SEQUOIA NATIONAL FOREST, California — Not far from Yosemite’s waterfalls and in the middle of California’s redwood forests, Mexican drug gangs are quietly commandeering U.S. public land to grow millions of marijuana plants and using smuggled immigrants to cultivate them.
Pot has been grown on public lands for decades, but Mexican traffickers have taken it to a whole new level: using armed guards and trip wires to safeguard sprawling plots that in some cases contain tens of thousands of plants offering a potential yield of more than 30 tons of pot a year.
So you’re out for a backwoods hike. You stumble into a marijuana field… and the growers won’t take kindly to that.
Many of the plots are encircled with crude explosives and are patrolled by guards armed with AK-47s who survey the perimeter from the ground and from perches high in the trees.
Of course, we knew this. But there are those that think parks are safe havens. Folks, they are no more special than anywhere else. Bad people will lurk about. Erecting artificial barriers that only keep law-abiding citizens in a submissive and weakened state (and thus embolden the bad guys)…. please, I’m still waiting for someone to show me the logic in that line of thought.
Stuff From Hsoi 
“Crude explosives”? Great. That sounds like a bleeding blast (no pun intended).
Having spent some time in sunny San Diego where mountain lions had a wonderful little habit of picking off lone joggers when they had the opportunity, I know full well that we face more than enough of a threat from four-legged predators… But once you throw a relatively powerful brain and a set of opposable thumbs into the equation, the situation goes straight to hell.
But, yeah, there is obviously no reason why average citizens should be allowed to carry self-defense tools with them while hiking or whatnot…
4-legged critters are another real reason. Heck, it was just some months ago some woman up in Canada was mauled to death by coyotes! Highly unusual, but it shows… these things happen. Worth being prepared for.
I feel strongly that the war on drugs has been a colossal and expensive failure, but we need to get some troops in there or something. These are armed foreign invaders as far as I’m concerned.
According to the article these growers are using poisons and polluting water. What is the EPA doing? Environmentalists?
Yeah, that’s a whole other aspect to this whole mess. War on Drugs is a colossal failure, but no politician is willing to step up and say so because there’s billions of dollars in play and they also feel it’d be political suicide. But, this sentiment is changing… slowly.
EPA and the tree-huggers aren’t going to do anything because they can’t. They’ll just want more laws and regulations, and like the growers care. But it’d sure be nice if they actually got behind a realistic winning solution….
If you stumble into a patch of 10,000 pot plants guarded by guys with AK-47s you’ll be better served by your running shoes than by any pistol you could be carrying.
In a situation like that the only thing that will save you is Getting The F Out of Dodge as quickly as possible.
(not that I’m opposed to CC in National Parks, I’m just saying that this problem is outside of the scope of problems that your CC pistol is prepared to handle.)
Now, I’ll agree that criminals like this could be most easily handled by the military, but calling them “armed foreign invaders” doesn’t make them so. I’m not sure the military could legally act in this fashion (not that it hasn’t happened before…). I’ll bet a Sheriff could deputize a few hundred Army Rangers who all, coincidentally, has a two week pass at the time.
Then we’d just need a film crew to make it into a full scale pay-per-view event!
Oh I agree… would be better to get the heck out of there. Still, having a piece with you gives you more options than if you didn’t have one.