have
sometimes exchanged gunfire with growers.
The public’s perception ofthe drug war is a border
Homegrown
An estimated half of the marijuana consumed in the United States is
grown domestically. Marijuana growers often exploit the abundance of
remote national forest lands to develop large plantations.
Top offenders
Here is a look
at the top five
states for
seizures of
marijuana
cultivated on
national forest
lands ’ 1 California
197,567 3 Utah
plant 5 8,758
Marijuana seized plants
National *•
forest lands
V
5 Michigan
5,698
plants jiflii
2 Kentucky
192,685
plants
4 North
Carolina
6,650
plants
Despite a decline in the number of Forest Service agents, the
amounts of marijuana seized on national forest lands has increased.
Marijuana eradicated from national forest lands
1,200,000
1,000,000
800,000
600,000
400,000
200,000
0
I I Plants
Pounds
1995 1996
‘Numbers are estimated totals
1997
1998
1999*
icted that the draft board
mn as ’ Mr. PrestonKii Igent pulling bundles of narcotics from the bed of a truck,
arning he was black
kier said. “They very rarely think of the poor forest
after that. He refusedW igent crawling through the bush...”
in Army physical until Inl999,452,330marijuanaplantswereremovedfrom
ressed himas“Mr..’'asi lational forest land, mostly in California and Kentucky,
draftees. He was evens iVith each plant estimated to produce at least 2.2 pounds
ed of draft evasion, i ifpot, that’s 995,126 pounds of marijuana, with an esti-
his three-day trip to natedstreetvalueofabout $700 million,
ates, King planned tot Tie U.S. Customs Service seized 989,369 pounds of
ent and to thank retired ft nanjuana along the Southwest border in fiscal year 1999,
udge William A. Bool nhilethe Border Patrol confiscated just under 1.2 million
Impounds.
The difference: Customs has 2,900 inspectors and
dge, now 97, said Kintfents manning Southwest ports of entry; the Border Pa-
nough, having missed trolhas7,761 agents patrolling between those ports.
There are just 588 Forest Service agents and officers
192 million acres of national forests, a decline
iom625 officers in 1996. That’s nearly 330,000 acres per
officer, and only one of them is dedicated full time to drug
ded over his trial in
med Clinton topardonl®
f both his parents audit®
He said that the sent
priate but that King had*
limself as a good citiz®
know Rosa Parks? Sn 1 ®f°rcement
ootle told WMAZ-TV
ixcept she wouldn’t givt 1
and he wouldn’t got« lm g |essthan lOpercent. I doubt we’re getting much over
tecause of racial disi
might wind up a hero)®
, c[ jj )0 percent in most of our areas.
“We don’t know how much is growing out there,’
. “There are places where we’re probably get-
Source: U.S. Forest Service
Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug in the Unit
ed States, with about 11 million users, including 8.3 per
cent of teens, according to government statistics.
One nationwide program is dedicated to the problem
of U.S.-produced marijuana — the Drug Enforcement
Administration's Domestic Cannabis Eradication and
Suppression Program. It receives 1 percent ofthe agency’s
$ 1.4 billion budget. In 1998 the DEAreported seizing 2.5
million U.S.-produced marijuana plants, including
232,000 indoor plants. Those seizures were done in co
ordination with state and local agencies; the DEA does
n’t track seizures done by public land agencies.
“Issues dealing with cocaine and heroin and drugs that
people are dying from tend to have a higher priority as far
as enforcement goes,” DEA spokesman Terry Parham said.
Public lands have long been targeted by marijuana
producers, but investigators trace a rise in production to
the 1980s, when the government enacted more stringent
asset forfeiture laws.
Before that, “if you were caught growing pot on your
own property, you wouldn’t lose your property,” Bauer
said. “People could grow com rows of marijuana literal
ly in com fields.”
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the profile of a typical
grower was a “white, hippie-type” running 100- to 1,000-
plant farms, agents said. These days the mom-and-pop
AP
operations are far outnumbered by major pot plantations,
ranging in size from 1,000 to 10,000 plants or more.
In the Southeast, old moonshining families now run
marijuana farms. But that’s only part of the problem in
places like Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest,
which consistently ranks first among national forests in
marijuana seizures.
“It’s a large unorganized coalition of people that live
very close to national forest lands who are generally very
close to the poverty level and looking for any way to try
to make a dollar,” said Jack Gregory, special agent in
charge of the Forest Service’s Southern region.
In the Southwest, Bauer said, most pot operations are
am by Mexican drug organizations that either ship crews
across the border or hire illegal immigrants to do the work.
“Just the cost of doing business up here makes it
great,” said Mike Wirz, a narcotics detective with the San
Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department who works with
the Forest Service to investigate marijuana groves on fed
eral property. “They don’t pay for the land, they don’t pay
for the water and they pay very little for their overhead
because they’re using illegal workers.”
Wirz also noted that by growing their product in
the United States, Mexican cartels eliminate the ex
tra cost and risk of paying a courier to bring drugs into
the country.
Page 9
Science in Brief
Marrow cells may
help find cancer
Looking for malignant cells lurk
ing in the bone marrow of women
getting breast cancer surgery may
help doctors better predict pa
tients’ chances of survival, re
searchers say.
Currently, doctors assess a pa
tient’s odds by two means: gaug
ing the size of the tumor, and re
moving and examining some of
the lymph nodes in the armpit for
signs the cancer has spread.
A new study conducted in Ger
many raises the possibility that
the bone marrow is an even bet
ter predictor of the chances of a
relapse or a cure.
Used together, the three meth
ods could help doctors decide
with more precision which pa
tients should get aggressive
chemotherapy after surgery, re
searchers say.
“This is the second large study
to suggest that bone marrow is an
important predictor,” said Dr.
Michael P Osborne, director of the
Strang-Cornell Breast Center in
New York and the first researcher
credited with the discovery. “It
may have significant potential to
improve breast cancer treatment.”
The study was reported in
Thursday’s issue of the New Eng
land Journal of Medicine.
Estrogen does not
help Alzheimer's
CHICAGO (AP) — A year of tak
ing estrogen did nothing to slow
the progression of Alzheimer’s or
improve mental function in 120
older women with mild to moder
ate forms of the disease, re
searchers reported today.
Research has suggested that
women who take estrogen are
less likely to develop Alzheimer’s.
But the study published in today’s
Journal of the American Medical
Association found that once the
mind-robbing disease sets in, the
female hormone offers no benefit.
“Overall, the results of this
study do not support the role of
estrogen in the treatment” of
Alzheimer’s, wrote researchers
led by neuroscientist Ruth Mul-
nard ofthe University of California
at Irvine.
Alzheimer’s affects more than
4 million Americans, stealing their
memories and ability to care for
themselves. About twice as many
women as men have the incurable
disease, in part because they
tend to live longer.
Its causes are unknown, but
suggestions that the decline in es
trogen levels in women at
menopause might somehow make
them more vulnerable to the dis
ease have prompted interest in the
hormone as a possible treatment.
Malaria mutations
cause resistance
A mutation-prone gene in the
malaria parasite apparently plays
a key role in the deadly organism’s
growing resistance to drugs, sci
entists say.
The findings could help re
searchers design new drugs to
combat the mosquito-borne para
site, which kills more than a mil
lion people a year.
Scientists from the Walter and
Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Re
search in Melbourne and Australian
National University in Canberra re
ported their findings in Thursday’s
issue of the journal Nature.
The researchers studied Plas
modium falciparum, malaria’s
deadliest strain, and found that
the mutated gene prevents anti-
malarial drugs from accumulating
within the parasite.
Somehow, the mutations allow
the parasite to either block drugs
from entering or quickly pump
them out, said Alan F. Cowman,
chief of the division of infection
and immunity at the Hall Institute.
Scientists find life
exists on small land
Scientists who inventoried
Earth’s shrinking wilds havje
reached an astonishing conclu
sion: More than a third of the plan
et’s plant and animal species ex
ist exclusively on a scant 1.4
percent of its land surface.
The researchers said the find
ings show that saving a large
share of the world’s species
from extinction isn’t an over
whelming task.
They believe conservationists
just need to focus on safeguard
ing 25 species-rich “hotspots" —
mostly tropical rain forests.
“The whole point of this is that
for a few hundred million dollars a
year, focused on these hotspots,
we can go a long way toward guar
anteeing maintenance of the full
range of diversity of life on Earth,”
said Russell Mittermeier, presi
dent of Conservation Internation
al, and one ofthe study’s authors.
The British-American team led
by Norman Myers of Oxford Uni
versity relied on previous research
to tally the numbers of land
species that inhabit Earth’s re
maining pristine forests, grass
lands and other habitats. Fish and
insects were excluded. Because
some ofthe tropical areas remain
unexplored, the researchers had
to rely on experts’ best estimates.
The findings appear in Thurs
day’s issue of the journal Nature.
Mittermeier said some of the
researchers were surprised by the
riot of life they found occupying
such a small portion of land.
The team identified 25
“hotspots” covering a total of
810,000 square miles.
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