By
Gregory Krieg
Marijuana has been legal in the state of Oregon since July 1, when a ballot initiative approved
in 2014 cleared the way for residents and tourists to carry and use the
drug, keep up to eight ounces in their homes and grow as many as four
plants, provided they are hidden from public view.
Smoking on the street or in common spaces is still illegal, and the growth business is tightly regulated. Like with beer and alcohol, industrial-scale production remains the province of licensed businesses.
But even as the marijuana business booms, there remains a
significant financial incentive for local police departments willing to
dedicate their time and resources to searching out and destroying rogue
crops.
The Drug Enforcement Administration will send more than $750,000
to Oregon law enforcement this year, according to a report by Portland's
KGW,
to bolster those efforts. The federal government will spend in excess
of $18 million this year to pay for similar eradication programs
nationwide, KGW reports.
Following the money: In 2014, local law enforcement officers in Oregon pulled up more than 16,000 cultivated plants, at a cost to the federal government of more than $960,000, the Washington Post reported. That works out to nearly $60 per plant, or 15 times the national average of $4.19.
A spokesman for the DEA defended the tactic, telling KGW that
the program "has proven effective in dismantling and disrupting drug
trafficking organizations, has protected public and tribal lands from
illegal marijuana grows and in 2014 was responsible for the removal of
almost 5,000 weapons [in all 50 states] from cannabis cultivators."
But as a number of increasingly outspoken critics are quick
to note, cartel activity in Oregon has diminished since voters
effectively closed the statewide marijuana black market in 2014.
According to the KGW report, officers have found progressively fewer
illegal grows over the past three years, with the final count for 2014 —
16,067 — down from 27,641 in 2012 and 26,597 in 2013.
Still, most police departments are understandably happy to
carry on doing the job. KGW found that officers doing drug patrols in
2014, often through aerial surveillance from expensive rented
helicopters, collected an estimated $275,000 in overtime pay.
"Those of us in reform have always seen eradication programs
as largely a make-work, overtime program for cops to go pull weeds and
spend taxpayer money on helicopters," Russ Belville, executive director
of the Portland chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws, told KGW.
Who profits: Despite opposition from groups like
NORML, the raids are generally welcome by groups otherwise supportive of
ending marijuana prohibition.
The Marijuana Policy Project, which lobbies for reform in
Washington, D.C., is ultimately tied to the interests of this rapidly
expanding industry.
In an email to Mic, MPP communications
director Mason Tvert allowed that the "funds could probably be used for
more pressing matters than marijuana eradication," but stopped short of
denouncing the program.
"If they are going to be used on marijuana-related efforts,
they must only be used to eliminate cartel activity and illegal
operations," Tvert said. "That appears to be their stated intent, which
means they're basically assisting a state in replacing an illegal
underground market with a regulated legal market."
But an increasing number of elected officials and even some
reform-minded law enforcement agents have begun to question the efficacy
of dedicating such proportionally large sums of taxpayers money to
pulling these plants out of the ground.
"When there were huge cartel problems, we needed that
money," Jackson County Sheriff Corey Falls, who dissolved his task force
earlier this year, told KGW. "But now we don't. I wanted to focus on
person crimes."
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