Orange County Register

According to news reports firefighters and investigators say that a cooking fire built by guards/attendants/whatever at a large marijuana grow started the Los Padres National Forest La Brea fire near Santa Barbara. This is said to be the first time marijuana growers have started a fire in a national forest, which, considering how long growers have been using national parks and forests, is almost remarkable.

Those particular growers certainly bear responsibility for this fire, if the suspicions turn out to be correct. In a larger sense, however, the drug war and drug warriors bear a certain amount of responsibility, if not for this specific fire, then for the widespread use of government lands by marijuana growers.

It should be obvious that if marijuana prohibition were not* in effect there would be little or no incentive for growers to use remote sections of national forests. Instead they would grow openly, most likely on relatively flat farmland, and unwary hikers would not have to put up with the occasional encounter with people guarding a marijuana grow in national forests, some of whom are inclined to shoot first and ask questions later.

The more specific reason that growers use government land, however, has to do with the expansion of asset forfeiture laws in the 1980s. Traditionally, assets could be seized (or forfeited) by government if they were shown to be the fruits of criminal activity. As one of the ways authorities tried to up the ante in the failing drug wars, however, these laws were expanded in scope so that property could be seized if there was a suspicion it was being used for illicit activities; no conviction of a crime was required before the seizure, or even the filing of charges, but once the property was seized the burden of proof was placed on the property owner to prove that the property was not being used for criminal purposes. Plenty of cars and boats have been seized under these provisions (proceeds to the seizing police agency, a clear conflict of interest), and quite a few homes and pieces of land as well.

So it’s not surprising that faced with the loss of property whether a crime was proved against them or not  or charges were even filed  marijuana growers began to use land that they didn’t own and couldn’t be seized. The best bet was not some poor innocent’s land, but government land, of which there is more than an abundance in the western states, which couldn’t be forfeited because the government already owns it. So the national forests became the preferred venues for large marijuana grows, the forests were in some cases degraded and became less useful to the public they were supposed to benefit — and now we have a major wildfire allegedly started by marijuana growers.

*The first version of this post did not include the “not.”

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.