A convoy of sheriff’s deputies heads into a vast network of illegal marijuana grow operations in the foothills of Mount Shasta in California’s Siskiyou County.
They drive into a dusty encampment strewn with garbage and piles of empty plastic fertilizer containers, a blight on the otherwise scenic landscape.
The morning raid is nothing new for Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue.
Thousands of makeshift greenhouses known as “hoop houses” – each one containing hundreds of illegally grown cannabis plants – are operating in the county at any given time, LaRue told The Epoch Times, as his deputies scoured the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision, a 20-minute drive northeast of Weed, Calif.
The sheriff’s office has counted 2,732 hoop houses using satellite and aerial imagery in the subdivision alone.
By the time he arrived at the scene on June 4, all the occupants had fled.
Spotters at these illegal grow sites – sometimes armed with AK-47s and rifles, according to nearby residents – alert laborers to leave the camp when they see sheriff’s deputies approaching.
Except for a few roosters, an older German shepherd, and a couple of curious pups, the site was abandoned. The occupants had already cleared out when an advance team of investigators approached the camp earlier that morning.
They know the drill.
About 430 flowering marijuana plants were found in each of two 30-by-100 foot hoop houses. Agents from the regional North State Marijuana Investigation Team weighed about 900 pounds of freshly cut marijuana plants that were hanging to dry in another slightly larger greenhouse.
All the marijuana was destroyed. No one was arrested, according to the sheriff’s office.
The team had served a search warrant on the same property last August and arrested the property owner, Haizhou Wang, then 56, who was on-site at the time.
Cannabis industry experts estimate that more than 30 million pounds of illicit marijuana are grown in the United States annually.
Siskiyou County alone produces about 17.8 million pounds of illegal marijuana every year, with a “low-end” estimated local street value of about $3.6 billion based on sales at $200 a pound, according to the sheriff’s office.
A typical pound of processed black-market marijuana may sell for a couple hundred dollars in California, but can sell for $1,500 in Midwest and East Coast markets and much more in other countries, according to both the sheriff’s office and the California Department of Cannabis Control.
Hellbound and Down 