San Diego-to-Tijuana drug tunnel uncovered; 25 tons of pot seized

Federal authorities discovered a tunnel linking drug warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana that led to the seizure of more than 25 tons of marijuana, one of the largest-ever drug seizures in San Diego, officials said. The 1,800-foot transnational passageway — roughly equivalent to six football fields in length — isn't the longest or the most sophisticated ever built, but it is one of the few instances in which authorities were able to seize drugs on both sides of the border. The scale of the operation pointed to the work of a major Mexican drug cartel, authorities said, and comes two weeks after Mexican authorities discovered a record 134 tons of marijuana in an industrial area near Tijuana. Officials don't know if there is a connection between the two events, but called this week's discovery another significant blow against organized crime groups.

Authorities estimated the drugs' worth at more than $20 million. "I can promise you there are some very unhappy people in the cartel," said John Morton, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which leads the multi-agency San Diego Tunnel Task Force. The investigation was triggered Tuesday afternoon when task force agents patrolling the light industrial area near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry followed a tractor trailer that was acting suspiciously, Morton said. The truck was stopped at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Temecula, where agents found about 10 tons of marijuana stuffed in the 53-foot trailer. Two people in the truck, a husband and wife whose identities were not disclosed, were arrested. Agents later raided the warehouse from which the vehicle had departed and discovered another 10 to 15 tons of dope, the bales wrapped in cellophane and on pallets, as if ready for shipping.

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How Legal Pot Could Harm the Cartels

So far, no modern country has ever legalized marijuana production—not even the Netherlands. Yet with heavy drug-related violence plaguing the U.S.-Mexican border, some analysts and policymakers now say that America should legalize weed in order to reduce the power of Mexico’s drug cartels. Marijuana carries the least amount of overhead cost for many of the cartels and provides some of their cash flow for buying guns and influence.

Estimates vary, but analysts say pot accounts for somewhere in the range of 20 to 50 percent of the cartels’ profits. But that could soon change with competition from El Norte: California has a proposition set for the November ballot—on which voters are roughly split—that would legalize the drug’s domestic production and sale. If the measure passes, says a recent analysis by the RAND Corporation, California could become a major supplier of the drug to the rest of the U.S. That, according to George W. Grayson, a professor of government at William & Mary, “would hurt the cartels badly.” RAND estimates that it could reduce the drug’s pretax price by more than 80 percent.

Of course, whether legalization has any real effect depends on the rate at which the drug is taxed. A tax rate of $50 per ounce, for example, would generally not make high-grade California cannabis cost-competitive with less potent Mexican imports. Yet a lower tax rate could significantly decrease the cartels’ market share. That wouldn’t put them out of business—they’d still be major players in the markets for cocaine, heroin, and meth—but it could reduce their power.

• "Assessing How Marijuana Legalization in California Could Influence Marijuana Consumption and Public Budgets", RAND, 7/7/10.
  

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Plummeting Marijuana Prices Create A Panic

For decades, illegal marijuana cultivation has been an economic lifeblood for three counties in northern California known as the Emerald Triangle. The war on drugs and frequent raids by federal drug agents have helped support the local economy — keeping prices for street sales of pot high and keeping profits rich. But high times are changing. Legal pot, under the guise of the California's medical marijuana laws, has spurred a rush of new competition. As a result, the wholesale price of pot grown in these areas is plunging.

In 1983, the Reagan administration launched a massive air and ground campaign to eradicate pot and lock up growers in northern California. With the Reagan crackdown, writer Charley Custer recalls, wholesale prices shot up — to as high as $5,000 a pound. That sudden and ironic windfall for those growers willing to risk prison time transformed the community. "Outdoor growers are having a hard time unloading their fall harvest," Custer says. "And this is six months later and when some people do move it, they don't get nearly the price they were hoping for." That goes for both legal growers who cultivate limited quantities of pot under the medical marijuana laws and illegal operators who often grow larger amounts.

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Colombia's marijuana feeding Europe's habit

These are the mountains of Colombia's southwest Cauca province, far from the reach of the law and just as far from market -- making it difficult, the dirt-poor peasants say, to scrape a living selling legal produce. Around every bend and in every village there's a surprise. Marijuana plantations stretch sometimes for several acres, clinging to steep-sided canyons. Farmhands wielding machetes disappear amid a "forest" of thousands of plants, two or three times taller than a person. They reappear minutes later with a bundle of marijuana over their shoulder and head for rudimentary drying houses made of black plastic slung over wooden branches. In some of these shacks hundreds of pounds of marijuana are hung out to dry.

In other communities, old ladies take advantage of a brief break in the rain to toss marijuana up to dry on the tin roofs of their homes. Others hang the herb in the rafters of the kitchen, where the strangely sweet smell mingles with the aroma of a stew cooking on a smoky fire. In Cauca province at least, there's a new bonanza. This is one of the few regions of Colombia where, according to United Nations' anti-drug officials, the production of marijuana and coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine, is increasing. At the same time, Colombia is once again exporting good quality pot and has become a "major supplier" to Europe, according to the DEA.

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Mexican Cartels are Taking over US Marijuana Production

Life is getting a bit harder for Mexican drug lords these days. Not only do they have to worry about the Mexican military and U.S. law enforcement tripping up their drug trafficking efforts. Now they have some supply problems from a place they might not have expected – competition from U.S.-based marijuana producers.

Several media outlets have published recent reports regarding U.S. marijuana farms, known as “grows.” A Washington Post article from Oct. 7 said that thousands of mom-and-pop grows in the U.S. are threatening cartel profits, partly because of recent changes in state laws that allow the legal use of medical marijuana. So what’s a Mexican cartel to do? Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), Mexican cartels have also moved to increasingly cultivate marijuana on public lands in the United States. McClatchy News recently published the following:

“There is no doubt” that three big marijuana fields uncovered this month in Ellis and Navarro counties, in Texas, “have a tie to the border and a Mexican drug cartel,” said a drug investigator for the Texas Department of Public Safety. “They brought the tenders up here from Mexico to do the work.”

The Washington Post article further stated that the Mexican traffickers’ illegal use of public lands is a response to the dramatic increase in U.S. production, according to authorities and growers. In the northern woods of California, illegal immigrants hired by well-heeled Mexican “patrones,” or bosses, lay miles of plastic pipe and install oscillating sprinkler systems for clandestine fields that produce a cheaper, faster-growing “commercial grade” of marijuana.

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States Pressed Into New Role on Marijuana

Health and law enforcement officials around the nation are scrambling to figure out how to regulate medical marijuana now that the federal government has decided it will no longer prosecute legal users or providers.

For years, since the first medical marijuana laws were passed in the mid-1990s, many local and state governments could be confident, if not complacent, knowing that marijuana would be kept in check because it remained illegal under federal law, and that hard-nosed federal prosecutors were not about to forget it.

But with the Justice Department’s announcement last week that it would not prosecute people who use marijuana for medical purposes in states where it is legal, local and state officials say they will now have to take on the job themselves.

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Agents Make Valuable Marijuana Busts in California

Federal and state agents have arrested 83 people for growing more than $1.2 billion worth of marijuana in an ongoing crackdown on illegal pot gardens in California's Sierra Nevada range.

Local officials said several Mexican marijuana-growing cartels helped set up the grow sites scattered throughout rocky mountainsides of eastern Fresno County, and warned more arrests were likely as the sweep continues.

More than 318,000 marijuana plants were destroyed in the operation, which also netted nearly $41,000 in cash, 25 weapons and two vehicles, Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims said Thursday.

While the bust was large enough to merit a visit Wednesday from Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, it accounts for a small percentage of the pot typically seized in California each year.

"Agents Seize $1.2 Billion Worth of Pot in Calif.", ABC News, 7/23/09.

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