Narconon Blog

In Sequoia National Park, where stately and ancient sequoia trees penetrate the mountaintop mists, law enforcement personnel rappelled in from helicopters or hiked in from roads to search and destroy extensive marijuana farms.

In operations running through July, hundreds of state, county and federal agents swept through three counties to locate the sophisticated plantations. When it was all over, they had eradicated $1.7 billion worth of marijuana plants and harvested product. They had also arrested 97 people, most of them Mexican nationals.

The Fresno County Sheriff tied the marijuana farms to Mexican drug trafficking organizations. Drug cartels have apparently developed these farms so they can get their products to market without having to cross international or state lines.

In the most common pattern, impoverished Mexican nationals are coerced or intimidated into acting as growers in remote regions of the Central Valley foothills or public lands in Washington, Oregon or Idaho. Diverting natural streams for irrigation and spreading toxic fertilizers, these workers tend their crops and guard the valuable plants with guns and booby traps.

What may be even more shocking is that this is not even an isolated incident. In 2009, a similar operation destroyed $1.6 billion in plants and finished product in Fresno County alone.

“Drug cartels are after profit and power,” comments Clark Carr, president of Narconon International, worldwide network of drug rehabilitation and prevention centers. “American drug users’ appetite for marijuana and other Mexican-produced drugs provide the largest demand worldwide. Although attempted and forceful interdiction of the drug trafficking by law enforcement agencies is one important tool to hold back the waves of drugs coming across our borders, drug demand reduction efforts must parallel or, ideally, exceed interdiction. As law enforcement develops better means of detection or interdiction, the cartels shift their operations to keep bringing product to a U.S. market that will pay for it.”

“Nothing effective can be done about demand reduction, many say,” states Carr. “There are even those who claim that marijuana is not addictive. That is a lie. More than a quarter million Americans entered drug rehabilitation facilities in 2007 to get help for addiction to this drug.”

“Emphasizing and providing proven, effective drug rehabilitation and drug education is essential,” continues Carr. “Narconon® drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers around the U.S. and the world provide these services to thousands of addicts and hundreds of thousands of children. Along with the drug demand efforts of so many other organizations, we must demonstrate to national, state, and city governments that the demand for drugs can be reduced. And then farmers can go back to growing food instead of poison for a hungry world.”"

The Narconon drug treatment program takes addicts through eight phases of recovery, from a drug-free withdrawal and a thorough, sauna-based cleansing of drug residuals from the body onward through life skills training in personal integrity and morals. The result is that seven out of ten Narconon graduates are still clean and sober when contacted two years or later after they complete.

Narconon drug prevention, education and rehab centers exist in over 40 countries. For more information call 1 800 775-8750 or visit www.narconon.org