SLIDE 1

Marijuana Cultivation in National Forests and National Parks:
American Market, Post-9/11 Border Securitization,
and Global In-Sourcing of Production

Christine M. Rodrigue Department of Geography California State University Long Beach, CA 908410-1101 https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/ rodrigue@csulb.edu 01 (562) 985-4895

Eugenie Rovai Social Sciences Program and Department of Geography and Planning California State University Chico, CA 95929-0450 erovai@csuchico.edu 01 (530) 898-6091

with the assistance of Janna Waligorski Social Sciences Program California State University Chico, CA 95929-0450

Invited panel presentation to the:
"Shifting Patterns of Illicit Crop Cultivation" Panel
Organized by Allison Brown
Association of American Geographers
Boston, 17 April 2008

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My comments are a brief summary of work that Eugenie Rovai and I have been doing along with a graduate students, Janna Waligorski, on the large scale shift in marijuana cultivation in California and otherparts of the country in the last decade or so. These changes include:

• an increasing shift in domestic cultivation from private lands to public lands, notably U.S. Forest and National Park wilderness lands
  
  
  
  
  • originally to avoid drug-forfeiture laws by American countercultural growers
  • now to hide huge operations in areas little patrolled by overstretched park and forest personnel and law enforcement
  
  
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• a huge increase in the scale of operations (~25-50 fold)
  
  
  
  
• a change in grower demographics:
  • countercultural Americans to Mexican nationals
  • from grower-operators to hierarchical grower-farmworker structures with a nearly sharecropping quality
  
  
  
• a change in activity patterns
  
  
  
  
  • isolated workers brought in illegally and provisioned
  • elaborate and professionalized operations
    • weeding
    • killing competing animal species
    • militarization
  • a change in scope from California to the whole USA
  • huge uptick in all of this after 9/11
    • domestic, illegal, and lucrative market
    • border securitization
    • easier to ship labor than crops
    • possibly a change in the cartels involved
  
  
  
• The law of unintended consequences
  • the illegality of marijana inflates its prices to a point trivializing the risk of providing marijuana
  • importation since 9/11 has further raised the risk to benefit ratio
  • criminal syndicates reduce risk by in-sourcing production to public wildlands in the USA on a large scale
  • law enforcement and park resources already thinly stretched, swamped by this new problem -- hugely disruptive
  • stovepiping blocks information transfer/sharing and data management
  • ineffective response leads to public danger and huge environmental damage
  
  
  
• Possible solutions?
  
  
  
  
  • perhaps hyperspectral remote sensing could be helpful in finding these gardens?
  • perhaps legal status of marijuana could be re-examined?

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This document is maintained by: Christine M. Rodrigue
First placed on web: 04/21/08
Last Updated: 04/21/08