Wildlife agency takes aim at marijuana farms that poison species

Illegal marijuana growers in the Pacific Northwest may soon have to more to fear than federal drug agents. The bigger danger may come from wildlife biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The service this week proposed granting Endangered Species Act protection to the Pacific fisher, a cat-size mammal related to the weasel, which is increasingly falling victim to rat poison used on illicit marijuana operations hidden in the forests of Northern California, Oregon and Washington.

A proposal to list the fisher as threatened was posted Tuesday in the Federal Register. A public hearing is scheduled for Nov. 17 in Redding, California.

Fights between farmers and environmentalists are nothing new, but the growing push to legalize and expand marijuana use is leading to more clashes between marijuana growers and state regulators and private green groups.

“Fishers have been part of forests in the Pacific states for thousands of years, but they have virtually disappeared from many landscapes across Washington, Oregon and portions of the Sierra Nevada in California,” said the agency Monday in a statement.

Matt Baun, Fish and Wildlife spokesman in Yreka, California, said those tending the pot farms use poison or rodenticides to get rid of the wood rats and other pests that feed on marijuana plants. The use of rodenticides is prohibited in the forests.

“So what happens is, the wood rats ingest the poison, and the fishers will eat the infected wood rat and themselves become sick,” Mr. Baun said.

Marijuana growers also spread rat poison around the irrigation lines used to water their crop, he said.

“Marijuana plants require enormous amounts of water, and so they do these makeshift irrigation lines from these tributary streams to the marijuana gardens and lace the irrigation pipes with these rodenticides,” Mr. Baun said. “So the fishers and other animals that find water there will also be ingesting the rodenticides.”

It’s not the only environmental battle being fought over pot. In drought-stricken California, where marijuana has been legalized for medicinal purposes, growers have been accused of violating water restriction regulations to keep their crops alive. Growers are accused of diverting streams because local well sources have dried up.

“I have told my marijuana team, ’I want you to fly the rivers, fly the tributaries. Let’s prioritize the water diversion,’” Mendocino County Sheriff Thomas D. Allman told The New York Times in August.

Federal drug agents and local law enforcement officers who break up the illegal marijuana farms are often ill-equipped to deal with issues brought on by rodenticides.

“What happens is agencies will go in, they’ll bust the people growing at the sites and they’ll rip out the marijuana plants, but they aren’t trained to handle these rodenticides,” Mr. Baun said. “So in the fall, you start getting these rains and all this stuff washes downstream.”

This isn’t the first time marijuana operations have been singled out for harming at-risk species. A recovery plan issued last week by NOAA Fisheries said the coho salmon are being threatened by growers illegally siphoning water from streams, according to The Associated Press.

“The other side effect is a lot of these growers will have firearms with them,” Mr. Baun said. “It’s certainly a concern for public access to these national and state forests, but at some of these sites, some larger wildlife like deer or bear were also shot dead.”

Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the Emerald Growers Association, told AP that regulating the marijuana industry would help solve the problem by boosting legal growers and weeding out illegal operators. The association represents those involved in the medical marijuana industry.

“We need regulation that’s going to make sense to the farmers on the ground,” he said. “That is also going to achieve the public safety and environmental goals that we all share.”