Mexican drug cartels are like the Walmart of pot growers; they grow marijuana in plantations that cover an estimated two million acres of U.S. forest, and are easily the biggest supplier of the finished product to American consumers.
Ultra-violent Mexican drug cartels are growing marijuana in our national parks and forests across 16 U.S. states, and our federal government doesn’t care. At least, that’s how it comes across when one sees that President Obama’s proposed 2013 budget cuts the National Guard’s Counterdrug program almost in half.
One might ask, “What does the National Guard have to do with Mexican cartels and marijuana?” It’s true that the Guard is known to most Americans as the soldiers who provide assistance during natural disasters and riots, and many also know that thousands of Guard members have been deployed to our southwest border to assist the U.S. Border Patrol. But what a lot of people don’t know is that our National Guard is the spearhead for detecting and eradicating marijuana plantations—sometimes containing over 100,000 plants, worth up to $3,000 each—created and heavily guarded by Mexican cartels on US public lands.
There are generally two kinds of people who grow marijuana in the US. First, there are Americans, who cultivate it indoors or in relatively small patches for personal use or for sale at a dispensary in states where medicinal use is legal. Broadly speaking, this kind of marijuana is more specialized, of higher quality, and more expensive than bud grown in mass quantities.
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