“It’s the sheriff! Search!” Weapons in hand, a team of police officers advances on a lost plot of land in the heart of the Californian desert: behind the main building, two greenhouses house 900 illegal cannabis plants.
Voted by referendum in 2016, the total legalization of this drug was intended to dry up the black market in the “Golden State”. In reality, it has whetted the appetites of countless criminals, growing without permission to provide an untaxed product to smoke enthusiasts.
A rush for green gold which is accompanied by a procession of violence and environmental damage.
“The model was far from perfect,” Sergeant Chris Morsch told AFP. “Precisely around 2016, when the laws started to change, there was a huge increase in illegal cultivation.”
With the San Bernardino County sheriff’s teams, he carries out six to ten searches per week to dismantle the hundreds of greenhouses located in the Mojave desert, east of Los Angeles.
Thanks to these facilities which keep the plants warm, traffickers can cultivate in all seasons and achieve three to four harvests per year.
Once the flowers are dried, “it can bring in up to $600 per pound” in California, explains inspector Chris Bassett. And “the price can triple” if the merchandise is sold in half of the 50 American states where recreational use of cannabis is still prohibited.
A handful of greenhouses is enough to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars per harvest.
Settlements of accounts
Forests, fields, deserts… illegal farms number in the tens of thousands in California, according to experts.
The underground economy still weighs more heavily than the legal market, handicapped by an avalanche of taxes and whose sales are stagnating at around five billion dollars annually.
“The explosion of the black market is largely due to the taxation of marijuana in the State of California,” said Inspector Bassett. “Some cultivation, manufacturing and distribution permits cost more than $100,000. This makes it very difficult to enter the legal market.”
Some rural areas live in a harsh climate, marked by violence.
In January, six bodies, four of them burned, were found riddled with bullets after a cartel-style massacre in San Bernardino County. A settling of scores linked to the illegal production of cannabis, according to the sheriff.
“We do not see any real organized crime,” however, tempers Mr. Bassett.
Its services are rather confronted with opportunistic petty criminals, coming from Latin America, Asia or the United States. Some “have a record related to marijuana, and others have no criminal history,” he says.
These groups constantly play cat and mouse with the police. In the five plantations where the AFP followed the sheriff’s agents, only Clarance Joseph was surprised on his land in Newberry Springs, a hamlet near the famous Route 66.
Banned pesticides
This American had been operating “under the radar” since 2017, thanks to an agreement made with a group of Laotians: he let them cultivate three greenhouses on his property and received 20% of the profits.
“It’s a big loss,” he sighs, while the police cut his cannabis plants with their pruning shears. “It’s six months of work that collapsed today.”
Even handcuffed, the fifty-year-old remains smiling. He will be summoned to court later, but will surely receive a simple fine: by legalizing cannabis, California has reduced the penalties for its clandestine cultivation.
“Unless we find untraceable kit weapons or environmental crimes, they don’t risk much,” laments Sergeant Morsch.
After the passage of the police, many farms resume their operations and continue their deplorable practices.
The irrigation of their illegal greenhouses generates gigantic water traffic. Offenders break fire hydrants to fill tanker trucks or dig illegal wells, despite chronic droughts in California.
The police also found all kinds of harmful pesticides. Some are even banned by the European Union, such as carbofuran, an insecticide so powerful that a teaspoon of its powder can kill a bear.
“Unfortunately, they spray this on the flower itself, which is ultimately ingested by the consumer,” warns Morsch. “If I was a marijuana smoker, I wouldn’t want to smoke this.”
