Nick Johnson is a historian based in Longmont, Colorado. He holds a master’s degree in American History from Colorado State University and is the author of Grass Roots: A History of Cannabis in the American West (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017), a history of Marijuana cultivation on public lands and the American West.  Nick will be at Old Firehouse Books in Fort Collins this Friday 10/20 to talk about his new book, Grass Roots: A History of Cannabis in the American West. Talk begins at 6 pm; signings after!

 

Today, illegal cannabis cultivation on public lands is one of the worst marijuana-related problems in the United States. Since the 1980s, outlaw marijuana growers have dumped millions of pounds of plastic and other trash into public forests, poisoned wildlife with pesticides and fertilizers, siphoned water from streams, clear-cut trees, and posed a threat to visitors and authorities alike with booby traps and guns.

Though it is most heavily concentrated in California, illegal marijuana growing occurs (and has occurred) on public land all over the country. Over the last several decades, state and federal law enforcement have fought public-land marijuana with varying levels of resources and intensity; yet the trend has only intensified. States such as California and Colorado have legalized marijuana, but that, too, has failed to curb the plant’s illegal growth on public lands.

Why is this? Is there any solution to the problem of pot growth on our public lands? As it often does, the past provides us with some critical perspective on this issue.

Origins of Marijuana on Public Lands

Marijuana cultivation on public lands was almost unheard of before the 1970s; most of the dope smoked by hippies and other American aficionados came from Mexico. But when US President Richard Nixon officially began the War on Drugs in the early 1970s, it became much riskier to transport large amounts of marijuana over the southern border. By the mid-1970s, under the Ford Administration, the federal government helped Mexican authorities spray Mexican marijuana crops with Paraquat, a toxic herbicide. Pot smokers in the United States grew paranoid about contamination. Countercultural publications like Denver’s Straight Creek Journal ran numerous articles about the possibility of paraquat-laced pot.

The Paraquat scare made domestic marijuana—long thought to be an inferior product—far more marketable. At the same time, young, mostly white, middle-class, and educated people involved in a countercultural migration known as the back-to-the-land movement were spreading into sparsely populated areas across the country, especially in northern California and southern Oregon. Back-to-the-landers sought to simplify and purify their lives by getting back in touch with nature and living off the land. For many, marijuana use was a normal part of their social, recreational, and spiritual lives.

Back-to-the-landers soon realized that growing marijuana not only provided them with their own personal supply, but also provided an opportunity to make ends meet. In many places, domestic marijuana became a cottage industry. Cannabis supported homesteads and entire communities. Increasingly, it drew back-to-the-landers away from their simple lives into the risky but profitable arena of black-market capitalism.

Law enforcement took note of the fledgling industry and began staging raids on growers throughout the 1970s. When Ronald Reagan won the White House in 1980, he intensified the War on Drugs across the country. In urban areas, War on Drugs funds supported measures that targeted crack use with devastating effects on impoverished African American communities. Elsewhere, War on Drugs funds flowed into rural areas to fight marijuana growers. Authorities all over the country began arresting more growers. In turn, the arrests raised the price of weed and drove growers indoors, or onto public lands.

California: A Case Study

In California, a conservative state government partnered with the Reagan Administration in 1983 to create the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP). The cooperative program linked dozens of state and federal agencies. CAMP strove to eliminate marijuana cultivation in California. Unique to California, the program remains active today, and data from its past reports offer insight into the trend of marijuana growth on public lands.

During the 1980s, marijuana grown on California’s public lands accounted for about 30 percent or less of all pot plants seized in CAMP raids—roughly 400,000 plants. That number dropped to 11% by 1994, but skyrocketed after 2000 (CAMP data from 1997-99 is not available). Meanwhile, the estimated price per marijuana plant ballooned from over $2,000 in 1983 to around $4,000 by the 2000s.

Why did marijuana growing on public lands intensify after 2000? In addition to high prices, eight states legalized medical marijuana in between 1996 and 2000. Seven of the eight states were Western states with large tracts of public land. Using the plant’s new, semi-legal status as cover, hundreds of outlaw growers began setting up in National Forests, especially in California. By 2009, 76% of the marijuana CAMP had seized—nearly 340,000 plants—was taken from public lands. That same year, BLM and Forest Service officials reported large-scale marijuana cultivation on public lands in Colorado, Oregon, and Idaho. In 2010, “nearly 60 percent of the outdoor marijuana plants eradicated” by federal authorities across the United States came from public and tribal lands; mostly grown in California.

Increased enforcement in Mexico also encouraged American growers to access public lands after 2000. Mexican authorities cracked down on marijuana cultivation under President Vicente Fox (2000-06). Mexican law enforcement also made record levels of drug arrests under President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012). These trends undoubtedly encouraged at least some Mexican cannabis growers to head north onto US public lands.

In the 2000s, CAMP reports increasingly included references to growers who were “Mexican Nationals” and part of “Drug Trafficking Organizations,” or “DTOs.” Although CAMP stopped short of using the word “cartel,” that did not prevent other authorities in California from assuming that violent Mexican cartels were infiltrating America’s public lands. But as late as 2011, it simply wasn’t clear how many public-land growing operations run by Mexican citizens were actually linked to DTOs, or whether those DTOs were actually linked to larger cartels.

The Solution: Legalize

Looking at this abridged history of marijuana growing on America’s public lands, two key points stand out.

First, increased enforcement has not discouraged cultivation on public lands; rather, it has only driven up and sustained the price of marijuana, which encourages larger and more irresponsible cultivation.

Second, while pot growers on public lands had wrought disastrous ecological effects in California, their impact has not been quite so severe in other states. Even in 2015, with prohibition still driving a lucrative black market, California had twice as many grow sites on public lands as the state with the second-most, Kentucky. In reality, most of the nation’s 640 million acres of public land are pot-free, despite what federal officials and media reports would have us believe.

Still, the forests of the Golden State desperately need a reprieve. Fortunately, the solution is staring us in the face: the United States needs to legalize marijuana on a national scale. Federal officials like to hold legal-marijuana states to the fire for ongoing black-market activity, but the government’s own policy is largely to blame. If marijuana was regulated everywhere, there’d be no reason for outlaw growers to congregate in a few states.

Journalists, scientists, environmental historians, and even former forest rangers have all argued that legalization will help our public lands. The question remains whether federal agencies such as the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management will take up the cause. After all, these agencies have plenty of other challenges they might address with their limited and dwindling resources. Marijuana—especially in the age of legalization—should not be one of them.

– Nick Johnson