California's New Pot Patch

Northern California's so-called Emerald Triangle, famous for marijuana farms that supply much of the U.S. with high-quality pot, is facing competition from hundreds of miles away—in Los Angeles County. As this year's marijuana-harvest season gets under way, law-enforcement officials are focused on the Southern California county, which by some measures has bloomed into the nation's most productive pot garden. Law-enforcement agents seized more than 734,000 pot plants in Los Angeles County last year—the highest number of seizures in the country for that year. The haul surpassed those even in California's most-prolific northern counties, with the biggest 2009 seizure coming from Shasta County at 629,000 plants. Law-enforcement officials have seized 103,000 plants in Los Angeles County since April, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which takes the lead in pot seizures in the county. Recent seizures in Los Angeles County have astonished even veterans of the state's long drug war. On a single Friday in late June, law-enforcement agents destroyed 19,000 plants with a street value of $39 million, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officials said. Most of the county's marijuana plants are grown in the Angeles National Forest, a rugged wilderness stretching over 650,000 acres east of Los Angeles, according to U.S. Forest Service records. Forest Service and Sheriff's Department officials recently warned hikers about the presence of pot farms in the forest—along with the armed guards and booby traps that come with them...more