More than 1,500 Hmong farmers have moved to Northern California’s Siskiyou County and now raise as much as $1 billion worth of marijuana, according to some estimates. But locals haven’t been pleased to see the newcomers or their crop, which law enforcement destroys during raids, claiming that the pot is sold to the black market.
The Hmong farmers in Siskiyou “hauled in soil, erected drying racks from plastic pipe and slept in plywood sheds,” says the LA Times. “If there was power, it came from a generator, and a portable toilet stood sentry at each gate — sometimes along with an American flag.”
California’s laws around farming pot are loose enough that a farmer can essentially be on the right side of the law right until the point of sale. But after Hmong farmers started to arrive in 2015, Siskiyou County banned outdoor pot cultivation. When the Hmong operations continued, armed officers “cleared as many as three fields a day, raiding 113 grows in four months, seizing generators and water pumps and destroying 9,200 cannabis plants and 3,000 pounds of marijuana. Fifty Hmong were hauled off to jail,” says the Times. Another 52 plots were raided this year.
Originally from Laos and allies of the U.S. during the Vietnam War, some 300,000 Hmong refugees came to the U.S. after the war to seek asylum. Many others were slaughtered or fled to Thai refugee camps, says the Times.