Thanks to the
Christian Science Monitor's Eoin O'Carroll for noting that
Marijuana growers worsening California drought...
"Large marijuana plots hidden deep in California’s public lands have illegally diverted hundreds of millions of gallons of water, compounding shortages caused by the state’s ongoing drought. [...] ...most of the environmental destruction is caused not by Mendocino’s local pot growers, who have long taken advantage of the county’s mild climate and tolerant views toward the drug, but by mostly Mexican crime syndicates that, in the 1990s, began planting large plots deep in the woods, which they would abandon after the October-November harvest. [These sites...] ...are as remote as the growers can get, often three miles from the nearest road. They contain an average of 6,600 plants, tended by an average of seven growers who live in tents the entire season, from May to October. The growers are aided by scanners, radios, night-vision goggles, an arsenal of weapons, and truckloads of plastic pipe to divert area streams to their plants, sometimes from as far as a half-mile away. When they abandon the site in the fall, they leave behind mountains of trash, about as much trash as a small city dump."
The title is a bit deceptive, however, because the root-cause of the worsened environment are in fact the unconstitutional drug laws criminalizing agriculture, trade, and freely-chosen consumption and thus making such extreme, violent, and destructive measures financially lucrative. Solution: Decriminalization. Treat all foods, drugs, alcohols, tobaccos alike -- i.e. as things any citizen has the liberty to choose to grow, trade, and/or consume as they please.
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