DIXIE NATIONAL FOREST, Utah — The hike through the woods, the hardened federal drug agents confess, has them a little intimidated.
The route pierces thick tangles of fallen trees before heading along a boulder-strewn creekbed and then directly up the side of a V-shaped canyon. On a topographical map, the terrain looks like a bowl of ramen noodles, full of squiggling lines turning back on themselves.
But at the very top of the canyon, where the lines squeeze closest together, is the reason for making the trek: a field of marijuana several thousand plants large, squatting on federal land.
“Regardless of where one stands on the marijuana issue,” DEA Special Agent Arthur Street said the day before, “the big issue here is the damage to our public lands and the threat to public safety.”
This is the other marijuana industry in America, the business of clandestine pot that supplies some of the estimated 16.7 million regular marijuana users in the country. Hidden in remote corners of land, concealed in underbrush, smuggled into the underground supply chain and sold on the street, it’s weed done the old-fashioned way.
But its presence in the forests of southwestern Utah — a state with one of the lowest marijuana- use rates in the country and sandwiched between two medical-marijuana states — also raises a perplexing question. In a nation where more people have pathways to obtaining legally grown and sold marijuana, why are all these black-market pot plants still here?
Cannabis advocates often say the legitimate medical-marijuana industry has weakened the underground marijuana economy.
“We’re making a dent in the black market,” Josh Stanley, the owner of Denver dispensary Budding Health, told Colorado lawmakers during a legislative hearing this year. “The black market is now coming to us (to try to sell marijuana).”
But both federal marijuana-use statistics and law enforcement seizure and eradication numbers portray a different situation.
Federal estimates show the number of people shopping on the black market is rising, including in states with medical-marijuana programs. In some cases, though, subtracting medical-marijuana users from state data lowers the growth rate of black-market customers in medical-marijuana states.
Seizure statistics, while a messy measurement of black-market vitality, tell a similar story. Both the annual number of marijuana plants eradicated nationally and the amount of marijuana seized at the southwestern border have increased over the past five years. This is true, too, in medical-marijuana states such as California and Colorado, where the number of illegal marijuana plants eradicated — many of them grown on public lands — has more than tripled in the past five years.
“I don’t think anyone would debate that there is an increased demand here for marijuana compared to what there was five years ago,” said Jeffrey Sweetin, who was the Drug Enforcement Administration’s special agent in charge of the Rocky Mountain regional office until his promotion last month. “. . . Doesn’t it stand to reason that you go get marijuana where you can get marijuana?”
Sitting in the living room of a modest Denver-area home, there is a man who would beg to differ.
“It’s definitely cut down on customers,” he says with resignation. “Nobody wants to go to a drug dealer when they could go to a store.”
Off to the side is a pinball machine with its top flipped up. It’s a new enterprise, the man says, fixing game machines for a little cash. He needs to find something because being a large-scale black-market marijuana distributor isn’t what it used to be.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he said, he could easily move 200 or 300 pounds of Mexican-grown pot a month via a supply line through Arizona. He had a small fleet of specially outfitted vehicles. He made frequent trips to northern California, Oregon and British Columbia to buy higher- end offerings.
He says he doesn’t want his name or age used or his hometown listed for fear of getting busted — not that there’s much to get busted for anymore. The Arizona supply line has been sold off. The trips out West are over.
He says he moves about a pound or two a month now, at about $800 a pound. He is also a medical-marijuana patient with a couple of “grows” and a few people for whom he’s listed as the caregiver. He says he’s telling all his old customers to become patients and start shopping at dispensaries, where the selection and presentation are more in keeping with what customers expect these days. Everybody’s become a pot snob, he says; nobody wants Mexican weed.
During a nearly two-hour visit, his phone rings only twice.
“The legalization of marijuana is a great thing; I’ve always wanted to grow,” he says. “But it’s totally killed the black market for me.”
Any attempt to draw hard conclusions about the marijuana black market is difficult because the available data are so spotty.
The DEA and other federal agencies acknowledge they have no idea how much pot is in circulation in the country at any given time.
“An accurate estimate regarding the amount of marijuana available in the United States is not feasible,” the National Drug Intelligence Center wrote in the 2009 Domestic Cannabis Cultivation Assessment.
Border and highway seizures, plant eradication totals and estimates on the amount of land in cultivation provide some glimpse but are unreliable in determining trends because so many variables can influence the totals. Data on marijuana users provide another measurement, since regular users are also likely to be black-market shoppers. But using those figures to gauge medical marijuana’s impacts is imprecise because the numbers are frequently a couple of years old.
Nonetheless, the data can provide some clarity. For starters, medical-marijuana patients nationally account for only a tiny slice of the overall marijuana market — about 4 percent of 2009’s estimated users.
In medical-marijuana states, the proportion can understandably be much higher, but not always. Colorado’s estimated 100,000 medical-marijuana patients are 27 percent of the most recent-use numbers. But in Alaska or Vermont, patients are only about half a percent of the estimated total number.
Beau Kilmer, the co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center in California, said whether a state allows dispensaries or how difficult it is to become a legal patient likely factor into how popular a state’s medical- marijuana program is. Looking nationally, he said, there just aren’t enough state programs for medical marijuana to have a big reach.
But the figures also suggest that medical marijuana may have slowed the black market’s growth rate.
Between 2005 — when most state medical-marijuana programs had yet to take off — and 2009, the estimated number of people who used marijuana monthly grew by about 14 percent, according to National Survey on Drug Use and Health figures. Subtracting current medical-marijuana users from the 2009 numbers lowers the growth rate to about 10 percent. (State-level numbers are too dated to make a realistic comparison.)
Either way, there’s still a lot of people in the market for illegal weed.
“It would be hard to explain why,” Kilmer said.
“Some people may be comfortable with the dealers they have.”
Pulling up pot by its roots
Three hours into their hike, the federal agents in Utah finally reach the canyon rim. Slowly, softly, they circle the marijuana garden with military-style precision, taking care not to snap twigs or rustle leaves and startle the men they can now see tending the plants.
When the agents finally close the trap, chaos erupts. The growers sprint off in multiple directions. Agents, guns out, give chase.
One agent yells, “Shots fired!” into the radio, only to later correct that it was a less-than-lethal foam bullet. When the scramble ends, five suspects are in custody. As many as six others have gotten away.
And now the hard work begins.
One by one, the agents yank marijuana plants — some 5 feet tall — from the dirt. Others rip up irrigation pipe. A helicopter hovers overhead long enough for agents to put a load of plants into a sling, then flies away with the haul.
By the end of the day, the agents seize more than 8,000 plants, 3 miles of pipe and 150 pounds of dried marijuana. It is the 13th marijuana grow that agents have raided in southern Utah this year, said Lt. Dave Moss with the Washington County Task Force.
“We haven’t been doing anything else for three weeks,” Moss said. “It just puts us behind in everything else.”
In recent years, the number of marijuana plants eradicated on U.S. Forest Service lands has boomed. In 2004, federal agents took out about 700,000 plants on Forest Service land. By 2008, that number had risen to more than 3 million.
The increase mirrors the rising number of overall plant seizures on public and private property. In 2004, 3.2 million plants were eradicated from both outdoor and indoor grows, according to federal figures. In 2009, the number was 10.4 million.
Nowhere is the situation more dramatic than California, where agents eradicated 7.5 million plants last year. Officials there say they are on target to eclipse that number for 2010. And this year’s seizures have come with another element: violence.
So far this year, law enforcement agents in California have shot and killed five people in marijuana gardens after suspects allegedly pointed weapons at them, according to published reports. Two alone have happened in Mendocino County, in northern California, and the most recent one occurred shortly before sheriff’s deputies there got into a gun battle with another set of armed growers.
At one point this summer, Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman’s force — only 47 deputies to begin with — was down 15 percent because so many deputies were on administrative leave following pot-garden shootings. During the height of the drama, the county’s board of supervisors considered declaring an emergency and calling in the National Guard.
“Spotting marijuana gardens in our county is not difficult,” he said. “Last year, we were able to eradicate only 25 percent of the illegal ones we saw.”
All the illegal marijuana production takes its toll in other ways too. Allman said growers pollute, they leave behind piles of trash, they spill diesel fuel from generators into streams, they let pesticide and fertilizer run off into watersheds. They cut down trees, speed hillside erosion and kill animals that might try to eat their harvest.
Allman believes part of what draws illegal growers to the area is the county’s reputation as a marijuana wonderland. Mendocino County is part of the famed “Emerald Triangle” marijuana- producing region, where, since the 1960s, people have been illicitly growing pot behind the protection of the region’s forbidding redwood trees. By reputation, Mendocino County is to pot what Sonoma County is to wine.
California’s medical-marijuana law has only strengthened that reputation as county officials have increasingly legitimized growing and as dispensary owners have set up their own gardens. Illegal growers have come too, putting down plants on public lands and private timber properties.
“People think that marijuana is legal in Mendocino County,” Allman said.
DEA agent Sweetin said he worries Colorado’s medical-marijuana law has created the same impression. Between 2004 and 2009, annual plant eradication numbers for the state grew from just over 6,000 to nearly 30,000. Two large grows have been raided on public lands so far this year.
“We’ve created a great environment for organized crime,” he said.
But there is little evidence linking medical marijuana to the continued strength of the black market.
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health found an uptick in the marijuana-use rate, which is at 6.6 percent of the population. But the survey drew no conclusions about whether medical marijuana played a role; in fact, the survey doesn’t differentiate between medical and nonmedical marijuana.
“Obviously, there’s going to be some seepage into the black market,” said RAND’s Kilmer.
More than a year into Colorado’s medical-marijuana boom, law enforcement officials have yet to publicly uncover any substantial link between dispensaries and the black market.
Destination unknown
With the sun sinking toward the ridgetops, the agents in Utah finally make it back to base camp, along with the five captured suspects. The growers range in age from 19 to 31.
Subsequent interviews will reveal that the men are all illegal immigrants, said Brad Cox, the DEA agent in charge of southern Utah. They are likely part of a harvesting crew meant to pick the buds and trim them for sale, Cox said.
From there, the pot would probably head to a distribution center like Chicago, St. Louis, maybe Denver. And then, Cox said, who knows?
Could it end up behind a fancy glass case in a dispensary?
“I bet most of the growers here,” Cox said, “wouldn’t even be thinking about that.”
John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold@denverpost.com