California Deputies Kill Pot Farmer

This is a breaking story, with few details so far …

The eradication of a large pot farm in Santa Clara County turned deadly. Sheriff’s deputies shot and killed a suspected marijuana grower this morning in a remote area about ten miles south of Livermore’s Del Valle Regional Park.

“We are talking about very rugged terrain up in the mountains,” Santa Clara County Sheriff’s spokesman Rick Sung.

About 12 deputies started the marijuana enforcement operation at sunrise in the rugged hills near the border of Alameda and Santa Clara counties.

At 10:25 a.m., Santa Clara sheriff’s dispatchers received a call from a member of the operation that a suspected grower had been shot and killed.

Authorities step up marijuana enforcement operations beginning in the summer when growers start cultivating their illegal crops. Sung says the deputies always go in fully armed.

“They have to assume that the growers at the gardens are heavily armed, and so that why they are very caution when they enter a scene,” he said.

This is the second time in two years that a suspected grower has been shot and killed by a member of the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s marijuana eradication team.

With so little information, there’s not much to say about the shooting itself. What I can say is that this is an inevitable result of prohibition of a substance 40 percent of American adults have used. Smoking weed’s a victimless crime, 90 million Americans have done it, and when there’s a demand like that, people will provide for the market. If Prop 19 had already passed, deputies wouldn’t have been out in those hills, and that pot farmer would be alive.

One question that I assume will be answered is whether this farm, like many in California these days, was a quasi-legal (in the sense that it’s legal under California Law, but illegal according to the feds) medical marijuana grow.