Antelope Valley Press
By. Julie Drake

Read the full article here.

Since Congressman Mike Garcia took a helicopter tour on April 8 with a Los Angeles County sheriff’s narcotics detective and viewed first-hand the hundreds of illegal marijuana cultivation sites cropping up in the desert east of Lancaster and Palmdale, the Santa Clarita Republican has been raising awareness about the illegal grows, garnering national attention.

The illegal grows are tied to water theft, violent crime including murder and human trafficking. There is also an environmental component with unknown pesticides and herbicides going into the ground and trash at the sites.

Garcia and Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva updated local residents Tuesday, during a private round-table discussion, followed by a press conference at the Los Angeles County Farm Bureau.

“When you first hear about this problem you almost can’t believe it,” Garcia said at the press conference.

He took the helicopter tour after he received numerous complaints from his constituents. They followed that with another helicopter tour in May. What came next was a massive multi-agency law enforcement operation that started on June 8 and involved Los Angeles, Kern, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties, state and federal authorities and the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale. 

Over a 10-day period, an estimated $1.2 billion worth of illegal marijuana was seized — enough to fill the equivalent of two Sea World orca tanks, Garcia said.

“This isn’t about right vs. left or Republicans vs. Democrat, this is about right vs. wrong and enforcing the law,” he said. “These operations are not legal. The  players involved in these operations are putting our constituents and our residents in harms’ way. They’re threatening them on a daily basis.”

Garcia said California needs new laws that make growing more than 100 plants or selling more than 100 pounds a felony rather than a misdemeanor if it’s not done under a license.

“You have my commitment that we’re going to continue to seek funds to support the local law enforcement agencies,” he said, adding they are working to gain a waiver on the cap to overtime for sheriff’s deputies.

They are fighting the illegal marijuana problem amid calls to defund the police and reimagine what policing looks like.

Villanueva said the risk is low and the reward high for illegal marijuana cultivation operations.

“For those who vote for Prop. 47 thinking there was going to be legalized and controlled and regulated market, it didn’t happen,” he said. “Because by removing all the consequences or not conforming to the law we’ve created this massive industry.”

Proposition 47, or The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, reclassified seven non-violent categories of crime as misdemeanors, limiting the length and type of sentence available for those crimes. As part of those changes, theft of property worth $950 or less was labeled petty theft, a misdemeanor charge.

In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the sheriff said they surveyed 150 illegal grows from the air. When they did it again this year, there were 500 illegal grows.

“That should tell you something about the lack of consequence for the illegal industry,” Villanueva said. 

They seized 340,000 plants, each of which has a value of $1,200 at harvest. Each plant requires three gallons of water per day. They made about 167 arrests, seized 91 firearms and rescued numerous dogs, cows, pigs and goats.

Illegal marijuana dispensaries outnumber legal ones by 50 to 1. 

“We have to find a way to control this, make sure that we support the legal operations and knock out the illegal operations,” Villanueva said.

During the round table discussion, the sheriff said California law makes it so there is little risk with maximum reward that extends to the dispensary level.

“We have a perfect storm of a lack of a regulatory scheme and a permissive DA that’s not filing anything,” Villanueva said.

They need more resources to fight the problem. 

“We need to have a district attorney that’s actually going to enforce the law,” he said. 

The illegal grows extend to neighborhoods with the cartels purchasing homes and stripping them bare to turn them into grow houses.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us,” Villanueva said.

Last year, L.A. County saw a 36-percent increase in homicides, this year the number is 104 percent through the first six months of the year, Villanueva said.

“This is how government should work,” Garcia said. “We were a  testimony that as a constituent, when you make a complaint to your local elected officials, from the time our office was made aware of the problem in March and April, to the time we surveyed it, to the time that the operation took place, was only a matter of months. 

He said illegal grows are a byproduct of the open border problem.