With California's four-year-old legal marijuana market in disarray, the state's top prosecutor said Tuesday that he will try a new broader approach to disrupting illegal pot farms that undercut the legal economy and sow widespread environmental damage.
The state will expand its nearly four-decade multi-agency seasonal eradication program - the largest in the U.S. that this year scooped up nearly a million marijuana plants - into a year-round effort aimed at investigating who is behind the illegal grows. The new program will attempt to prosecute underlying labor crimes, environmental crimes and the underground economy centered around the illicit cultivations, said Attorney General Rob Bonta.
In keeping with the new approach, the annual Campaign Against Marijuana Planting program started under Republican Gov. George Deukmejian in 1983 will become a permanent Eradication and Prevention of Illicit Cannabis task force, Bonta said. The task force will work with state Department of Justice prosecutors, the department's Cannabis Control Section and an existing Tax Recovery in the Underground Economy task force that was created by law in 2020, all with the goal of filing civil and criminal cases against those behind illegal grows.
The workers are victims of human trafficking, Bonta said,"living in squalid conditions alone for months on end and with no way out. These are not the people who are profiting from the illegal cannabis industry. They're being abused, they're the victims. They are cogs in a much bigger and more organized machine."
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California expands largest US illegal pot eradication effortCalifornia’s four-year-old legal marijuana market is in disarray. So the state’s top prosecutor says he will try a new broader approach to disrupting the illegal pot farms that undercut the legal economy while sowing widespread environmental damage.
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California expands largest US illegal pot eradication effortCalifornia’s four-year-old legal marijuana market is in disarray.
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California Expands Largest US Illegal Pot Eradication EffortWith California’s four-year-old legal marijuana market in disarray, the state’s top prosecutor said Tuesday that he will try a new broader approach to disrupting illegal pot farms that undercut the legal economy and sow widespread environmental damage.
Read more »
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