TBT: Forty Years Later, the Ghosts of Paraquat Rise in Dorris

DORRIS—On a Tuesday morning forty years ago this January, this newspaper published what seemed then like a cautionary tale from a distant front in the War on Drugs. Mark Slack’s January 23, 1985 headline—“Paraquat: the best answer?”—warned of federal plans to rain poison down upon the Klamath National Forest from helicopter gunships, all in the name of marijuana eradication.

This past Tuesday, the poison didn’t fall from the sky. It fell off a truck.