Benzinga - Cannabis may be legal in Oregon, but officials are sounding the alarm about ongoing illegal cultivation in the state, including people trafficking and workers being subjected to slave-like conditions.
“America’s freedom to smoke may come at the cost of actual personal freedoms,” ABC News reported as part of a year-long investigation. Legalization has not stopped cartels from continuing with illegal marijuana growth and distribution, or, what’s worse, exploitation of the people cultivating it for them. Sometimes these exploitations have had “deadly consequences.”
Over the last year, ABC News has been following law enforcement officials' raiding illegal farms and finding workers in slave-like conditions — without bathrooms, forced to sleep in tents, not being paid, and some even being sold into prostitution.
Literally Worked To Death It “is the human factor to see the conditions that these people are being pulled in every single day to the point that they're literally dying," Robert Hamer, a special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) for the Pacific Northwest, tells ABC News. "It is heartbreaking.”
Bodies of "narco slaves" are being dropped off at his station, Hamer explains, adding that they have been literally worked to death. "I can guarantee you that they would tell us today that they were slaves [if] they could,” he said.
These organizations are like big corporations in the U.S., Hamer says. “They’re very sophisticated. We are seeing the exploitation of our real estate markets. We're seeing the exploitation of our banking industry, all related to this ever-growing threat down there.”
The Exploitation Of People ABC reporter Mireya Villarreal joined HSI on a joint raid with local authorities in October.
On a property about 20 miles outside Medford, agents discovered 17 workers and a two-year-old toddler. They raided a total of three properties in the neighborhood.
Law enforcement confirmed more than 100 illegal greenhouses, more than 8,500 illegal marijuana plants, and 7000 pounds of processed black market weed.
"We are really trying to focus on the fact that this is the exploitation of people," Hamer says, emphasizing that HSI is trying to approach the problem not just like any other cannabis operation.
After each raid, local authorities use bulldozers to demolish the growth site, trying to stop resurfacing of the illicit farm. The main problem is how widespread these farms are.
Chris Hall, a resident of Cave Junction, Oregon, confirmed to ABC News that “the term 'narco slave' is not hyperbole. People were living in slave conditions. They were not allowed to leave the properties. They were under armed guards.”
Sometimes these organized crime syndicates trespass onto someone’s property, and if a landowner lives somewhere far away they have no idea what is going on.
According to Hall, there are around 800 illegal grow areas around Cave Junction.
“A human toll is impossible to hide from... This is in your backyard. It's in my backyard. It is happening here in Cave Junction. It is happening throughout southwest Oregon. And it's happening throughout the northern parts of California,” Hall said.
California’s Similar Scenario Illegal cannabis growth in the Sunshine State has been hurting the environment for many years. Just recently, Congress members Scott Peters (D-CA) and Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) introduced legislation that seeks to crack down on the use of banned pesticides on illegal marijuana grows on public land.
In October, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a new program — the Eradication, and Prevention Of Illicit Cannabis (EPIC) task force — to eliminate illegal cannabis farms after this year’s eradication program seized almost one million marijuana plants.
At the time, Bonta also highlighted that workers at these farms are often victims of human trafficking, “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.”
California governor Gavin Newsom also recently established Unified Enforcement Task Force (UCETF) to crack down on illegal marijuana operations
Officials requested licensed farms and their employees to report any suspected sex or human traffic.
What can you do, to help put an end to these horrific stories? For starters, if you are buying your weed from illegal sources, stop doing that, because your money is supporting narco slavery.
Photo: Pixabay
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