Mexican drug cartels, operating illegal marijuana farms on public lands, are polluting forests and saddling the federal government with millions of dollars in clean-up costs.
Trespass marijuana farms are thought to number in the hundreds of thousands in California alone. The sites “wreak havoc on the land, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of pounds of garbage, leaching caustic chemicals, polluting watersheds, and damaging the habitat of endangered and at-risk species,” reports High Country News.
The Forest Service estimates that at least half of such sites use toxic pesticides and fertilizers prohibited in the U.S., especially Carbofuran, “a pesticide that is deadly by the teaspoon but used by the gallon on these sites. These toxins have been found in the water, and they move through the food chain, poisoning and even killing some species, such as the imperiled Pacific fisher, a forest-dwelling carnivore,” says HCN.
To clean up one of these sites can cost $20,000 and $70,000 just to get rid of the hazardous material, leaving behind the soil, garbage and other infrastructure. It’s money that a cash-strapped Forest Service doesn’t have, given that the agency’s budget is expected to drop “by $970 million, from $6.1 billion to $5.1 billion, with a current national budget for remediation between $13 million to $14 million that is split between all the regions,” explains HCN.