By Joe Dokes
Investigative reporter-L.E.N.S.
Week of 09/29/22
During this weeks Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting I relayed the story of an elderly lone woman whose well had run dry in the Lakehead, Ca area. To humanize this story her name is “Leslee”. Her water loss was certainly affected by an illegal marijuana grow next to her operating off the same aquifer. It would be easy to say just eliminate the grow but the public should understand there are thousands of them and only the most onerous ones that are commercial scale can receive eradication. Our Sheriffs are already running at 110 percent effort.
California is in a serious drought and has begun to provide grants to counties for remediation of wells that have run dry. In the case of Shasta County we received approximately 2.5 million dollars in promised grant money. To date our county has spent about 100k of those monies just providing emergency bottled water. This doesn’t account for water to bathe or provide for animal or crop/garden needs. I think the nation does not realize we are in for food shortages and vastly higher food prices, even more than what we are experiencing from “Bidenomics”.
The woman at the center of this story is disabled, poor, and now because of age/injury can no longer work. In the past she drove thousands of miles every month for work delivering blood and hospital lab tests for hundreds of people in multiple counties in Northern California. Our county has just begun to provide her bottled drinking water. She has had to drive to neighboring rural vacant vacation homes with one gallon jugs to fill up (illegally) water for bathing and her animals. I have been pushing to try to get her water truck deliveries to a tank she purchased before the winter months.
Shasta County cannot find contractors to drill wells now, they are all working at 100 percent capacity and honestly few will want to take on a government contract because of the issues in fairly getting paid for the different amounts of work that needs to be done. We see illegal marijuana water well drillers coming from out of state or central California getting three times the going rate, or upwards of one hundred thousand dollars for illegal wells drilled in the middle of the night. In the scheme of illegal growing this is simply a cost of business. We estimate between the counties of Shasta and Siskiyou that water theft is approaching 15 million gallons a day. In the case of Siskiyou County the head of the California State Water Board, E. Joaquin Esquivel, Chair, has publicly called this amount “insignificant” . Tell that to “Leslee” who hasn’t had water for a real bath or shower in a year.
This is but one small story of what illegal marijuana production is doing to our communities and the human cost and suffering on the street.
We, at Law Enforcement News Network, will be telling more stories from the street putting people before pot. We will tell the stories exposing the harms of cannabis that corporate biased media won’t comment on. We can do this because we are completely self-sustaining, self-funded, and take no special interest monies whatsoever. We admit one bias…. We see cannabis as destructive to our society.
Look for more reporting from the street soon.
Exposing the cannabis cartel crime lords of Northern California
A coalition of citizens from multiple counties protecting our youth and environment while actively supporting our law enforcement partners.
Contact us at – (530)510-1080
