A new kind of pollution

The felons who grow marijuana on public land don’t just break the law.

In some cases they also pollute our water.

And we’re not talking about unimportant little creeks that go dry every summer.

Earlier this year police in Grant County, while harvesting illegal marijuana plants, found that the growers had dammed streams to divert water to irrigate their illicit crops.

Worse, the growers had poured fertilizer into the streams, some of which are tributaries to the John Day River, which supports some of Oregon’s most robust runs of salmon and steelhead.

The problem is not limited to Grant County, either.

This summer police destroyed several marijuana grows in Baker County. One of those, the first ever found in the Elkhorn Mountains, was within about five miles of the watershed from which Baker City gets most of its drinking water.

The bottom line here is that the so-called “War on Drugs” is not merely a battle to keep dangerous drugs out of our society.

The tentacles of the illegal drug business threaten not only our families and communities, but even the water that is, quite literally, our lifeblood.

It’s a battle we must win.