Lt. John Nores, Jr. (now retired) grew up duck hunting in California. He was still a young game warden when accidentally stumbling into his first illegal marijuana grow in the heavily wooded outskirts of California civilization. His career remainder was defined by Marijuana Eradication Taskforce investigations throughout California. The scope of illegal grows in California and throughout the entire United States is staggering, generating cash-crop sales exponentially greater than the sum of wheat and corn sales combined. Societal costs are steep: America’s public lands are being decimated. Hazardous wastes, unregulated resource depletion and wildlife habitat loss are ugly by-products. And cartels send only their best growers illegally across the US border, where they’re heavily armed against intruders. For reasons Lt. Nores explains, legalization has possibly only made this problem worse.
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