By Kate Siber

June 20, 2003 For countless years national park rangers have been finding the occasional marijuana specimen tucked away in the underbrush, but recent discoveries of large plots of the illegal plant on federal land point to an increasingly pernicious problem.

These illicit growing projects—in many cases believed to be organized by Latin American drug cartels—wreak havoc on natural resources, and the armed men who protect them threaten the safety of law enforcement officers and park visitors.

California's Sequoia National Park in particular has seen a steady increase in the number and size of marijuana farming projects discovered in the last ten years, with a dramatic jump in 2002 findings. Last year alone, rangers removed 34,000 plants from the park and found evidence of 20,000 others that had been successfully harvested. In previous years, rangers have generally found no more than 1,000 plants.

Park caretakers are tormented by the damage covert marijuana growing does to resources, especially in designated wilderness areas, which are meant to remain unmarred by human activity.

"The lands involved [in this issue] have been set aside for the highest level of protection," said Bill Tweed, chief naturalist for Sequoia National Park, "and we're having a major assault on our natural resources. We're having vegetation chopped out, pesticides, poaching, severe disturbance of the soil, which leads to erosion, and depletion of riparian resources because water is being diverted. All of this adds up to a whole sweep of resource damage issues."

Marijuana growers in national parks have built complex irrigation systems to divert water from streams for up to half a mile, and have cleared and terraced tracts of land to the detriment of local ecosystems. Insecticides and fertilizers used by the growers have also tainted groundwater supplies and killed fish in nearby streams.


In addition to the harm done to land and water, park officials say that these illicit farming projects threaten the security of visitors. Law enforcement officers have had shoot-outs with marijuana workers, and hunters and hikers have been shot at after stepping into the wrong territory. The growers—who are frequently illegal immigrants from Latin America—have been known to wield automatic assault weapons like AK-47s to protect their cash crops.

The problem has grown to nationwide proportions but is most troublesome in California, Utah, Arkansas, and in parks with international borders like Texas' Big Bend National Park and Montana's Glacier National Park. Sequoia National Park's foothills are prime territory because of their remote location and ideal growing conditions.

It's possible that national parks have recently become popular targets for this illegal activity because of the increased vigilance of border patrols since 9/11. Marijuana sellers are increasingly opting to grow the weed domestically and face less severe punishments than they would receive for international drug trafficking.

"Why take the risk of risk of smuggling marijuana over the border when you can come here to grow it?" asked Sgt. Marsh Carter, who has led drug enforcement efforts in Sequoia National Forest.

Rangers and law enforcement officers can't easily see marijuana plots from above, so they have a difficult time controlling their proliferation. Workers have the advantage of the forest canopy and even use camouflage tarps to disguise the plots. Many are so remote that harvests must be helicoptered out.

Marijuana-growing on public land also poses law-enforcement problems because there are no property-owners to identify, or traffickers to prosecute.

Officials believe that exposing the problem of marijuana growing in national parks is an important step toward curtailing it. "This is everyone's problem," Tweed recently told The Christian Science Monitor. "It's not just a question of the moral and legal issue of marijuana. It's an issue of commercial-sized agriculture devastating the mission of national parks to preserve land."