Marijuana growers leave quite a mess

Another side effect of the war on drugs: public lands are being trashed by marijuana growers. It's an ecological disaster, apparently:

Come September, marijuana growers who have labored for five months in some of California's most remote country will abandon their secret gardens, taking their multimillion-dollar crops.

What will they leave behind? Irrigation tubes that snake for a mile or more over forested ridges. Pesticides that have drained into creeks and entered the food chain, sickening wildlife. Piles of trash and human waste in the most rugged and bucolic drainages.

The government hasn't got the resources to clean up these lands properly:

The trash goes first, packed out sometimes by National Guard helicopters or hotshot firefighters once fire season is over. Restoring native plants and fixing soil erosion problems are longer-term issues which, officials say, are sometimes never addressed.

"Unfortunately, we really can't clean up all those sites like we would like to," said Ross Butler, assistant special agent in charge of the Bureau of Land Management's Sacramento office.

"We go in, we get the weed," Butler said. "Everything else just kind of ends up staying behind."

So if you're keeping score at home, the war on drugs has managed to incarcerate zillions at a cost of zillions while failing to meaningfully halt any amount of supply or demand, and the unregulated black market is taking advantage of public land to continue getting the population high, after which the government can only barely find resources to take out the trash. Gotcha - it makes perfect sense!