Around here there are frequent home invasion robberies, but the important detail is the homes invaded are always drug dealers or pot growers, and the invader is usually an unpaid worker who'd put a lot of time in, promised money, then kicked out without pay, or with less pay. Sometimes the dealer/grower is killed. Sometimes they're tortured. I suspect many of these cases aren't reported, since both parties are breaking the law. And don't kid yourself. While there are some permits for growing "medical" marijuana, there are very few actually issued, so most growers are felony committing, and murder is just an additional penalty to add to a lengthy prison sentence. There's pot growers down in the outskirts of Sacramento, and along the foothills down the length of the Sierras to the mountains above LA, and back north and west. Realistically, there's too much land growing pot these days, and while there's a big appetite for it in San Francisco and Oakland and San Jose, if there's too much product, the price falls. This makes the growers unable to raise the funds they expected, so they have to cut their expenses. And things tend to be tight so often this means giving up necessities or not paying your workers and dealing with their revenge. And the eventual home invasion, torture for the money/drugs location/combination/PIN, and murder. And that's the primary crime in this region. Drug related. These people are armed, without a permit, driving crappy old 4WD trucks with serious offroad tires. Wearing nasty clothes. Heavily tanned from working with the plants all the time. Some don't bathe enough. Others are starting to catch on to the need for soap. They live on the Ridge, all the way up to Bowman Lake, halfway between Donner Pass and Downieville, a rough region between the Feather River and Interstate 80, the Yuba River and so many low forests, deep canyons, hidden places. Its the boonies, very much like West Virginia, and if booze were illegal they'd be moonshiners because there is no industry otherwise. The clearcut days are over. The jobs from clearcutting all the trees in your home are over. That's the big problem with the Bubble Economy. Eventually the exploitation ruins it, and the resource is gone or the money goes out of it. And all you get left are people without jobs. Left behind with nothing better to do than have kids they can't afford to feed, and prey on each other.
The people in that lawless desperate region, the Ridge, are big fans of Survivalist resources, and use those to help themselves survive and thrive in their chosen illegal method of making cash, namely growing and selling pot, which isn't quite legal. These are the big fans of solar power, because they can set up sneaky pot farms on stolen land. These are the reason that BLM has guns and bulletproof APCs. They learn how to pump water without being tied to the grid, to water their pot plants. They learn how to modify vehicles to travel on roads too rough for regular cars, to get to their hidden pot fields. They learn how to camp, quietly, hidden, while tending them. They defend their pot fields from thieves, observing and waiting for the plants to ripen, then harvest at the right time this Fall. And every year, the pot is worth a bit less. So those who get pot harvested and packaged for sale are under serious threat of bankruptcy. Even when everything goes right, they can still lose money on the sale. They have too much competition, and drug dealers, buying this product, find themselves in volume discount territory, but with increased risk of arrest by having too many customers, and risk being both turned by police, or shot dead by competing dealers, or organized crime assassins. The dope dealers face a lot of risk.
Those growing mediocre or low grade pot that doesn't sell to picky dealers find themselves motivated to make "honey oil" which is essentially liquid hash hish. This is sort of like turning fresh blackberries into pies or jam. Its value added drugs. I'm sure that's how the processors see it. Narcotics officers see the people burnt by the honey oil FIRES, which burn down apartments and houses. A local motel, less than a mile from here, had both honey oil processing AND a meth lab AND caches of hidden guns, money, and packaged bricks of drugs ready for sale. Everybody involved with that was arrested, and the owner of the motel hired new people with orders not to rent to anybody local. The trouble with local homes if drugs end up being processed in ridiculous places. A house up my street here melted its own pipes dumping Meth chemicals down the toilet, and the stink got the Environmental Health inspector to visit. The folks dumping the drugs ran for it, and got away too, since "false name, paid cash" was how they rented in the first place.
I knew a guy who'd bought a house in Tracy on a NINJA loan as income property then rented to a Chinese couple. He was Chinese himself and figured it was the thing to do. Turns out that couple grew pot in the bedroom after sealing plastic over the windows to keep in the light, and there were weird marks on the carpet. He was baffled that he'd been so thoroughly fooled by their cash rent payments, and claims a friend with a sniffer dog checked and found nothing after they vanished, however I could tell he was lying about that part. They'd been growing drugs. He just didn't want his house seized under existing narcotics laws. Some significant percentage of homes in Elk Grove are rented for the express purpose of growing drugs or brewing meth. The crime there, and home invasions are the key sign of this, has turned Elk Grove from a nice if slightly boring commuter town south of Sacramento into a hellhole where you can get shot crossing the street. Like Stockton, only less noticed in the media.
All things considered, a crap economy leads to these desperate and risky drug production and sale problems. Too much cash involved, and too many murders result. A person living in an area like this needs to have a visible job, a not too nice car, not too nice stuff, and no suspicious lights or smells. When I worked in downtown, I went for a walk and spotted several pot gardens within a few blocks of my job on Main Street. I suspect if I flew over this town in a small plane I could see plenty more, and the local Sheriff has said there's too much of that going on around here he can't make arrests for, thanks to the fuzzy definitions of a medical marijuana law. This is what happens when gasoline gets so expensive, and jobs so scarce, that people with roots in the ground and can't leave, can no longer make a living commuting down the mountain. The bigger the troubles in the Middle East and Russia, the higher the price of oil, the more people facing desperate choices. For them, making Marijuana Legal only keeps them out of jail, but bankruptcy, which drove the law breaking in the first place, remains a serious threat. The desperation is still there.
I am just an observer to this local and state problem. I've witnessed things, and wonder about what's beyond a strangely hanging tarp, or why some manzanita likely to catch fire isn't cleared along a section of road, or what's beyond in an obvious clearcut, or why there's activity in a disused orchard. You see stuff when you look beyond the distraction. I don't know how these people actually feel about their almost legal job growing dope. I don't know how they'll feel about the risks they took when the price crashes, and they have to pay taxes after it is made legal. I figure that's inevitable, even with Gov. Brown against Potheads, something he said to the point being they should move to Washington State if they want to get high.
When Gov. Moonbeam is fed up with hippies and wants to talk about construction contracts, California is a different story from the advertising. I'd like to talk to him about reservoir silt, and levee repairs, and disaster planning, and how to use the water we've got for best effect, so there's both salmon AND agriculture jobs growing food we can export. We need both. I'd like to talk to him about getting campground managers and reopening the campgrounds so the tourists will come and spend money in our wild places and show their friends how great California is on vacation. The way it was 30 years ago. I suspect he'd like that too. There is a balance possible, after all. We have really nice weather here.
It comes down to keeping people lawfully employed, rather than desperate, miserable, and murderous. This shouldn't be so difficult. I wonder if the pot farmers who mostly aren't getting paid to tend plants owned by someone else, would take jobs planting and tending trees in high erosion areas after fires come through, replanting clearcuts and then tending to them to keep those saplings growing till the roots hit ground water and can grow without them, pay them to succeed rather than follow the law and fail. Because laws are written by idiots, not experts. If these jobs paid to succeed, those who must live in the boonies can work legally. Instead of go bad and eventually murder people for money, which is what a Home Invader really is, after all. Armed burglary with the intent to kill. They have those every couple weeks, that get reported. Who knows how many don't? Most of the crime in this area is drug related. All of it desperate, and everybody who gets caught wasn't thinking things through. They didn't realize the little law they broke would become big ones soon enough. It kinda snowballs.
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