The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - California’s War on Toxic Weed— Inside The Cartel Marijuana Boom

Episode Date: June 28, 2026

Former California game warden John Nores reveals the hidden war being fought deep inside America’s forests — where cartel-run marijuana farms have taken over remote public lands, poisoned wildlife, stolen water, and turned California’s mountains into dangerous territory. In this episode, John breaks down how Mexican cartel growers set up massive hidden weed farms, how they camouflage camps and irrigation systems, why game wardens became involved in marijuana raids, and what happened when his team came face-to-face with armed growers in the woods. We also discuss the environmental destruction caused by illegal grows, toxic pesticides, cartel tactics, California legalization, the black market, and why this problem is still far from over. John Nores is a former California Department of Fish and Wildlife game warden and author of Hidden War, where he documents his years tracking cartel activity in America’s wildlands. Topics include: Cartel weed farms, California forests, game wardens, illegal marijuana grows, Sinaloa cartel, toxic pesticides, water theft, wildlife destruction, armed growers, and the hidden war on public lands. Go Support John! Book: https://www.johnnores.com/hidden-war.html Website: https://www.johnnores.com/ This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: Hims! To get simple, online access to personalized, affordable care for ED, Hair Loss, Weight Loss, and more, visit https://hims.com/connect Prescription required. See website for details and important safety information. Sildenafil is the generic version of Viagra®. Viagra® is a registered trademark of Viatris Specialty LLC. Hims is not affiliated with or endorsed by Viatris. Lucy! Save 20% on your first online Lucy order at https://lucy.co/connect with promo code CONNECT! Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow 00:00 Intro: California's Weed War 01:00 Meet John Norris: Game Warden Turned Cartel Hunter 04:00 Why Game Wardens Battle Cartels 09:00 Inside Cartel Grow Tactics 17:00 Water Theft & Ranch Infiltration 24:00 Deadly Encounters: Gunfights in the Hills 26:00 This Episode Is Sponsored By Hims 27:58 Cartel Structure & Operations Unveiled 41:00 Cat-and-Mouse: Grow Raids vs Apprehensions 46:16 This Episode Is Sponsored By Lucy 47:52 Cartel Incentives: Who's Growing & Why 55:00 Hidden Health Dangers: Pesticides & Poisons 01:03:00 Environmental Fallout: Wildlife & Water 01:08:00 Legalization Backfires: Black Market Thrives 01:16:00 Chinese Cartels & the Evolving Threat 01:25:00 Why the Legal Market Can't Compete 01:36:00 From Gunfights to Game Wardens: War Stories 01:43:00 Cartels, China, and the Fentanyl Pipeline 01:53:00 Northern Border, Drugs, and the Hidden War 02:03:00 Solutions: Law, Education, & Real Change 02:10:00 Impact of Legalization Laws in Other States 02:12:00 Organic Growers vs Cartels: The Forgotten Warriors 02:16:00 Wrap Up: The Fight for America's Wildlands & Closing Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Two to five thousand plants. We got into our first gun fight, my partner was almost killed. These guys are military-like train. It's really potent weed. Other than being, you know, deadly and full of all kinds of poisons that's slowly killing you. How is that prejudicial to a human's health? Central nervous system damage. I've never seen more corruption than in the Golden State that I love, and it's a bittersweet fight.

John Norris is a federal game warden who spent the last 20 years hunting and eradicating cartel marijuana growth sites all over the state of state of the state of the state of it. California. John has seen firsthand the power of Mexican cartels to infiltrate national parks, forests, and private land in order to grow billions of dollars of black market marijuana every year. John reveals the harmful pesticides that cartels spray on their weed plants, which not only kill wildlife and poison the environment, but poison you, the weed smoker. But probably most shocking is the fact that marijuana legalization has actually made cartels stronger, not weaker. John reveals how Mexican cartels have allied themselves with Chinese pot growers who are operating with impunity in California's most vulnerable regions and have spread out to states all over the country.

Make sure to check out John's best-selling book Hidden War, available wherever you buy books. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a fascinating interview, the great John Norris, right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. John Norris, my man. It's been a long time coming. Yeah, over a year. Yeah, that's right. We are. And you were in California when we first had this conversation to do the show and now you're in the great state of Texas. So awesome to be here, man. Thanks for having me. Well, we kind of grew up on opposite sides of the fence, didn't we? We sure did. I was buying weed from, you know, certain fellas in Northern California and you were trying to take out my fellas. You were taking out my connects, dude. I did not appreciate that.

No, I know. I know. Eventually, I had to do, I had to do my side of the world of the job. And I had to work on those connects and get into the weed issue, which ironically, I never predicted what happened when I started my fishing game game game crew in 1992. It just wasn't something we knew in the traditional world of doing game warden work that we would be dealing with the weed cartels on an environmental threat level and a public safety level and how that would even play into the game warden continuum, if you will, for definition. So most people wouldn't guess that as a game warden as part of the California Fish and Wildlife Bureau. why are you guys and at the DEA going after these big illegal cartel marijuana grows? Yeah, that's a great question. And for the longest time in my career, I started in 92, got out of the academy at Napa Valley College up there in Northern California. Got sent down to Southern California, the Inland Empire, Riverside County, specifically.

22 years old, you know, I've been to like Disneyland, Anaheim a couple of times my whole life. And I don't know what SoCal is even about. I'm a NorCal kid. And you know from being a California veteran or, you know, alumni like I am, they're two different countries, man. They really are. 100%. But I get down there, Johnny, and the cool thing is,

you're drinking through a fire hose on a learning curve to be a really good safe Game Orden because of the dangers down there. So yeah, I'm doing the hunting and the fishing enforcement. And for everybody listening watching, game warden's primary mission is to enforce environmental laws related to fish and wildlife species, water quality, and really protecting what I call the 3Ws, wildlands, waterways, and wildlife. But before we do all that in the academy, we have to go through a full police academy that certifies us to do everything California Highway Patrol do,

Texas State Troopers, Dallas PD, federal agents. We learn all that and we're certified to do that, but we're going to focus on the environmental protection side of it, working for the state of California under the resources agency directly under the governor, also federally deputized to do federal enforcement of wild land, waterway, and wildlife laws with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other federal agents. So that gives you the jurisdiction to enforce laws that are on federal land? Exactly. Like in California in a national park.

Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. And now we'll work with our federal brothers and sisters. Let's say there's a Sinolaa cartel grow in Yosemite National Park, which we handled some of those with those guys. Or Sequoia National Park, we will, if we find it or someone turns into us, we're going to make it a federal case, obviously, we're going to collaborate, we're going to work together, state parks, private cattle ranches. And something I want to talk about a little bit today

is there's kind of a national push to put cattle ranching in a negative light of environmentally damaging and you know we want to change protein consumption from beef cattle to soy whatever and i've grown up in the silicon valley foothills which oxymoronically who thinks of the tech capital of the world having some of the best cattle ranches and cattle ranchers families working in that area and being some of the best environmental protectors when they do cattle ranching correctly working on private lands like that where the cartels have also impacted for what we call the private land infiltration of rural areas. That's fascinating. For clandestine illegal gross. Wow. So there's so much land that the cartels will actually sneak on to privately owned land where there's, obviously it's

forested, right? Vegetated. That's, yeah, I mean, you got to hand it to them. These guys got will. They have willpower. Yeah. And to your point, I went in, I mean, we knew the cartels were working their way in the late 80s and pushing growers out of Mexico, vetted tier one growers that cut their teeth and basically, you know, got their stripes down in the Sinaloa cartel structure by effectively growing really weed, however, talks late tainted with the EPA ban carburem poisons will talk about that I also show pictures of and highlight a lot in all my books, especially the new second edition of Hidmore that thankfully you've got a copy of. We knew that that was going on.

We had no idea what the environmental impacts were and that they would eventually work their way from the San Diego National Forest areas, the Riverside National Forest, like Cleveland National Forest, where I started my career early on in the 90s, including throughout the rest of California, Oregon into Washington, and later would move into really the whole country and being in any of these rural states where they could effectively grow weed under the noses of. of the Federalists down in, or the Mexican military down in Mexico. And when they do that effectively, then they'd get deposited up here and smuggled across the border to do really effective work. And when you said something like, these guys are really, you know, gung-ho and skilled, that's not an understatement. These guys are excellent in what they do. Yeah.

The way they divert water on a gravity-fed half-inch or one-inch black polypip pipeline and suck it out of a pond or an underground spring or dry up a creek. And I have no exaggeration, Johnny. I have seen and tracked with our guys a water source for a massive grow on a private ranch that had been there for years. It was probably harder to find it on this private ranch on the Pacheco Pass Highway that goes from Santa Cruz, San Jose Silicon Valley, all the way over to the Central Valley to get the Interstate 5, as you know. And there's a massive cattle ranch up there. Guys hunt deer, you know, in the summer, a little bit of deer hunting going on. and these guys have a 15,000 plant grow running for years

because it was even more remote and in and, you know, just didn't get access or looked at than somebody going into a national park in a remote area or a state park. But that waterline brother, it was in Merced County pulling out of part of San Louis Reservoir and ponds associated with that and run underground in places where cattle ranch roads were into the growth site to have an awesome, effective year-round water source for this massive gross site. Three miles. Three miles. Three miles. That these guys just... Across two counties. Yeah.

That's insane. And running it through poison oak, through rock, you know, embankments and cuts and creeks, running it, keeping the angle so it has enough velocity to keep enough uphill flow where the pipes got a dip. And then camouflaging it, spray painting it, tactical. like we would, you know, our sniper rifles or whatever with camo paint, put brush on it, hide those encampments. And again, pitchers really go into this book. And when you look at, it's mind-blowing because I have so many relatives that fought in the Vietnam War, and they're watching my missions as a gay morden and forming up the marijuana enforcement team,

the first tactical unit dedicated to doing this the last six years of my career from 2013 to 2018. That was my job. And it took 13 years to get there. Five or six gunfights we had had with growers. One where my partner was shot the very first gun fight by an AK-47 round through both legs. In the Silicon Valley foothills, literally in the foothills above the affluent little city of Las Gatos. So you probably know where Los Gatos is. Affluent.

Yeah. A lot of money up there. Big time. And literally a stone's throw less than a couple miles up on those ridges of mid-pedal insular open space property is a 32,000 plant. six or seven individual grow sites, probably 20 plus growers in satellite camps owning that mountain for years. Wow. And nobody had found it until we stumbled into it with Mid-Peninsula Open Space Help.

And what year is that? 2005. Okay. And that was only the second grow I had ever been on as a Game Orrin where I was effectively working with the sheriffs. And that was the day that we got into our first gunfight. My partner was almost killed. Okay, so these guys started shooting.

They did. They did. Which I think is pretty rare. Usually it is. You know, I'm mad because I was locked up with a lot of these guys, the sweetest guys. They're just poor farmers from, you know, one of the states in the Golden Triangle. Yep.

And they're hired. They're contracted by the actual cartel members who fund them. And then they're small, you know, they're not treated well. They're smuggled up across the border. But yeah, they do have guns. They are armed. They're armed and we kind of call it, it's kind of on a sliding scale of who we're going to deal with in a particular grow. Like in that particular case on Sierra Azul above Las Gatos, it was August 5th of 2005.

It was harvest time. Most of those plants were mature. They were budded. So there was a lot of harvesting going on. And the way we learned this, and you've probably heard this and can validate it or we can talk about it. Two vetted Tier 1 growers from the organization typically come up across the border. They're smuggled across. The money's paid.

And then back in the day, because in, I think it's chapter four in Hidmore, I talk about a debrief. And this is going to be a tangent that relates. So bear with me for a minute. But we picked up what's called a plaza boss, you know, and in the cartel structure, a plaza boss runs a region of various size. One guy might have the whole northern third of California, central California. another guy, maybe Southern California in general, one other Plaza boss. And this was a boss that was overseeing 50 to 70 outdoor cartel weed grows,

but he was picked up in the winter overseeing his guys doing a 22-pound methamphetamine cook. And when he was busted by the white dope team in the sheriff's office, we got called in because this guy wasn't your typical violent, aggressive, sacario type, because we've run across those. and that's who we dealt with on the gunfight and several scents, which I'll make that differentiation in a minute. But this guy knew he was facing a lot of drama. I mean, a 22-pound meth cook, you know, that's big. And now the super meth labs and everything going on, they're about 22 pounds of pop when they make that stuff up.

But I got to sit in on a debrief with DEA with all the agents, with the district attorney's office, and debrief this gentleman, right? because now he wants to cooperate. He wants to give us legitimate information. And he was incredibly candid. And we don't mention names or anything like that. Obviously, for security reasons for everybody involved. But at that point, and this is about 2011, 2011, 2012 that we're into this. So we've been doing the anti-cartel weed stuff for quite some time.

And one thing that agencies were not doing up there, they would rip a grow that they'd find. And it was never, we weren't really involved. We found our first one in 2004. That's another book story of how I even stumbled on that. And suffice to say, when I found that grow with an unarmed civilian biologist that I grew up with, very savvy outdoor guy. And this is 2004, the spring of 2004 around April. And I get a call, call him GI as he's called in the book. But he's been a family friend growing up with all four of the Norris kids, the Wolfpack Wright.

And very savvy outdoors, think of the law enforcement side, fisheries biology, really savvy and surviving. And he's doing a study on threatened endangered species on a Palisot Ranch, which borders Henry Coe State Park, which is the second largest state park in California, where I grew up and met a Game Warden even become a Game Warden right in the foothills above Morgan Hill in San Jose. So, GI is doing studies on, excuse me, red-legged, yellow-legged frog, steelhead trout. and steelhead are a ocean-run trout that go inland and upstream to spawn and lay their eggs, and they go back to the ocean. And these fish are so limited anywhere, especially on the West Coast. They're valued at about $40,000 of fish by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

And he's studying all these animals to make sure habitats right, what water levels are biologist stuff. And one of the creeks is dry out of the two, and he calls me in a pan. in April of 2004 and he's like dude someone's got to be diverting the water up up the mountain i i have no idea why i left before the weekend i come back and i had flowing creeks the you know the fish are out they've laid their eggs the little steelhead fryer swimming around the red-legged yellow-legged frogs are doing their thing they're small and um now it's bone dry everything's dead and i got like viscqueen black pipe and kind of debris like from a camp that's all, you know, deposited in the sand.

And this is like two miles downstream where you go in the ranch to where he's doing his studies. I said, okay, that's a problem. And what do I think, Johnny? I think, okay, this is a landowner, maybe an outlaw rancher that needs more water. Maybe it's a developer, you know, diverting water they need for a project because those were the water diversions that led to Dead Creeks that I was familiar with. And that's illegal too, right? Right. It's all illegal. For whatever purpose you're doing it for, whether it's illegal or not.

Correct. You're not a lot of divert water. Yeah, you can divert with an agreement, a stream at alteration agreement from our agency where mitigating factors are put in. You know, you're diverting the water to keep it clean while you're doing a project. You're re-vegetating. Water is, you know, it's liquid gold around the world. And this was right before the big drought started all in California. countries all over the world, we're having massive drought right now, and water's becoming a source of we need this or we die all over the globe. And now endangered species are being damaged as well. Okay, so that's how you first became aware of the problem of illegal cartel marijuana grows. Is that all of these, all of these creeks and streams and rivers are basically without water? Exactly. And this is worth going in a little deeper because this is the first time I'd see Cinaloa cartel growers. How did you know they were part of the Cina Loa cartel?

I didn't know they were part of the Cinelloa the day I saw them, but the way they were dressed, I'll go back a little bit and give you a little bit of brief because then I had to backtrack after this incident with my biologist buddy that I'm going to finish. I had to backtrack and start talking to DOJ and DEA and involve myself with other agencies that I just didn't work with as a game weren't at the time. But let me jump ahead for a minute. But we go back. So Gia and I, I throw them in the truck. I go, okay, let's go to the top of the ridge. Let's dive down to where you think that water starts. What's the headwaters? Is it a pond? Did somebody, you know, damn it up? Where's that creek water coming from? What stopped this creek from flowing? And we get to a good strategic spot. We dive into the canyon. He's very wood savvy and quiet. We sneak around really good in the woods. We all hunt. We all fish. That's what game wardens do. This kid's awesome. And we get down to a almost like a Grand Canyon, beautiful rock formations.

And we can see right there this impoundment of water that it should be a creek. And it's lined with this black visqueen plastic, almost like tart material. For some I'd seen that, but that again is what we call a target indicator of a cartel grow. No one else really uses that typically in public lands or when they're trespassing private lands.

And then hand built dam. And at the bottom of the dam was the black polypipip the one inch pipe going down a dry creek. The creek is totally dry, everything is dead in it, but here's all that water under high pressure going down a creek. So spider senses are tingling for me. I'm like, this is not a typical water diversion I would see on private land or public land.

So I say, we're going to move really quiet, we're going to follow this for a little bit, see what we got. We end up going down tactically quietly stalking through that creek, staying on the brush line of one edge of it, and then Johnny, we get down to, where we start to see 18-inch marijuana plants on both sides of the creek. All the vegetation, all the trees, all the grasses, they're cut, and they're gone, which is bad. When all that stuff is gone, what happens when the winter rains hit? All that silt washes right into the creek. Forget that

there's even toxic poisons and a growth site with these guys. Let's just take that out of the equation for now. All that's gone, that washes in. Nothing survives. Those eggs suffocate, nothing can breathe in that water. You can't drink it. It's a done deal. So there's so many multifaceted levels of environmental crime that go on on an unregulated cartel grow anywhere in the outdoors by water. We get about 100 yards down that water line when we're seeing these plants. And there was a big cut in the creek bank that we could kind of hide in. And ahead of me, the plants are a little bigger. And you can see kind of trails through them.

And they're on both sides of the creek. And I don't know this is a cartel grow yet. But I'm like, we're not moving any further. Get behind me. We hug the inside bank. I have an AR-15 with my red dot. We have cell phones. We have radios. Or I have a cell phone in a radio. I have no radio communication, no cell service. Unarmed civilian buddy that I've known is the second grade. And we're hovering and we start to see movement through the plants. And here come the two growers. And they're dressed all in olive drab, battle dress uniforms, probably from a surplus door. The same stuff my dad wore in the garden in the army. Vietnam era. a guy in the front, pistol on his hip, and he had like a long blade and some clippers. And he was moving very slowly through his plants, trimming them, check and drip emitters for the water. The guy behind him had a long gun, like an SKS derivative of an AK-47. And he's just carefully a couple yards behind his lead partner, just moving slowly, scanning left and right.

He's checking behind him. They're not saying a word to each other. they're not even whispering. They're like, you know, use a hand signal. Maybe they'll look at each other and nod. So that gunman was using tactics we would use on our tactical SWAT unit, right? Or our tactical unit. He was checking his six o'clock as a tailgunner and a stack of operators.

And I'm like, where are these guys from? These guys are military-like train. This is crazy. These guys know what the heck's up. And they kept working their way down and 50 yards, 30 yards, 20 yards. And I'm like, this is going to suck. Because I can tell the way they're outfitted. They don't belong here.

They know they don't belong here. They're hiding from everybody. And they're doing a great job at it. And I've got a red dot painted on the guy with the rifle. And I'm hovering and going, this is not going, we do not want to get in a gunfight today. And we held. And they got 15 yards from us. And they kind of did what they needed to do.

And they were done. And they swept around and went back the way they came one level higher into the plant's higher up on the ridge, knowing that, and the tail gunner did something that was really interesting, doing a really good tactical job that I would want on my teammate, whoever's covering our back end, the last guy in the stack, he stopped and he kind of gave that look all down the creek and up the creek just to make sure nobody had come in behind him when they made that turn. And then they disappeared. And the adrenaline dump was crazy. And, you know, just our eyes were huge. and now we know what's diverted this channel.

And we waited a good, you know, good, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes to make sure nothing else was coming in on us. And we back stepped all the way up of a mountain straight to the truck. My wheels are spinning like, okay, call my lieutenant, my boss first. DA, DOJ. I've heard about a UNET, like a narcotics task force. I haven't met any of these guys yet. And now I would start making those introductions. and three weeks later, we would be the bird dogs and be at the back of the stack after we got

this multi-agency unit of about 30 dudes to go raid this thing. How many plants were there? 7,000. Okay. What was the typical before marijuana became legal in California? 2012-ish, right? 2016. Was it that late?

Yeah, Prop 64. But pre-even, like, the laws were thawing. You know, it was getting easier and easier, you know, medical and, you know, special medical. In the mid-2000s, when it was still fully black market, what was the average size of a grow that you would bust? Two to five thousand plants, give or take. The biggest in Santa Clara County we ever found in one spot, I'll fast forward to about 2010, 2011, keeping in mind that we would go full time and we would dedicate and leave patrol with the handpicked right group of guys in the marijuana enforcement team and the Delta sniper team, advanced canines, helicopters, the whole nine

from 2013 to 2018, where we didn't do regular patrol anymore. What we did was focus on this. And we had no district boundaries. We'd go anywhere in the state. We could work with bordering states. We could train with the feds. My seal team buddies say you were kind of like the team six of domestic law enforcement where you work specially for like special operations of your agency versus the federal government. Very unorthodox for game organs at the time to have a team like that. the environmental damages and the violence we were seeing that had led up to this team even being greenlit by an awesome chief, one of my mentors might carry on going back from the academy days. We needed it to do the job safely and to make the best environmental dent. But that particular day on rating that 7,000 plant grow, we stocked within 50 yards of the same two bad guys that we had seen.

And they made an announcement and didn't try to apprehend them. And they went running down the creek, knowing their. Creek really well. You know, one thing, you mentioned how smart and driven these guys are, and you've got to give them that respect, man, A, for effort, because they know that environment in the woods more than we do. They've lived in it for four, five, six, seven, eight months. They have escaped trails. They know which way they can run and dodge this. They put booby traps out, and noisemakers, everything else. I thought we could have caught him. I would meet two sheriff's deputies that would later become brothers and really the catalyst to making our own team.

that were guests and invites of the narcotics task force that day to do the raid. And they wanted to, they wanted to at least apprehend to put some sort of deterrence and maybe just learn who these people are. Right? And the four of us, I asked the team leader, go, can we just follow their trail and see if we can get a shot? He goes, okay, but we're not here to chase. We're going to cut plants and get out of here. Went, all right.

So we went down, made those bonds, the four of us, two gay mordons, two sheriffs, deputies go back to the you know main headquarters or you know are operating base within the main camp of these guys and we chop 7,000 plants down the team leader calls in a black hawk payfawk helicopter from moffat field Air National Guard they work counter drug when they're not overfighting the global war on terror because all that Afghanistan Iraq stuff was going on and we could use military assets right out of the Bay Area assigned a counter drug that could help us with a helicopter they could hoist us out. They can hoist five, six, seven thousand pounds of weed, of garbage, of human excrement chemicals, you know, water pipe, whatever. Belas, how's your rod, your tent pitching, your twiggin

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or endorsed by Viatris. Would you decide based off of how mature the plants were? Did that have any impact on when you decided to raid? Would you try to wait till they were about to harvest the actual marijuana or did that matter?

No, man. That's another great question that no one's ever asked. And one of the things I like to do once I was, you know, kind of running the show with their own team, and we talked about it as a team, it's like, why would you let a plant get five feet high, have several pounds of heavy, sticky butt on it, and suck water for 120 days instead of 20 days? So we would find, once we formed this unit up, like the pilot program in 2013, if we got a tip and we found a grow where they were literally

this big, either clones or regular seeds, and we get these mixes, I mean, we'd take out. a 30,000 plant grow and walk out with like Safeway plastic shopping bags of weed in our hands that weigh what, two pounds. No water, hardly any water was taken. Right. No environmental damage. The guys weren't in there to set up enough to even get into a deadly force gunfight. That became the thing.

But back then, what the DEA paid each county for, it's called the DSEP grant. And counties, it's a lot of money, a lot of resources, a lot of time to do these eradications. because of all the personnel you've got to have, all the specialized equipment, even just to rip plants and remove the plants. So plant count was what each county would get money for in California, of all 50 plus counties. So all the garbage, all the water diversions,

all the poisons left in the creek, cleaning up and restoring environmental damage, had no net positive financial value for law enforcement teams, so nobody was doing it. So see where we're going with it. Yeah, it's bad incentives. Bad incentives. And brother, catching a cartel grower, actually catching a gunman in a row.

No value. Zero net monetary award to your agency to continue doing that job. But if you get me 30,000 plants or you have a 250,000 plant count season, you're maybe going to get 250K of money that's just going to fund that part of your agency. So you would bust a lot of grows and not the people, not the growing. worse. They got away a lot, I assume. At that time, that was the model. It was an oddity if you caught anybody. I met a guy in county jail. He was getting ready. He's from Colima. I'll never forget this guy. Really nice guy, kind of funny, goofy Mexican guy from Colima, Central Mexico. And he was growing in, I can't remember, maybe like Grants Pass, Oregon.

Okay, yeah. Or, you know, Ashland, Oregon, right? Yeah. And he was on a big row, and the feds were actually, like, identifying all of them somehow. Somehow these guys either had warrants, but they were using binoculars and they had videos of them, like shooting guns for fun and all this kind of stuff. Oh, shit. But they raided one day. He was barefoot, and he ran for it.

And he made it, didn't have any money on him. I guess he had a cell phone on him. But he made it with no shoes from Grants Pass, Oregon to Colima, Mexico. That's how much solidarity they have. Like, because in one little town, one guy from Colima will be like, oh, you need help. They'll put you in a van and send you to like the next town. Yeah. And they'll just keep working their way down through California into Mexico.

Remarkable. You know what's crazy about that, man? That is remarkable. And because you heard it firsthand from a guy inside with you. And that's the perspective I don't get to see because debriefing that Plaza Boss we were talking about. That was the first like validation or, you know, that vetted some of the stuff we suspected was working and not working of our efforts. But you don't, you really want to hear it from the source, right? And so that that tells me a lot.

And it also tells me what we know now is this infrastructure nationally that you've got growers in the field working, say, four or five different grows from one particular cell. and then you have that same organization having a meth cook going on in a different place with different guys specialized in that and then fentanyl of course is you know I mean but I don't want to get off the weed topic so let's get on the weed topic because I was always even when I was in the game

I was always fascinated by that because I would go meet these guys that I just met through just being in the underworld long enough yeah but I wouldn't you don't ask those kind of questions what cartel are you with yeah how is it structure. You know what I mean? You don't have a way. It was one guy with an LA Dodgers cap. He was the youngest guy and he spoke a little bit of English. So that's who you, he's the guy meeting dudes like me

in a hotel room in Garberville, California. Yeah. And it's like, okay, it's $2,000 a pound. Here's 40 pounds. Yep. Make sure it's 80,000. Boom. Thank you. We'll see you soon. You know what I mean? Yeah. And but that, that's the extent of it. So, but I was always fascinated. I'm like, Yeah. How is this set up? Are they actually working for somebody back in Mexico? Or are these just entrepreneurial drug dealers who snuck across the border? Maybe their father has been here for a while. Right. Right. Right. They're, they're actually American citizens. Like, yeah, how deep does this thing go? And that's, so when I first saw you, I've always wanted to ask you that because you actually, you actually have the inside scoop from interrogating these guys. Yeah. About how it's set up. So let's,

Let's just start with that. Typically, just in the illegal days before 2016, how cartels in California, do they operate independently of Mexico? Or do they actually have joint ventures with Sina Loa Plaza bosses in Mexico? Does that make sense? It does. It does. And what we found out is they are connected to Mexico. And the Plaza bosses are up here and they're taking not only.

parts of California, but the northwest of the U.S. You know. Oregon. Oregon. The northeast corridor, the southwest. And all the same organization and just vetted particular individuals, whether it's Sinaloa. At the time, it was LaFamly, LFM, big time, LaFamilientichwana.

La Familia Mitchelana. Big time. And I'm sure you may have run across some of those guys. They kind of dissolved and lost power and Sinaloa kind of absorbed them and Sinaloa became the powerhouse, as you know. And now we got CJNG, we got Helisco New Generation, just well-armed, savagely trained the whole nine yards. And now that rivalry going on. But on the weed side, I knew right away when that grow went down, I said, okay, there's no environmental gain.

And we're leaving destroyed wildlife to continue. We're continuing the problem the way we're doing this eradication thing, which was just the protocol. And I get it. sheriffs, DE agents, you know, police officers, they didn't sign onto the job to go raid grows, try to apprehend these guys that are sometimes heavily armed, sometimes very violent, they're definitely in good shape, it's not going to be a fun, easy day to take these guys out and get them into custody. And they don't want to certainly collect a bunch of trash and put it in nets and hoist it

out or carry it out or whatever. Even cutting plants is a burden. It's hot, it's arduous, they're heavy days. This is 0405, 0607, and I'm talking to my chief about this. And she's like Nancy Foley and she was behind us 100%. She goes, okay, I see we're going with this. And I do think we need to stay involved. And we didn't know as game wardens as a fishing game agency.

This would even be a thing. But it's not only is it like something we're into, it's we're kind of mandated. Because the water pollution laws, right? Poisons in grows. dead wildlife, health and human safety with toxic neurotoxins, whatever. That's our bailiwick. Those things are dying. So we made it a thing when we formed the team that if we're going to go out and raid grows,

we're going to try to apprehend these guys, at least to learn some intel to your point, whether they talk or not, put some deterrence in the organization to realize if these teams focus on this with really good canines and really good fieldcraft and stocking and apprehension skills on the part of the operators, the men and women, then this might get a little harder for them to do effectively. We're not going to stop it. We know they're going to outproduce us. But I think every grow you take out, you've saved, I don't know, anywhere from three to 20 million gallons of water.

You know, you've probably stopped tons of wildlife from dying for fish and aquatics to deer, to, you know, turkeys to bears, whatever. So we said we're going to be a three-prong approach when we form this team. We're going to apprehend aggressively or attempt to. we're going to eradicate everything. We have to safely with the poisons on them. And I'll dive in further on that because it's important. And as crappy as it's going to be, and if we don't get to it on the day of the grow raid, we're going to come back when the scene is calm, maybe in the winter, and we've got to put money and helicopters and guys hiking in there, bagging the trash, restoring the creeks, taking all the water diversions out, stabilizing the environment,

which is reclamation or environmental restoration. And that was the tracts. triangle, if you will, of the program. But the intel that I derived from that, I'll get back to that plaza bus. I got to interview, and they said, Carlos Elfaro, the DSEB coordinator that was really good. He would go into Gros with us, first DSEP coordinator to kind of do that. And he's the guy divvying up the money, right? Going directly to the drugs are under the president and saying, okay, Santa Clara and these game words and sheriffs, they're doing some really cool stuff.

And this is what I think we need to do. And so we were getting more and more money for our team to operate and just be able to do the job and not run out of money to pay our guys or buy helicopter fuel or whatever, blade time for the choppers. But I got to ask them any question I wanted. And a lot of people are asking like, well, who do you connect with down to Mexico? How does this work? Three things I wanted to know. One, we had started to reclimate and clean up these grows. and traditionally Johnny,

if we rated a grow, traditional style, non-game warrants involved at the beginning and just rip the plants and left everything else there, 90% chance. There's going to be a same team

from that same cell. They're going to put a grow in there because they might get away with it because they know we're busy. They know we're taxed. They're overseeing hundreds of grows. We might get to 25 a summer. Right?

So they'll put people people out there just to probe, knowing that we're going to put attention on it, and it's going to hide the more significant ones that are more remote, that they're getting a lot more bang for their buck. The plants are always making it to fruition. Maybe they've got three grows staged out over the different months. I've seen these three-level grows that are, you know, they might be seven to 20,000 plants, but they're all in different stages because they're going to have three harvest that year. California afforded that being one of only six Mediterranean climates. where you and I come from, we love the weather in Cali.

So they would actually send guys to have diversion grows. Yeah. Like to divert the attention. So would they actually plant real weed? Oh, yeah. Or would they just, okay. Yeah. And these guys know that they're under surveillance.

Yeah. Or they may not know 100%, but they're going to assume they are. Right. And they play the game. You know, and again, there's a couple million growers out there. And does anybody ever really get caught? Probably not. You know, they're going to run.

Teams weren't really apprehending at the time. But what I asked this boss, I said, okay, when we start cleaning up these gross sites, which I know no one else has done, it's got to be new. I mean, you're captured, you're arrested, whatever detained, facing prosecution. Within the last two years, this reclamation thing really got kicked into high gear in California with our efforts and the efforts of like-minded sheriff's departments and BLM and Forest Service. And I go, are you going to go back to that grow? If we really reclimate it, like take all your water line out. take all your infrastructure, the tents, all the stuff you had set up. And he goes, you know, we just noticed that the last couple of years. Why are you guys doing that? No one ever did that before.

He said, we could go back in there, if not the next year, maybe the year after, and we could probe it. And he said, in 80% and 90% of the time, we'd harvest another grow in there. Because we know how busy you guys are. Right. Other places. Tactical thinking. Business model, right? Cost benefit analysis. reasonable risk. So then who are the experts? Like who are the guys, if you want to call them Plaza bosses in California, like how many grows are they overseeing at once? And does it go as far as, yeah, this is my territory? Like I grow in the Central Valley. I grow up north. I grow near Arcata. Yeah. Oregon. Like, is it that, is it that organized? It's organized enough to where they do have delineated geographical areas.

Like this boss was like Marin, Petaluma, North Sonoma County, not quite into the hardcore Emerald Triangle of, say, Del Nour, Mendocino, Trinity, Humboldt. He was on the fringes there. And by and large, different groups, they will probe each other's boundaries. Different organizations will come under gangs, the patch pirates. So you do have an infighting. You know, you do have dead cartel growers from different factions in tents. We found bodies and grows over the years.

But you know what? No shit. Yeah. Like raided by rivals and people killed? Yeah. People killed, yeah. And not as prevalent as you would think, knowing how their mindset is of territory and power. But once they get to the state side, it's bad for business with the headsheds, no matter how agro they are, to have too much infighting like that.

Yeah. They're going to draw too much attention and we're going to concentrate on them. Now, Mexico, as you know, it's the wild freaking west down there as far as, you know, internal and external conflict with these groups. But he told me, he goes, yeah. I mean, if you guys, I don't know why you guys started cleaning your grows up, but that's $20,000 to $40,000 of infrastructure we have out there with the waterline that you're, you know, all of the pesticides, the poisons, the camps, all the stuff they got a truck in there. and you guys clean it up, well, we got to put that money in to start it again. I got to take two skilled growers to go back in it again. It's like starting over.

And it's on some data center. It's on some spreadsheet in an agency or you guys share information like we do. You guys already know about it. So that's not worth it. So the light bulb went off. And having the actual DSEP coordinator from D.A. hear that was an answer to my prayers because now Carlos could go to the president's group himself, right to the drugs are, and say, you know what? We need to encourage all these agencies from

the environmental point to clean this stuff up and reward them, just like plant count. And how about we try to arrest some guys because we can get information from them and at least stop them from doing what they're doing in the moment and not just skirting out on a hidey hole trail or an escape trail. And they're going to be going to grow five miles away or they're going to be somewhere else. Okay, so the workers So the game did change then Okay, so that kind of made it Harder, well, I don't want to say harder

For them, but they had to be A little more tactful Yeah, and they could just go back to the same site And start growing again Exactly How many like teams of workers Everybody from You know, people that are actually tending the bud

To buying the supplies, lookouts, all that stuff Like how is a typical cartel operation manned. Another good question. Are they illegal immigrants brought over like any other labor, migrant laborer? It's a little bit of both. And so I think of it as a luxury home contractor that's a general.

And he has the best roofing guy. He has the best foundation guy, the concrete guy, the best framers, the best finish guys, electricians, whatever. And what they do is the way he explained it to us in that, brief is it's nothing for us to get two of our best growers that we've vetted in Mexico into put up a grow site and get it started and they're the guys that know that great water diversion how to work a gravity line perfectly that they can bury for three miles right and how to hide it how to camouflage it from overflights how to

camouflage trails for looky-loos rather law enforcement other grow other gangs whatever the public and once we get that established and we get our two guys, and they're not, you know, they're respected. They're not. Like they're known from the other side. They're known from working for the cartels in Mexico. And so they get recruited or what is their incentive? They get recruited and groomed in the organization.

And what he told us and admittedly was for every 100 pounds that these guys get out of your California woods, they're going to get 22,000 bucks between the two of them. Wow. And every hundred, they're going to get that cut. And how many pounds can they get off one plant? Oh, man. It's a lot. Some of those strains, it's a lot.

So you can get like five pounds of plant. I've seen five to eight pounds come off of some plants. And then, brother, look at it from this standpoint, a 7,000 plant grow with that much bud on it. How many hundreds, how many thousands of pounds are you getting out of there? 35,000 pounds of wheat. Yeah, the money is in the millions. And I mean, it's not like human trafficking money. It may not be fentanyl money.

but there's still a lot of money in the weed trade. Yeah. And even today, we'll talk about the failed regulation in China, and we'll get into that later. But today's episode is sponsored by Lucy. You guys know that I am a tobacco pouch, a fixionado. I pop one in by the long day. It gives me energy.

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Okay, so that's how they incentivize these growers. Yeah. They basically become, like, mini-entrepreneurs, and they're just funded probably by the plaza bosses? Absolutely. Like, we're going to get you your start. If you come over here, we'll fund. the startup and you keep the percentage, which I guess was 22,000 per 100 pounds.

Yeah. So yeah, you could like, if you could get away with it, you could make out pretty good. You could make out really, really well. You could feed your family really well if they're still in Mexico. 90 plus percent of all these growers either contracted by the cartel, pressured leverage traffic by the cartel, or actually employed and very happily employed by the cartel are, you know, what they call deportable felons, right? Most of them had heavy criminal records down in Mexico for drug trafficking, for sexual assault crimes, for murders, for violent crimes,

whatever. But the same thing from the trafficked, you know, family member that has pressure on his family down in Mexico. We saw that too. Yeah, go into that. So, and people say, well, no, they're not really making money. They're all trafficked. So, you know, they're not part of the problem. I said, well, let's look at it objectively and let's look at the whole picture, the whole pie, if you will, you have what I just described. The guys that are coming up from Mexico and setting the grow up, the two skilled guys, those guys are damaging. They're voluntarily part of the group. They're making really good money by living in Mexico standards. And then you have the traffic side that's absolutely, I mean, inhuman and evil, and it's horrible.

And you get those people working in those grows. And we see this in the Chinese and the Asian organized crime grows now, which is really started to take over. And I'll talk about why as we developed the story. So we saw a little bit of it all. But it put into perspective how organized, how professional, and how I think just multifaceted sinola was at the time running the weed trade. And they're still involved in it. But it's just crazy, man, how. I can't believe it started in the late 80s.

Yeah. Like, I always assumed this was an early 2000s phenomenon because as just out of competition, less people were buying the shit that they grew down there and exported. But it's been going on for decades. It has. And I'll go back to when I started my game warden career in Riverside County. I'm fresh out of the academy, three field training officers throughout the state. You passed.

Good job. Ward Norris, go hit it. You're in Riverside County. I befriended some federal forest service agents that were starting to deal with on forest service land, illegal cartel grows in the Cleveland National Forest, which was my forest in my patrol district. So I got asked, hey, we're going to hike in off this Indian truck trail area. And I know you and I met working Spotliders together that night. Real good federal federal buddy of mine now retired as well. And I said, what?

like a cartel marijuana grow what are you talking about he goes you got to see this and so i cammoed out with everybody completely ignorant to what we were going to do and it was about a four-mile hike in and i saw the you know the hidden little bunks in the little thatch you know hooches that had leaf litter on them and had coyote branches and manzanita and you're walking right by them and if you stop there's like a pivot like kind of a hinge on a brushy door and you're into you know know, an encampment of where four guys are sleeping and a hidden kitchen and a shower. It's like Vietnam. It's totally Vietnam. So I'm going through there and I took very few pictures selling a brand new game warden. I'm on a federal operation. I have no idea

that I'd be doing this type of stuff, but I'm getting pretty excited. I grew up with a lot of veterans in the family. We always were into tactics and shooting and, you know, being good in the woods. And so I felt like, wow, this is my district. I patrolled this area with this federal officer. And that was 1993. And they had been here a while. Now, fast forward, I wouldn't see him again until I worked them directly when I got back to the Bay Area, got back to Silicon Valley, and 04 when I met GI, and we learned. And then 05, we had the gunfight. And now I find out that now it's in the time I've had 10, 15 years of traditional warden career, it's gone from San Diego, Riverside County right across the border in the late 80s, early 90s, and now it's dominating

the state of California and the whole west coast. And northern California is the most active? Generally, I will say that, but the stuff we've seen in Riverside, L.A. County deserts, what I see even in the Silicon Valley in some places, El Dorado Sierra County, you know, which are bordering like those mountain kind of Sierra Nevada's, they put up numbers some years. And why is that? Good temperatures, man. They stay dry.

They don't have that moisture, you know. One thing about Northern California, it's all of California is great for growing weed outdoors in general. One of only six Mediterranean climates. I mean, we've had grows start in February and, you know, Christmas week we've been raiding them when rain's starting to fall. Right in my backyard in the Silicon Valley. And these, and were these greenhouses or were these actual open air? Open air outdoor. Wow.

Open air outdoor. The way the cartels wanted to do it, they wanted open air outdoor because until we had some semblance of a regulation that, you know, that made sense to have a greenhouse or what we call a hoop house, like all over Northern California now, they were more remote, more hidden, like the one I found in 2004 with GI, like the one we had in the shooting in the Las Gatos' foothills, like the one I walked into way back in 93, 94. And it was my first grow, but I wasn't really in the knowledge base of it. But that just shows you the expanse of what was laying the foundation for what I would be focusing on. When did the greenhouse thing become prevalent? We talk about regulation. And I want to go back for a minute and say that 25 to 30 percent of my job as being lieutenant of the marijuana enforcement team was to outreach and education through these very graphic PowerPoints that I still speak on all over the country that show dead mountain lines. dead bears, the carbopheran poisons, the pictures are in color in your book, whoever gets it.

I tell that story to legislatures that are looking at these proposed cannabis regulations that we're going to ratify, if you will. I talk to hunting groups. I talk to animal rights groups. I talk to veteran groups. I talk to conservation groups, kids assemblies. And I'm never the guy to go in and say, hey kids just say no don't smoke marijuana it's bad for you no it's not yeah shit's really fun too yeah exactly and you know it's what we're finding is all these good uses for it a clean organic plant you know not one that's been put in the ground or grown in a in a hoop house that's got neurotoxins sprayed all over it to keep every living thing off it for the sake of profit where the growers are literally putting on tybex hazmat suits with n95 fitted

ventilated masks, like we have to wear if we go into a taint and grow now. That's insane. That is a true story from just a couple years ago in Sisku County and it's in LA County. And I'll get into that. And again, we're going to have, we have some pictures in the book on that. But when the growers and the organization know that we're going to, we're going to have 27 plus THC percentage concentrated, you know, outdoor grown weed or hoop house grown weed. It's going to be very potent.

It's going to be on the black market. It's going to be affordable. Was that the, because you guys would, if you busted actual flour, you would go test the potency, right? Yeah. What was that about the normal THC percentage in the 20s? It was high. Yeah. Yeah, that's high.

That's good weed. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the pounds I would buy, you know, when I gave it to my customers on the East Coast, yeah. It could have passed for indoor weed. Okay. Like before everybody knew what like fire indoor weed was. Yeah, yeah.

You know, my, my connects in Ohio, we were buying from me. We're like, holy shit. Like, I can tell my customers this is like hydroponic. Right. I'm like, no, this is just grown by some fucking dirty Mexicans. It's crazy, man. And, you know, other than being, you know, deadly and full of all kinds of poisons that's slowly killing you, it's really potent weed.

Okay. So explain those negative chemicals. Explain the chemicals that cartels use and their outdoor grows. Yeah. And thanks for bringing that up. So I didn't see this on that first grow. I saw it down in Riverside County. It was all over on the plants.

We were running through in 04 on the raid. And when Mojo, the call sign in the book, when he was shot and almost killed on that first raid and that first gunfight we were all involved in, we were all, it was all over in that grow. We just didn't know how to recognize it. And what they do is you can't get it in America, but FMC Corporation,

and a lot of pesticide chemical corporations worldwide, including American corporations that do that, created these really, really potent insecticide, rodenticides, kill anything aside I call them. And they're trade names like Carbifurin, Metafos, QFran, and they basically are a nerve agent and an anticoagulant with some of the most active ingredients were developed by the Nazis for their chemical warfare program

in World War II. Very, very potent. So derivatives that work kind of like, that xylon or sylon B that they called it that went into the gas chambers during the Holocaust, a similar nerve agent to that, not the same stuff, but something they had developed that was just really potent and pretty much any animal gets on it, insect, bear, deer person, they're going to be dead fairly quickly. Now, this stuff comes in crystalline containers, Johnny, that are maybe 12 to 16 ounces and it's like a wider, a blue or yellow powder. And one of those containers, you know,

it has polygro, altamacoco, all the Spanish language with the crossbones. You can't get it in America. Yeah, okay. This is fascinating. It's a felony now. Wow. So they have to import it illegally from Mexico. They do. The one thing they, their supply chain within the plaza boss structure of outfitting a grow, like let's take those two growers, right? They're making that kind of money. They get trafficked up and they land. I don't know. Let's say. in the Mount Hamilton, you know, backcountry Mount Hamilton, San Jose, where I grew up, hunting, and I've done a ton of grow raids there. They're going to get dropped there. The only thing they have to bring with them or somebody that's come like them across that border illegally

and got smuggled across are those poisons. The guns, the tents, the food, the propane, the weed, the seedlings, the clones. That's all supplied. That's all waiting for that. It's waiting for them. And that's the part of that really organized contracting company that you were asking about of that every cell has a job and everybody can fill and flow. And if somebody needs to escape and get moved, they're going to make that happen if we don't interdict them first. But what the growers have to bring with them from Mexico is that chemical agent. They got to bring that chemical agent. Or somebody coming with them that may not go into the grow is going to have to bring it from Mexico and divvy it up. This stuff was being talking to this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this stuff.

loss, he's like, yeah, and sometimes we don't have enough of that. So we're doing one growing harvest time, and we're, you know, trying to keep people off and keep animals off. And we're trying to like trade for more, you know, ounces of carbophoran or metafos or whatever from another grow. I'm working down this other area. I mean, it becomes like the drug itself of a commodity, but now the demand is overseeing the supply, right? That's incredible. And where do they put it? Okay, so they obviously pour this stuff around the marijuana plants to keep animals from going in and eating it. Correct.

Right? Deer, bears. Exactly. Squirrels. Yeah. And indirectly to keep people off of it. Yeah. They don't want, and they don't care about the human, you know.

Okay. But if it's that toxic, why are people not, obviously they're not putting it on the plants? They are, but I know what you're going to ask. How is that possible? And it's a great question because what happens is it goes on, they have these like back pack sprayers, like irrigation sprayers, and one of those bottles is designed to be diluted with 5,000 to 6,000 gallons of water. And EPA, 20, 25 years ago, when they got their analyzing data and equipment to really analyze the toxicity of this stuff, they went, oh, man, we've been putting

this on our agriculture all over the country. FMC's been making metafos or carbophoran. We can't do this. It's just too deadly. It's too toxic in long exposure. So we're going to ban it from use. It became a felony to possess in the U.S. It still is. So if I find that in a grower's hands or I find him connected to it in a grow, there's your felony even today in regulated misdemeanor penalty only weed. But this stuff, they spray it on.

And there's a picture of it in the book what it looks like when it's freshly sprayed on. And it looks like kind of liquid paper, misty, white spray paint or bird drawings. But within 24 hours, maybe a little longer, 24 to 48 hours, it kind of absorbs into the plant and it just becomes invisible. And it also becomes less detectable because we found it with like mountain lions that have ingested this stuff in a water line that had it in the water. And you don't find carbopheran traces because it dissolves in the system apparently. But it's detectable in those first 24, 48, maybe 72 hours. So yeah, they do put it on the plant itself because nothing will touch the bud, nothing will touch the flower or the leaf. And they'll just trim away.

And growers would, you know, it was protocol that the bosses said you've got to do. This is the way they learned. So these guys were getting exposed to this stuff all the time. But lately toward the last 10 years, we start to see things like they had gloves on. Some of them were wearing, you know, face masks a la COVID, right? Like some sort of old N95, at least a cloth mask or something. And what was really interesting is... How is that prejudicial to a human's health?

If it seeps into the skin, they breathe it. If it seems into the skin, central nervous system damage, you start to lose, you know, you get pain all throughout your central nervous system. We, our guys have gone into grows, and I didn't know this was so widespread nationally, Johnny, until I retired. And after Joe Rogan and I had had our conversation, I was getting these private messages, Haley 10. it, I'm like a Tennessee Forest Ranger.

And I've been on admin leave medically for like three years. And nobody can quite ascertain what's going on. But I can't control my shakes. I can't operate a weapon anymore. I go in and out of losing my vision. I'm nauseated, you know. It's hard to breathe some days. And that was from exposure in an indoor or an outdoor grow and a small grove.

I mean, if you go across this stuff like, when it's that wet on all the plants. And I didn't see that very often. And we didn't, because that even without knowing these poisons, you go, that's, that's fucked up. Yeah. We're backing out. Stay, you know, we, let's get, you know, upwind.

So is that kind of like the roundup? You know that product roundup that it had the big scandal where it's like, yeah, this is like giving people slow cancer. Yeah. And they sold out for billions. Right. It's essentially something similar. On exponential to the infinity power.

way, way more dangerous. And now I've talked to so many federal state and local officers that have popped up. We had some of our guys assigned to the helicopter team that went into a grow that it was recently sprayed on. It wasn't, couldn't smell it. And they started to lose their vision. They started to get migraines. And they were out for 10 days.

Wow. And now what we had to do the last five years of my career, especially running the MET team, federal OSHA got involved because federal officers, like I just said, that that one of many that have called me since, since retirement or messaged, they were getting exposure, not figuring out what was really happening. And then they attributed to these poisons, all in cartel grows, all over national forests, not just California, but the rest of the nation. And basically they said, we're done. Our bosses right down from, you know, the head shed all the way to the top is like, you're not going into gross until we get the proper PPE, protective

equipment. And that's where we got fitted for masks. We got long sleeves. We got boots and camos that can be decontaminated. We got to have five sets because you're not using the same one until you clean the last one. That's how serious it's gotten. So you would actually raid grows with full hazmat suits on? We really try to avoid that. One, because it's so limiting and the heat factor would, we'd last about 10 minutes if we were lucky. But when there's a grow that's that hot, we're going to back out, let that stuff dry for several days.

And then we're going to go in with the stuff. after and rated. And yeah, are you going to catch people? Maybe not. We've had to go into active grows that were just massively, you know, sprayed within the last couple of days. And I've had to back the team out. And if you have the resources to sit on it and wait to see if these guys are going to come back now that it's been rated, maybe, but who does? There's so many more grows and so many bigger problems to face. But we lose catching people, but we'll just hold and come back and we'll eradicate it safely just to get it out. And this comes back to this is where you start to basically, you know, demonize or put a bad taint on, say, legitimate cannabis,

especially the organic growers. And, you know, everybody thinks because I was heading up a marijuana enforcement team that me and the agency and the guys on the team are anti-marijuana were not. This never was about that. This was we're anti-environmental crime and we're anti-poisoning your public with bad weed or an AK-47 bullet or a pungy pit you're going to step into. You know, that's it. And so the cartels put a bad slant on wheat in general.

And then when we regulate under Prop 64, and I, all the talks I did, Johnny, for years, even with the legislators, governor's aides, the whole nine that were driving this law in California. I said, look guys, we know regulations coming. There's 43 million or more, basically, habitual cannabis consumers in America, that demand's not going to stop. So maybe we should attack something else.

Let's attack the bad stuff that are doing so much more. Not only tainted weed, but fentanyl all that we know, one deadly pill out of a dirty lab, it's a death sentence. Right? Everything else. Well, that's a great place to transition to the years where it did become where marijuana became legal in California. I think it became legal in Oregon in 2014. 2016 for us in Cali. Yeah, that's right.

it's finally like not just medicinal it's completely legal yep and for years in the early 2000s I told my guy my partner I was like we got to hurry up and make millions because they're going to make it legal and it's going to eliminate the black market yeah it's what we grew up thinking and like taking for granted we were like it's just the drug policy yeah they just have to make drugs legal and that will eliminate the incentive and the government has to take it over and And it just, it's not what happened. It was the polar opposite. And here's why.

I told everybody I ever presented to, pro-cannabis, anti-cannabis, liberal conservative, animal hunter conservationist, anti-hunter animal rights activist, whatever. I said, guys, legislatures especially, whenever I could get to people that were driving this bus, Senate, Assembly, the governor in California, Brown, then into Newsome. It's like, okay, we know regulations coming. Ban fricking-tastic. Let's get this black market out of here. Let's try to break the back of these cartels doing so much environmental damage, gunning for our public, gunning for us officers. But here's what it is. Right now it's a felony for illegal growing, especially trespass growing, right?

It's a felony to grow cannabis, whether you're a deportable felon from out of the country, a non-citizen or a citizen. Don't take that bite out. reward the legitimate grower, give them incentives, get them permitted, have them do it all with the organic water and inhabit, do everything but seed to sale, track the purity, test it. But don't take that bite because if you make it a misdemeanor and water it down, we're not going to stop the problem. And guess what they did? Oh yeah, we agree because it will be so easy.

So 6,000 plants, Johnny, or 60,000 plants are a misdemeanor in California to grow. Oh, wow. So Cinaloa, and later on, and I'm going to talk about how the very symbiotic relationship and partnership between the Mexican cartels and the Chinese triads and everything they're doing, and I've seen it and been in it firsthand, and that's even more explosive, but we'll go there in a while. I said, great. And when it passed that night in November, I went and I read the statute. I'm like, and then it's an infraction for a juvenile.

grower. And we get these little Sicario's in training that are under like some crazy uncle or a Primo cousin, as they call him. And he's 14. He's got a 45 ACP or an AK, a big knife. He's all tatted up with patron saints being a hard dude. And I'm like, great. My seatbelt ticket is more penalizing than this guy. And this guy's running around, you know, little little rock star in training. And so once that happened, brother, 2016, I'm pulling the plug, December of 2018. By 2018, we started to see not everything, but a majority of it all go into these hoop greenhouses on rural private land tracks that cops, I mean, they're not like driving into this neighborhood and raiding an indoor grow, but you're going to go a long ways out in the

woods of Siskew County below Mount Shasta or maybe, you know, Whiskeytown National Park and you're going to find a little subdivision of homes. And there's all these hoop houses and you're going to rate them or inspect them. And you're going to find that there's ban poisons. You're going to find that there's human trafficking. There's all kinds of other crimes related to the cartels. And they don't have a permit. They're not licensed. So what do they lose? They lose their plants. It was a product, but they literally walk away. And they walk away. With like a ticket to appear like it's a traffic ticket. And you know they have 20 to 30 other operations grown in places they bought. They're not even like renting these places. They're buying rural tracks.

They're taking in a well, a well drilling device, you know, the whole truck and everything, and doing unpermitted wells and only take surface water out of the creeks, but to dig down and take underground aquifer, millions and millions of gallons. Now I'll talk about Siscue County for a minute because there's no better example of how we completely failed. And, you know, like you, I'm from California, there's a lot of pride to things we could have done right in California. California, I consider the weed state of maybe not even the country, but the world because of the climate, because of the lure, you know, the mystique of the Emerald Triangle, right? And you know it. I mean, you were in the game and we're from there. So I learned this grown up before I was even going to even be in law enforcement. And so many states have followed our suit, Michigan, Oklahoma, Maine, Colorado, and they're having the same, you know, shit show problem. And now it's the triads and a little bit of maybe Sinolaa still. And that's just put us on our heels. And now the real tragedy of the whole thing is there were 10,000 rural, humble, illegal growers in Humboldt County that were going to come out of the dark and regulate.

And these were like the white guys. Yeah. They were like the mountain men. I also bought from these guys. Yeah. Organic family, women living off the land with their kids. They were kind of the hippies. The hippies.

They were still criminals because it was illegal, but they were very chill. They had good weed, but they didn't have huge amounts like the cartels because they just didn't get down like that. You know what I mean? 10,000 of those growing operations. 10,000 of those in Humboldt County, which is epic epicenter number one for great weed production on the black market. The whole murder mountain mystique on Netflix. they come to those growers associate meetings that I'm speaking at in gear with my canine on a panel with growers and Hezekiah, the leader of the California Growers Association.

I'm showing these PowerPoints. They get over the freak out thinking I'm going to follow them and get their license number and start to profile. I'm like, no, guys, it's a whole different game now. We need your help. You're here to do it right. This is a year grace period. No one's going to back penalize you for anything, but we need to do it right because this is what's going to happen.

And I anticipated with that dumb law going down to a misdemeanor, I said, we're going to have cartel problems. It's not going to go away. Did I know it was going to explode this much? Not quite. But I knew it was going to fail. We all did on the team. And I remember talking to these folks. And I remember one gal from Lake County who became just a real ally of bringing

the walls down of those rural small mom and pop, really organic, holistic, if you will, you know, weed farms to let us in, to give us information because they've been dealing with cartel trespass on their places for decades. And they can't talk about it. Right? And I can't tell you all these tier one growers that crawl out of the woodwork and are calling me up like, oh, dude, can I talk to you? I saw you on this podcast and I think I can talk to you now. I go, yeah, you can talk to me. And what were they saying? They were seeing the same thing. They were going, yeah, I almost got run out and almost shot by a cartel two gunmen.

And, you know, they basically saw my water line and took it out for the diversion because I did divert water, but very little. And they, you know, obliterated the creek behind me and then made a super impound and killed everything below it. And we were at eye at 200 yards. And they just like put up an AK and went, this is next. And I never went back to that property again. Wow. They literally ran them off their own property. Yeah.

In America. In America. The Chinese growers in Sisku County, I'm going to jump ahead just for a second, in Shasta County, are going to, you know, the baby boomer generation, right? The last great generation, all our grandparents that maybe fought in World War II, chase the American dream, they settle in places like Sisku County, California, boring the Oregon border, you know it, Mount Shasta, 14,000 feet, one of the awesome seventh wonders of the world, place your water.

Chinese come in. in cahoots with, say, Sinaloa. Yeah. And they don't only start just growing weed illegally. They buy property. They drill the wells. They pretty much surround. And when we're in a drought four or five years ago,

second largest drought in California's history, ranchers that obviously need water for their livestock, farmers that need water for their crops, and just drinking water. They're all on water restrictions under the governor's office to save water. yet our governor's office isn't attacking these outcries from sheriff Jeremiah Leroux, youngest sheriff in California right now that is fighting an uphill battle. A friend of mine, great guy.

And we're in there. I don't know, do you know Jorge Ventura? Have you? You probably know Jorge. Great dude. Found me after something. We connected. He's with Daily Caller.

But what does that have to do with the boomers? What is the Chinese? The boomers. They're getting run out. Because Jorge and I and his producer are doing a documentary. documentary called Narciforna in Sisku County and we're interviewing all these people that their house is already in sale and escrow and they're moving to Alaska. They're like, I had somebody come to my gate these two Chinese growers, they had like flat jackets and like

AKs and said, hey, you're probably going to lose your water on your property. You might not have water pretty soon. Don't make an issue of it and nobody will get hurt. In Southern California, they were doing the Southern California desert saying the same thing and holding up a picture of like a woman woman's grandchild and these are a veteran family so they're getting run out of parts of california that were you know that generation that really helped make california what it is and so for you and then the chinese chinese well as soon a low was doing it too yeah but the chinese were uh the asian growers were doing it up in northern california and when we uncovered all of that it was just like so shocking people said i can't believe this is going on right i said nobody's talking about

it. So that's what it turned into. Long story, winding it up. When we watered to a misdemeanor, not only do we incentivize these guys, the black market got double worse than it was when it was illegal. Yeah. And it's like even if the price, the wholesale price of a pound definitely went down because now you have just a flood of people growing. But it almost, the fact that it's, you can do it, grow as much as you want kind of makes up for it. Because like if a pound is now 500 versus 2000 when I was in the game. Well, it doesn't matter because instead of 5,000 plants, I can grow 50,000. So it's a volume.

For the black market growers, it's volume now. Big time. And do you know where their markets are? Like, are they still shipping most of it east or south? Or are they also supplying dispensaries in California, legal dispensaries? Primarily, some of it is getting in, some of the cartel weed is getting into legal dispensaries. It would have to. It would have to because everybody's going under in the legal market.

And I'm going to give an example and talk about this is where the double prong has affected, not only incentivizing these guys, but those 10,000 growers and humble, the number is under 1,000 now that are registered. They backed out. They're either going into the black market again or they're just getting out of it entirely. And that's exactly what I would never want to see in the weed industry because those people are as organically pure as any environmental and conservationist. I know.

cattle ranch or whatever. But yeah, it's all going back east on a pipeline, especially with the Chinese now and the Asian groups. They've got this thing streamlined through distribution, vertical integration. They have the whole East Coast figured out. They can get into dispensaries that are just holding on and look the other way. It's happening because you can't test it all. I mean, in a perfect world, I'll like to see.

I guess I call it the DEM Dragonfly certification of the purity that all these Lake County and Mendo growers were doing that I talked. to you at that first California growers association and not being a weed expert by any method. I didn't know how much goes into making the purest cleanest weed. I had no idea. And brother, and we're not going to take five gallons of water a day or even eight per plant. We can get it down to a gallon and a half. If on our outdoor farm, we take big logs and branches from some of the trees we're going

to have to clear minimal amount and we put them four or five feet underground with some mulch, It becomes a water sponge through drought. Wow. So they were making that top shelf dispensary weed burning up less than a gallon of water per plant. And you see California Department Fish and Wildlife approved. You see the certification and the permit right on their fence, a $2 million operation. And we interviewed them and they're like, we can't do it. Now, why can they not compete?

Two reasons. one, the overhead and what the money they do make that their distributors owe them, they weren't paying them. And right there, the distributors were stiffen them. Yeah, distributors inside the regulated system. So they tell me, this distributor owes me like $600,000 from last year. And then we went out to market on this, and it's $500,000. I'm a million and a half in revenue going back to 18 months ago and we just can't compete and we can't hold on any longer.

And what happens is like DCC Department of Cannabis Control, that organization that's built to regulate all that, piss poor version of doing it. Yeah. You know? So again, because that misdemeanor and it all stems on watering it down to illegal growing because we kept that felony in it and nobody wanted that because it doesn't sell. in votes. Oh, it's a felony for weed. We don't want to put attention on that. We don't want people jailed for that. You don't have to jail everybody, but you're probably going to want

to jail a Tier 1 Plaza Boss that you catch that's involved in a lot of other, you know, heavy felony stuff, whether it's fentany trafficking, running the drug trade trafficking through the grow operations. That's happened too. Yeah, these guys are no good, most of them. They're no good. Yeah. And you know, because, I mean, and this is what's fascinating to me is, you probably had more canon conversations when you were in the system and got some unguarded perceptions, man. And for you to have the take on it is awesome. I like that you're looking at the environmental level now. And we're finally having this conversation. And what are the remedies? And that's something that just... So if growing weed was still a felony in California,

less black market growers would do it. And that would open up more. space for legal growing. But still, it comes down to the consumer. Exactly. The buyers, the people buying weed at the end of the line, right, buying $50 worth of a weed, are still choosing to go to the weed man. They are. Your local neighborhood weed guy versus a dispensary. So what is that? Like, that's over taxation? Is that making dispensary is too expensive, I guess? It is. You hit it on the head because here's the thing.

I think it's somewhere between eight and 11 different permits, a California grow operation dispensary seed to sale has to get. For most organizations, some minimum of like $80,000. And these are approximations. It could have changed since they're retired. Some of these big groups are spending half a million in permits. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. That's a big commitment. And then when you have a black market, it's got this 27, 28, 29 percent THC super weed. Oh, it's poison, but nobody's getting killed right away. They're just long-term effects, whatever. And these guys can't keep up. So they're like, oh, man, this is all I know how to do. So I got to keep at it. So they start bringing in that cartel weed and they kind of put on the blinders to maybe I heard about this hidden war thing in the poisons and everything we're trying to fight. So, um, and I do think a lot of it goes through dispensaries. Oh, it does. It just can't afford the regulation. They can't. And plus just the cost of living overhead running a business.

Yeah. Taxation. Yep. At every turn in California. It's like, yeah, some guy comes to me with a business card and says, I'll, I'll get you 500 pounds of weed at 20% cheaper. Yeah. Nobody has to know about this. They take that. California is corrupt as a motherfucker. It's correct. Very, as any state in the U.S., probably the most corrupt. Without a doubt, without a doubt. And I differentiate between, I still love California, and even though I'm a Montana resident now, I still consider California home. I also know how we manage wildlife with conservation, how we manage weed in Montana, how we

don't have the cartel threat for that, but how we attack things like that, I still feel California's more in protection than anything. And I'm still there a lot doing these type of things. We're talking about this with you, doing it. you know, Tuleau conservation, you know, on ranches that have been impacted by cartels or they've been impacted by development or whatever else and bringing groups together, whether it's cattle ranching families, products like a COVID gear and friends that, you know, we want to preserve these animals. You know, I mean, the woods are my church. It's kind of a sane my grandfather came up with,

handed it down to my dad. He gave it to us four kids. And actually, there's a picture of the memorial. My sister carved when my dad passed. It goes up in a dude. kind of a deer trail right by the house that I built up in Montana and the woods are my church quoted and you know the cabinet mountains the white tail deer came down on the Cooney River and it goes up every spring through the summer comes down in the winter his ashes are a couple feet below that some of them where all the deer trails come together and that's not it's not it's not contrived you know that's just something I feel very deeply so I became a game warden in California is a so such a diverse, beautiful state.

There's great people everywhere and the politics that drive the money and drive the corruption. And I'm glad you said it just raw and real. I've never seen more corruption than in the golden state that I love and it's a bittersweet fight.

And I think about all the game wardens that are behind me and the guys that are still on the team we built and these new game wardens that I still hear from as they're coming into the game. And it's like, man, bless you guys. You have a heck of a fight.

dealing with the politics of California, not only in the weed continuum, but just on wildlife management issues, predators like wolves and lions, all that, but different, but different topic, but you got something spewing there. I can see it. So you retired in 2018. I did. Is that because they legalized weed and you just felt like, no, um, although a lot of the guys that kept going behind me, because see, we have to, when we get to 30 years of service, you're maxed out. And one thing California does really well, they pay their law enforcement a really good pension through the CalPERS program. And even though I had 28 and a half years of service, I had paid back and bought a couple more years of service way back when that was,

you know, doable, something a couple chiefs recommended to me in a retirement plan. And, you know, knowing that when I get to 50, that's the earliest I can retire. I started at 21 years old. So I had almost 30 years at 50 years old. And if I continued working past that, and it wasn't about the money, the last thing you do to get wealthy financially is become a game warden. You know, you do it for the love of it, but they pay us really well now like all the other agencies because of some politicking we've done. But I was at the highest amount of money I could keep in retirement, which was 90% of my annual salary for life. Medical benefits, my family, whatever covered. Great retirement. I knew we had a bigger race, coming because I was kind of behind the scenes working with our we have a really cool wildlife

officers foundation called Caloff California Wildlife Officers Foundation a lot of big conservationists with with with some assets right with some revenue started this thing and help politic getting gay morden's paid comparable to highway patrol or city police and say not necessarily Silicon Valley because they're paid exceptionally well but it keeps good people doing the job that we need to have happened. I mean, we don't call the game warden career the thin green line for nothing. You know, there are less than 500 game wardens in the state of California, and a hundred of them are dedicated to the cannabis enforcement program now. Wow. Strictly dealing with, you have the tactical kind of the elite team, which is a marijuana

enforcement team that I was part of, was blessed to form it up and lead it. And then you have all these private land teams that are just going to all these illegal grows that are misdemeanors, doing search warrants, eradicating, tainted, and illegal plants that are not licensed, and hopefully finding other felonies that they can arrest people on. Otherwise, they're just taking plants, you know, chopping down the, you know, taking everything out of the hoop house. And then moving on. Are there even open air grows anymore?

There are. Why would you, what's the point of doing that now that you could do it legally? In plain sight. Yeah, in a great. So check this out. This is so fresh. And I'm glad we didn't have this conversation last year because of this shift. And you're the first person to ask that.

When Trump defined the cartels we're talking about is FTOs, foreign terrorist organizations, and put a ton of enforcement rebuilding the wall, putting a ton of military and early assets of the southern border, he tightened up the southern border tighter than it's been. Now it's advertised as zero penetration, not true. They found a tunnel, you know, two-thirds of a mile long from Tijuana into the tunnels are still happening. You can still get people across, but it is significantly, significantly slowed down for sure. But when he said at foreign terrorist organizations, a governor now of a state, like California, can't say, nope, we're a sanctuary state. So, game warden, California, I talk about this in the last chapter of the book.

Last gunfight we got in when I was operational, 2017. Sierra Zool and my partner got shot in 05. Go over that mountain to Santa Cruz County when you're going down to Surf Central, right? And you got the rivers down below. And we had a grow site in there. An area grows. We called it Asphal Alley. We have been in and out of their four or five years, done a grower two every year.

And we ran into the most aggressive dudes with shot off shotguns, AKs, you know, assault weapons, not just like the 22 or the last. little pop gun, whatever. They fought us, you know, when it, when it wasn't going to be a deadly force encounter. It was a fist-to-cuffs thing. You got in a fist fight with them? We had several because it's pretty awesome. It's not, well, I like to avoid it, but it's not one of those things where 90% of the time in those aggressive areas, like especially that part of Santa Cruz County, they had a lot of weapons, a lot of guns. But you don't, unless I have an immediate threat to me that I'm going to take gunfire that could end my life or seriously injure me or my partner or you as a

civilian, we don't engage with deadly force. It's only in that particular situation under our rules of engagement or basically our deadly force policy. Okay, so what happened? Yeah. So what happened in that is these guys may not be pulling a gun on you, but they're not, you know, you're chasing them down. Your canine maybe is apprehending them or you are. And they're just fighting you tooth and nail. And they're hopped up on some stimulant. I haven't talked about this story a lot, but one of the one of the chapters in the second edition of Hidmore you've got just crazy you know guys that plausible boss coming at you with bags of marijuana you've cleared three or four encampments and you get him on the ground and he's just got brute strength and he's fighting you tooth and nail

and partners trying to get him in handcuffs just to do a non-fatal apprehension and the Glock 23 pistol suddenly I see it you know in the back of his hip and he's going for it and not and pulling that gun and has a lot of strength and then well it's not a shooting situation but he gets that gun out it's going to be one and we're trying to avoid that and it just becomes you know so you guys had to neutralize some people we've we've had to neutralize some people yeah yeah we've we've been in have you been ever been fired on directly like yes have they seen you coming and then just started opening up on you well the one time yeah we've had it We've had that happen in the dark and in daylight where rounds were coming toward the team.

Nobody was hit. And then it becomes kind of a tactical, careful, safe search to find out if you can find them, bring in assets, maybe air assets. But the one particular one where that really shook the world because these growers were typically known for running away. And if they had the guns, they took them with them. And nobody was trying to apprehend these guys. So like the beginning of our conversation, we weren't finding that many guns.

and they're like, okay, go, yeah, whatever. Mexican guys, I don't know about this cartel stuff, but go find them, you know, no one's getting hurt. And the day in August 5th at 2005, when we walked into that growth, three sheriff's deputies, three game ordens, my young partner who had only been on a year, who joined my squad, I trained him in the academy, I become a supervisor like 21 days before this event as I promoted a lieutenant to supervise three counties. He really wanted to go on the raid. Same with another young warden call sign Bulldog. They came on this thing. And that one round from that AK derivative was the one that hit my partner through the left leg.

Steel Corps military penetrator, 760 by 39. It's the round in an AK-47, right? And they have a steel core, so they're made to tumble. So it went through his left thigh to start, tumbled through his entire left leg, was boomeranging out his inner left. that thigh and then went through the right thigh. So he had four holes in his legs that we were trying to keep him from bleeding out of. Yeah. Waited three hours for an air rescue. He almost passed out from shock and I don't think he ever would have woke up. We got him off that hill

within minutes of not making it. And that what we think was that gunman that came back around the corner with that type of weapon. While I'm seeing this guy come around the corner after my partner goes down. I start to look for what's going on. We just heard a gunshot. My partner screams I've been hit, a bunch of other colorful superlatives, and boom, he's on the ground. And right as I'm scanning to see what the heck is going on ahead of me, I hear gunfire to the right. And it's my two sheriff's deputies, Apache and Snake, as they're called on the SWAT team for the sheriffs. And their AR-15s are going to work. I can't see them. The plants are six feet tall, Johnny. There's a bunch of Manzanita. I can see from about here to your knee. But I don't know that

I've got a gunman ahead of me seven yards with a sought-off shotgun pointed at me in that second order and are not hit yet. And my partners in the sheriff's office are at a kind of a vector angle as we're going through this grow is what we call a skirmish line so you don't get ahead of each other because with all that debris and you might miss a threat, a trip wire, but mostly you don't want to crossfire and get into where you can shoot one of your own. Heaven forbid we have to, you know, employ deadly force on an armed grower wanted to shoot us. They saw the guy from their angle and they engaged him and neutralized him, probably within

a second or two, of me taking a face full of buckshot and or my partner bulldog. So that day, obviously you make a brotherhood for life with guys that aren't from your agency. You start to develop tactics so you have the super awesome canines like canine Phoebe, who was a historical dog that Rumble, who's a soon to retire lieutenant in California. So you guys, you do the raise with dogs, like it's a house. We had to. Okay. We didn't have them in the early days.

And then K9 Phoebe, who's kind of legendary, and I really talk about her in the book, she was a love bug of a Belgian mal, same dog the seal teams use, same breed. But what Rumble did in Shasta County, while I was down the Silicon Valley, we were all doing, some of us that were kind of specialized in this, we're doing the anti-cartel weed stuff with SWAT units and tactical units from Forest Service or the Sheriff's Department. We weren't our own team, and we were all spread out. So we didn't work together. But behind the scenes from 2008, 2009, all the way to 2011-12,

when we really started to employ canines, Rumble and his dog, Phoebe, were up in Shasta County learning the ropes of how to work these cartel grows. And for a law enforcement canine that's an outdoor rural dog, having to go for eight to 10 mile hikes maybe in 100 degree heat and keep quiet and not overheat, and then identify the right bad guy that's pulling a gun that she asked to buy. With all these other camouflage officers and face paint, she was amazing. She got 116 bites and saved a lot of lives. What do you hear about now from the people that are still in the game?

Have those kind of deadly engagements gone down? They have. The growers know, I don't have to shoot it out. I'm not even doing a misdemeanor, right? Yeah, yeah, they do. Unless they've got felony stuff going on. There have been some running with guns and it's come close. But why even have guns that are a felony?

Why bring a felony to a misdemeanor? Yeah. You know, so that is, I guess, one of the positives is that it's turned the temperature down on their desperation. Yeah. Generally speaking, it has. But your question was, is there any open field stuff anymore? Yeah. So when the FTO designation got set with the new administration, it basically allowed ICE and federal agencies to employ that type of tactic, even in states that are saying no, we're not going to cooperate.

you can't stop us now. Right. We're going to go into Gros. We're going to find these deportable felons. And I don't care if it's a misdemeanor. They probably have a drug trafficking warrant or a violent rape felony or a murder out of Mexico. And they're here illegally. So I'm going strictly on their citizenship.

So now ICE is going on these raids with the game commission? Oh, yeah. Game wardens? Yeah. That's wild. But it's wild. And it's something absolutely that like certain administrations, especially California, don't want. But this is something that we will turn you over now.

Nobody can tell us not to because we're mandated to support our fellow brothers and sisters on the federal level. Yeah. And, you know, basically at the highest levels of the U.S. government for the nation at the federal level, they're going to take care of this problem. But any reasonable person, even if you don't like what ICE did, you know, in cities in Minnesota, like, that's kind of what they're there for. It's going after people that are here committing crime. Yeah, absolutely. Any reasonable person will be okay with that. Yeah, and I, there's no downside to that, you know.

You get ice involved, even if they're not on a raid with us, but we turn this person over. We take these people into custody, and they've done a bunch of heinous anti-human crimes. Forget the weed trade. They're just in there making money and they're doing a ton of other stuff. That's a net positive. And nobody would really disagree with that. And that's essentially the thing. And so the growers went, oh, crap.

If we're doing a hoop house in Siscue that the sheriff's going to drive up and I run away and that dog bites me, I'm done. I'm never coming back because with the ICE statute and the mandated deportable felon and Mexico cooperating, I'm actually going to get buried and locked up on this and I can't run from a corrupt system and just completely, you know, immerse in it. So what they said is, and this came from straight up Intel recently, like within all last year, last season, We're not quite into the hot growing season yet. For my colleagues that I've stepped in behind, they're like, we're going to every grow because the word is out, these Sinaloa guys and even some of these Asian growers, if they have any type of statute or they're illegal here, they will fight to the death.

They have nothing to lose. So they're going, Sequoia National Park, had a four or five thousand plant grow on it just last summer. That was pretty much done. We hadn't seen that since pre-season. 2016, 17, 17, 18 when I retired brothers. So they're going back to the old school. They're going back to doing it completely guerrilla style. Yeah. Yeah. They're going back now until everything kind of sorts out or so if you're white and you need a job, if you're a citizen, you could just go to one of these groups and be like, I'll be, I'll be in one of these hoop houses. Yeah. They raid me.

They can't. Yeah. They can't touch me. Right. I don't have. I might do this shit. Yeah. There's, I hear they pay well. Yeah. And you know that well. Yeah. And you know to that point though, yeah, there's no downside because a guy described as yourself wanting to do that to be a trim or get into the industry that doesn't, you know, have a history of felonious aggravated rapes and murder and trafficking and, you know, gun running or whatever. Yeah. Well, do the Chinese, do they fight back the way the Mexican cartels do? Or how do they do a difference? Because, you know, there are much more low-key people. They're low-key people.

they're very smart, they're very well-funded. We found out that thousands of military age male Chinese men with super clean passports. We're getting visas like in South America, getting brought up through the South America, you know, stretch, and then basically already had a trafficker and a handler on this side,

they dump and they burn all their documents. No, passport, no ID, no visa papers, burn it. Communist China doesn't keep data records, and they certainly don't share them with America. So, and Jorge uncovered a lot of this, and he and I started talking about it, and then I'm hearing it from other people, and then we're seeing some of this stuff on the northern border, which we got, what I'm doing on the northern border right now is just, just mind blowing. But that's what they were doing, and those are the guys running these marijuana hoop houses and the trafficking. But you know what bothered, what blew my mind, bro, was why are the Chinese in the weed trade? Economically, they're really, I mean, you think they'd be creative and smart.

Why aren't they doing fentanyl? Why aren't they, I mean, human trafficking? They are. They are doing fentanyl, right? And they are doing human trafficking a lot. They're getting a lot of labor money out of it. But you know why they want the weed? And I got this dropped on me by good friends at the upper level of DEA right before.

I testified in Congress twice, once in 24, 25. on environmental impacts. And the first hearing was, protect our borders, save our parks. Congress wanted to hear from somebody that could talk about cartel impacts not just on the southern border. What's really happening?

And when the Silicon Valley example comes up and the environmental impact and the gun fights we've had, in the tech capital of the world. So why do the Chinese want the marijuana? They want cash. I had no idea, but I brought the,

this to Congress, and they want to enter the weed trade because the weed trade is not a sanctioned, federally digital-backed business, right? It's cash money still, even where it's regularly. So the Chinese come into California, they come into Sisku County, and I'm thinking, what about Sinaloa, man? They've been running the weed trade. Why aren't these happens? Why aren't we finding, you know, dead guys on both sides? I mean, and the Chinese, said, we know that Sinaloa and Lee's Good Generation, they spend about 6% of every black market dollar they make to launder that money into legitimate businesses, however they got to launder the billions of dollars.

The Chinese said, listen, we really want the weed trade because we want the cash. And we want the cash because we can amass a ton of it and eventually turn it over to our currency standard. by 2035, and this is what the Fed's uncovered, some, and I don't know how deep this goes, but changing the world currency standard to the Chinese standard. And doing that by amassing a ton of cash that's untraceable, and then they convert it, and they feed it right here into Chinese businesses, some of the stuff to the Chinese are buying as far as businesses in.

Well, they launder a lot of money for the Mexican cartels, too. But I don't get why that's different, them wanting cash. doesn't every drug dealer want cash? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. There's that benefit too. I think it's just a business for them. Yeah, it is.

But what blew my mind was, they started with, you're paying 6%, give us some of the weed trade, and how about we'll do 5%. Yeah, right. And it worked really well. That makes sense. We'll do 4%. Right now, the Mexican cartels are laundering their money for 0% with the Chinese. And the Chinese are supplying the fentanyl pre-easternal pre-executive.

precursors because you know what Halisco is all about and you know what Sinaloa is doing. They're like, okay, you know what? We can let the weed trade go because I can put a million fentanyl pills in a pretty big backpack. And now I can hike in across the unprotected northern border 30 miles from my new hometown, dude. I'm not even kidding. And that's the rub. And so they're going to amass this cash. They're going to do what they want to do. It's so harmonious. It's scary to me what is happening throughout the whole U.S. I would just like to be a fly on the wall to hear a Chinese guy trying to talk to a Mexican guy. Yeah. Yeah, I'd like to see that dialogue. What language do they speak? Do they speak English? Do they learn Spanish? Do they learn Mandarin?

Do they use a Google translator? Probably. And, you know, it's a long conversation. I kind of guarantee they do that. That could be the way they do it. No, but it's going on. And the scary part about it is there's a lot of intelligence. And I mean, that's like high level white collar. structuring that and just well let's talk about that because it's a little off topic but not really because you seem familiar with it the northern border so everybody knows or you should know that the chinese especially in vancouver which is like little little Hong Kong there you go I'm glad you know this it's uh my sister is Chinese and she lives in Vancouver maybe my sister is we adopted her as a little kid but maybe she's like a spy after all these years she's been wild if she's

cool sister. I hope she's not a spy. Yeah, no, she's a cool person, but like, maybe she's a guy. I don't trust her. So they, they smuggle a ton of precursors into the port of Vancouver. Yeah. So, and that fentanyl, a lot of it stays in Canada. Yep. They have a huge fentanyl epidemic, just like we do. Yep. And then a lot of it gets smuggled across the border. So how does, can you explain a little bit just in layman's terms? Yeah. How that symbiosis, that Chinese fentanyl smuggling, is aligned with the Mexicans here in the U.S. and the weed? Absolutely. Absolutely spot on.

And another, no one's had the knowledge. I mean, I just haven't talked to someone in the know like it, you know, on a podcast platform like this. And that has a Chinese sister in Vancouver. Port of Vancouver is where all the precursor coming. So, yeah, exactly. So Trump tightens up the southern border. And we have to, you said it in the beginning of the conversation.

these guys are gritty. Don't ever underestimate cartels for anything. These guys are integrated. They're smart. They're businessmen. And you know what? Cartels are like water. They are not going to continue to beat their head and try to push through that southern border. They're going to go all the way around and drop into the west side of Canada.

And the other thing is, Canada law enforcement are awesome. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are, you know, they're running so much rural like law enforcement to keep that whole province safe. They're not equipped to deal with the cartels, Chinese or Mexican. Task force, how do you hunt them? What are you really looking for? And it's all relatively new. Right. And so now, fast forward, I'm in northwestern Montana, 30 air miles from the Alberta border. And I'm seeing in my little town, they're handing fentanyl Narcan inhaler kits at the pharmacy. Fentanyl warning signs at the barbershop. for all the kids in a mountain town that has never seen really quote unquote a cartel infiltration

or a threat this deadly. But if it's in little conservative veteran run, Uber American patriotic Lincoln County. And Montana has been defined as America's last best place because it's so remote and you can still go live that dream until you get into, you know, Alaska or whatever. And if it's there, it's everywhere. Okay. So there, you're saying most of the fentanyl is actually going north to south now. It is. Okay. And here's why. So we're doing, I'm doing a project with Ironclad productions. They do a ton of remote pod. I know you've been on me. I think you've been on Vince's show a couple times. I've listened to him. Great, great episodes. Thanks.

But me and Andy Stump from change agents have done, he does the change agent show on Ironclad, besides cleared hot his own podcast. and he's a retired SEAL Team 6 guy that grew up in Santa Cruz County, 10 years my junior, is in the SEAL teams fighting the global war on terror about the time I'm in my late 20s, fighting the cartels in the Santa Cruz Mountains before where we grew up. He moves to Calispell, Montana 90 minutes from me, which is Whitefish, it's Kalisher National Park. It is pristine as it gets. How can the cartels, yeah, beautiful. One of the reasons I'm up there.

But fast forward to this whole, fentanyl thing and this northern border thing, cartels just flow like water. They go right around. They come in from the Vancouver side. The Chinese go, yeah, we can just ship to Vancouver. We don't have to go to Mexico and then try to take up the southern border or however we're going to get our fentanyl made in Mexico

or if we're going to be making some of it in. So you're saying that they'll put somebody with a backpack on in remote British Columbia. Yeah, wilderness. With fentanyl and March. run it right down. And it's actually with methamphetamine, that way of trafficking for the cartel has been going on for 20, 30 years. I've been hearing stories from my family before I moved up there. I live on national, I border national forest on my backyard for like my six mile running trail. And then you got the yak wilderness, you have the cabinet mountains. And so we talked about all this in an interview. In an interview, we talked about all this, um, in an interview, um, in an interview, um, in an interview, um, in an interview, um, in his helicopter. the Black Rifle Coffee helicopter and flew the northern border, tail into winter, just to see what the northern border looked like.

Yeah, and there's no wall, no fence. Johnny, it's so remote. Imagine a one-lane dirt road just covered like a snow track, and they moved the timber just to kind of delineate the border. I had these giant power lines way at the back of my National Forests running trail that are twice the width. And that's, we flew this thing for miles all the way to Glacier National Park. You see the glaciers and the big snow cap mountains.

that's in the snow and we flew 20 miles of it there's no way we can protect that right now impossible okay so technology is going to be needed but in warm weather and it was motorcycle guys driving dirt bikes it was guys hiking it was meth in the history put a couple hundred thousand or even a million fentanyl tablets in a backpack like i just said and you slip across anywhere in flathead county on the Canadian border it's not hard to get across and now all the All that trafficking hub now is happening in the pristine areas of Montana and really all of the northern states because the northern border is so vulnerable. It's so open. And this is the crazy part.

These cartel operatives that are coming into Canada now, there's already embedded motorcycle gangs and clubs, a bunch of gangsters running the drug trade at a lower level. Sinoloa Helisco just drop right into Canada and they just start to meet the people and go, hey, we can't. can give you three times the amount of product you can sell right now as much as you want. You know, work for us. We're going to cut you in heavy. A visa for these cartel people to show up in Canada. It's like getting a park pass to visit Yosemite. There's no vetting.

They just get an anonymous name. They go in on a visa and you've got a plaza boss going, this is Disneyland, man. And I got a free pass. So that to me is scary now, how much they can affect any part of the country coming. coming in from the northern border. Unbelievable. And so you think that has, you think they've moved away from growing marijuana in rural California to this fentanyl to Canada down into the U.S.

Definitely the Mexican cartels have. Right. Yeah, yeah. They've lessened their presence significantly. They've left it to the Asians, the Chinese primarily. Right. It's funny because Tucker Carlson sets up in Maine and then Maine, the tributtons. I had invade Maine and one of the main wire does a documentary on that.

And he puts it on his network. And I'm like, wow, looks like Sisku County, 2018 and just started, Oklahoma, right? Yeah. Michigan. I work with a lot of those northwestern states talking to their, basically their, you know, marijuana cartel teams on what do you guys see? And this is what we saw. Be prepared for this poison.

The other thing, too, before the congressional testimonies, brother, that was incredible, is I got the first pictures of the seven nerve agent insecticide, antifungals, fumigants that the Chinese, they don't even use a carbopherom the Mexicans use. They use their own stuff. And it's nasty. And then I always look it like this. They don't allow that stuff used in their own country, but they sure don't mind slipping into Vancouver, drop it into America, and eroding us from within. And I mean, I don't remember who said it. But it's like, okay. So China's, throwing all these precursors out for all these deadly fentanyl pills taking recently and it's decreased considerably but it was a hundred thousand american lives a year from fentanyl deaths

i mean yeah dude 55 57 000 soldiers died in 11 years of vietnam and innocent civilians and i've seen everything from well those are people abusing it no it's not it's people taking what looks like a prescription pain medication. Silicon Valley, a friend of mine had a niece. Valedictorian two years ago about to graduate high school, had an Ivy League ride scholarship for volleyball and something else. She comes home from a get-together with her friends, the volleyball team. Inflamed knee. Just, you know, she got a prescription pain pill from a friend, thought it was completely sedate, wasn't partying, took that pill, neutralized the pain, went into her bedroom to, study, didn't come out for dinner, mom thought she was just really tired, driven kid,

valedictorian in a Silicon Valley school, maybe even going to Stanford right up the hill, where we've had grows, by the way, and doesn't wake up the next day. So it hits everybody, you know, and that's what breaks my heart. She thought it was like a percassette. Perkissette. Yeah, the fake perks. Yeah. Those are big on the street. Now, that's horrible and heartbreaking. Most people do know that they're taking those to get high. I just want to point that out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not in the cartel's interest to have people dropping debt. Well, for sure.

That's why you've seen overdose deaths actually come down off their high. Not that there's not a lot of them. There are. But it's because they're taking measures to like rain back in some of the potency and they're separating it from it getting into other drugs. Now, you're right. The perk 30s is like you pop those. You're taking your life in your hands.

We just had a guy on from Baltimore. He said that's like, that's the, the main overdose. That's the main fentanyl disguise now is in those fake perks. I did not know that. Yeah, do not do those. I appreciate that update. And the thing so scary about that is it's such a sedate, approved, kind of accepted, a perciss. I mean, you just, and, you know. Well, perkinsets are legal. They are. But they're hard. If you're abusing them, they're, it's difficult to get from a doctor because it's so regulated. So you go to a guy on the street or you get one from your friend. It's like, you can't do that.

Yeah, no, it's crazy, brother. And I just want to point out, like, it does seem like Western civilization is imploding on itself. Without a doubt. And that might be by design. It might just be the force of history, right? Yeah. Just empires rising and falling. But the, if you want that to, if you want it to degrade faster, do drugs.

Yeah. Because you're just, you're literally playing into their plan. You are. You know? And the cartels are just, if you want to go all the way back, the cartels are a creation of the CIA. Yeah. The creation of the globalists. And, you know, you can fight back by not doing drugs.

You know. I should be talking to myself because I have some weed that I bought from a guy in Austin that's probably spray of all these chemicals that came from a Chinese growing California. But you're laying it down honestly, man, and you're saying it. is the thing. And through Ironclad on the same podcast we've both done with Vince and with Andy, I talked about it, we keep, you know, beating our heads against the wall going, how do we stop it? Can we, you just can't throw tons of law enforcement at it. I mean, you have to. This one step, I mean, the dam is broken. We can't keep plugging the holes like with bad regulation. But my thing now is, you know, the pins might be iron in the sword since I've operationally retired. Yeah. What a treat to talk to you

today, bro. And get this out to as many people as possible because I can do a lot more good and really represent those men and women risking their lives and grows right now for crazy stuff and making a dent saving a little bit of water. But I think educating our kids big time. And not saying, don't do it, just say, look, guys, I've done this at school assemblies and I've showed my PowerPoint. And I'm like, look at these poisons.

Look at these armed gunmen. look at the pungee pit with the sharpen sticks like the Viet Cong did against my dad's family. Tell us about that. This is fascinating. I caught a blip of that in your book. Oh, it's, yeah, I have a good color picture of it in the book. The booby traps that they would set up. Cartel growers, Whiskeytown National Park, a national park in Shasta County, California,

and a major hiking trail that's hundreds of yards from a grow site. But the growers put it there to stop anybody. So it just delays him never thinking there's a gross side ahead, right? Cano and Phoebe, the Wonder Dog, has a good nose for something wrong. And Rumble and his dog, Phoebe, with the Shaston County Sheriff's Department, are walking that trail. They've got intel, they've found the grow, they're working their way in. I'm down somewhere in the Silicon Valley working with like the sheriffs. So we're not doing a whole med operation together.

We would bifurcate sometimes and then come together as a team. I start getting these text pictures of the ones that are. in the book of this freaking pungy pit i go where are you i saw your ops plan dude i approved it you're in whiskey town right he goes yeah this was on the main trail and it was completely covered with like a tarp and leaf litter so it just looked like the trail and carry ericsson a really good sniper and awesome sheriff's deputy was on point with shasta was about to step into it and apparently phoebe alerted they halted the team they peeled it back to the people pitcher you saw. And for viewers and listeners that you guys don't know, a punji pit was designed by the

Viet Cong and the Vietnam conflict along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and remote trails where they dig a big hole square in the ground, put sharpened bamboo stakes, razor sharp, and just below the surface of the ground that somebody would step on. And what they would do is they put human excrement on the tips for infection so that when the soldier stepped into that disguised pit, they would get their leg sheared, their Achilles, you know, their whole calf and get that blood infection to take a bunch of people out in colonia medics that are going to have to tend to them. Yeah. So, dude, these Cynaloid dudes? And so they did that same thing. They did the same thing. And they had put carbopherin on the tips, the nerve agent from the pesticide bottle. So that is as anti-personnel

as it gets. That is absolute evil to attack not only law enforcement, but a kid, several kids with their family hiking in a national park in all America, California. And that was in a national park where people actually hike. Yeah. That's going too far. Yeah, that was around 2016-ish. When I got that, I said, I'm going to save this picture for posterity. And the editors right away when I gave him a bolt to go, oh my gosh, this is America dude and this is happening. Right. Yeah. Hidmore for nothing. We don't call that tap for nothing. So many people don't know. And we're exposing it talking today here. you've, man, you've got just great school hard knocks knowledge in this stuff and the trends. But my biggest concern right now is getting to the kids to educate so they make the decision

and we attack it as a public. We attack it as a country. Law enforcement, I like what's, I like what the current administration has done with foreign terrorist organizations. These guys don't want anything good for us. They do want to make a lot of money. Chinese collusion with the Mexican cartels is a recipe for absolute disaster. It's another hit us and I agree with you when you look at the Roman Empire and we talk about empires falling after that 250 to 300 year mark yeah we're right there we're on the precipice right yeah we're teetering we're about to celebrate the 250th and we're teetering and I look at so many kids that have been so comfortable and so

insulated from any type of conflict especially on our borders within on our soil or not been to other parts of the world to know how good we have it even even as jacked up as a country is with divisiveness. Dude, from California to Montana, and I've been all over the world, and I had a Baja racing team for years in Mexico, Iron Man and the Baja 500 on a quad, an orphanage we support down there. I try to get back into racing. I can't go down there.

I'm like, Mexico is beautiful. The people are amazing. The Baja Peninsula is magic from an outdoor perspective. And I miss it every day. And I know the evil that's kind of taken that over, and you're right. it was put together with that involvement from our side of the our side of the fence and then how about this I look I mean not totally off topic but all this intel that's coming out and what have you

heard 24 to 25,000 firearms supplied to Cjng to a hoistco by Israel yeah dude yeah I'm just starting to barely dig into that and how far this you know nefarious rabbit hole goes after the whole Charlie Kirk thing and everything that's going on with the Iran War. And well, that's, you know, in my opinion, I don't know if this goes too far off topic, but before we can move on and start fixing these problems in our society, we have to overthrow the occupying force, which is the government of Israel, probably in collusion, too, with like the financial industrial complex. You know, there's other people.

It's not just them. It's a cabal of corrupt. industries that are active that have taken over our government, our elected leaders, literally. Like one or two are not. Yeah. And one of them, Thomas Massey, they spent $40 million to make sure he didn't get reelected. Like, yeah. They're vindictive, vicious people.

So it's like with El Salvador, before they could do anything, they had to eradicate MS-13. Yeah. So in my opinion, now it's pretty clear before we can. take one step forward, we have to overthrow these people that have, I mean, if they own our government and we in a democracy are supposed to have equity in that government, it means they own us. That is infuriating, heartbreaking in the same statement. To be the superpower that we are and knowing that nothing gets effectively done over on that side, if we don't be involved, puppeteer or owned or whatever, you're right. I totally agree with you. And it's just been a

complete morale buzzkill on what some of the good potential this administration was starting to do. And again, and I'm looking, that's one thing. And I completely, I think you've nailed it, brother, on that assessment. And I think more and more Americans are waking up to that. And hopefully something does change there. But any proxy war, and I agree with my military veteran buddies and, you know, being in a domestic eco-terrorism fight, I don't think we need to fight anywhere. We don't absolutely need to fight. I really don't. And the other things, is when we haven't really attacked the hidden war here at home on everything you and I are awesomely discussing today and we get into not only the fentanyl deaths we get into the weed poisoning

we get into human trafficking child sex knowing what groups are involved in that we've been discussing them all today and we've really stepped up the attack domestically but iran and the crap and Israel and everything else going on is diverting attention from our backyard And I think the Empire falls and we don't take care of our own first. And I don't, I'll still talk to kids, middle-aged Americans, I mean, 30 years in the game, and obviously podcast and books and documentaries and all. And they're like, this is really happening. This sounds like a movie.

This is not really happening. Well, we have some people in the comments, Cap, and I'm like, all bullshit. Yeah. Well, and we're going to get that. We're going to get that. I'm going to say, not bullshit. Been there, done that, got the scars to prove it. But anyway, it's refreshing to talk about it with you to this level.

This was everything I hoped it could be. Truly, this was everything I hoped it could be. Let's promote the hell out of your book. Go for it, John. Wow, man, yeah. This one I'm really proud of because this is the updated second edition that the first edition dropped 2019. But that was before that whole thing about that COVID-19 pandemic dropped.

and the cartels went on steroids and the border got very little attention and we were overrun, which is the fear of panic of a global pandemic. So this takes us through that transition as well as how we form the team, who was on the team to go from traditional game work and just become kind of the elite tactical unit to fight these drug cartels, these trespass growers and come back with an environmental solution and educate on it. And if you love California, if you live in California, you have a lot of people out there that watch the show,

you know, if you live in L.A. like I do or sunny San Diego, you don't see any of this. No. This is like, it's so shocking that this, truly, this like low-intensity warfare is happening in the majority of the state that you don't see. Yeah. And even though it's based on my experiences in California and forming up a team that wasn't really popular even in traditional warden circles.

So you can imagine the internal and external politics I had from bosses that didn't want me doing this, that didn't think we should be in the game. And then other supervisors throughout the state that their best game wardens that had the best careers, obviously were doing these hard jobs really well. They were leaving traditional work that's super important. And on the thin green line, we don't have a lot of game wardens. So we had less on patrol, some to fight the drug cartels. And all that was a growing pain thing.

But now, because we had this effectiveness in California, it's been a template for the rest of the country. Many other game ordn agencies, conservation agencies have developed units because now the cartels are on there for us because they've regulated poorly, right? Right. And they've incentivized Cinelloa to come into, say, Oklahoma or come into Indiana. Okay. But yeah, before, because I now have more questions, we can't end right away. No, no, no, no. So what other states have been impacted by these poor legalization laws like California

that now have a ton of cartel growers? Yeah, a ton in the northeast that I've been working with, Michigan, Maine, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, California, and many more and more escaping me. And these are greenhouse or are a mix of both? They're primarily a little bit of mix of both. Like there's refuges like in Indiana and down in Tennessee and just different places, even states that haven't regulated, but that they will have that outdoor presence. But once you adopt the misdemeanor standard and you want to just incentivize weed sales legally,

regardless of intent, that's when they flood in. Oklahoma followed California's model almost to a T. Well, that's the biggest state for growing now, I think, per capita. or per square mile. It's Oklahoma. And they are battling that as well as they can. I just spoke at a, we had a kind of a marijuana summit in Oregon. And one of the hedgesheads of the whole marijuana narcotics group in Oklahoma had videos just mind-blowing what that's blown up into.

But again, you follow California's model. We could have done it right. We did it wrong. All the states see the money and they see the votes. And that's what those administrators go for. So there's more states on escaping me right now, Johnny. So you think it's got to be, okay, make marijuana legal, make growing it without a permit illegal, make it a felony. Yep.

And lower taxes. Lower taxes. It's the only good thing Texas does. Yeah. The state stinks except for the tax policy. Yeah. Yeah. So true.

So John knows. I'm with you. So that's a. John doesn't make any money. He doesn't know anything about Texas. So that's like, that would be like your recommendation if you were running, if you were the new governor of California, for example, which we're about to have. I would start there.

And I can tell you right now, somebody like Chad Bianco, who, you know, I know and a lot of people know, I don't know. I followed a fair amount of the California politics, but you got to put the deterrent back in. And then you've got to attack it on a national scale with educating youth. And then make it easier for, for good growers, good business people to do business. You have to make it, you have to let them compete. Yeah.

Fuck. What do we not get about this? Well, it's, it's completely, it's completely contradictory to what you would want to do just on, you know, natural thought of health and human safety. We've reversed it. When we had the deterrent and then incentivize the good growers, don't charge them $80,000 for a permit. Don't hold up their permit for two, three years. Right. Don't create a black market that forces them to either get out of the business because, like we said in the beginning of conversation, cannabis growers need to be the best cannabis growers and doing it for all the right reasons. Pay them what they're worth. But make sure it's organic, make sure it's quality weed, make sure it's not getting into the wrong hands. There's no, you know, nefarious poisons on it. It's not bankrolling a larger crime syndicate, which certainly all that money goes into the whole thing we talked about with the other crimes. Yeah.

And then now my organic, small farm grower friends aren't, I'm sure they wouldn't be happy with this statement, but looking at it objectively, and I don't want any of you guys to go away because you guys are, they call us our Earth Warriors now, which was kind of an interesting term for a tactical unit, but hey, I'll take it. Earth Warriors? Yeah. Yeah, I had growers in Lake County in Mendo after one of those talks. They go, well, we had no idea.

Game wardens could do something like this. you're not persecuting us, you're going after the cartels we've known about that we couldn't help you with because we'd involve ourselves and we were illegal. You guys were like our earth warriors. And I went, wow, that's such a California term for it's awesome for a tactical unit of our, what I think, our caliber and our sniper team and whatnot. But I'll take it, man. And when we got growers backing us and we back the growers doing it right, and we make the cartel public enemy number one, we unite everybody. And like I said, I show that power. PowerPoint with those graphic pictures of dead poison animals, fraudulent at the mouth, black bears,

foxes, golden eagles, mountain lions. And that's from when they go to eat the plants? Yeah, they just barely get into a little bit of that poison, and 10 minutes later they have the most violent death an animal can ever have. And the crazy part is, as a hunter, I was willing to make a clean humane shot and killing an animal is the least enjoyable part of a hunt. But it's done for the benefit of the species and providing sustenance, right, under the conservation model. Hunters make wildlife balanced and everybody thrives. And if you're an anti-hunter and just you don't want to see an animal ever killed that way, everybody agrees that's where this is such a unifying issue.

I've gone to both factions and I've got the conservation hunters and the preservationist animal rights lovers in tears at a growers' meeting when they're seeing these dead animals, baby bears with their mom and no one wants to see an animal die that way. That's not nature. And for a foreign invader, Johnny, coming in from a criminal, organization that looks like a San Anista rebel that I see in 2004 with GI. In my backyard where I learned a backpack and met a damn game warden to change my life, it doesn't get any more personal. And you being a California guy and loving everything about California. And I wish some of these homeless people would start eating these weed plants. You're just going to get like a,

and he's not moving. Oh, man. Um, yeah, one other thing on the book, one last thing on the book. So Hidden Wars, yeah, Hidden War. One last thing on the Hidden Book, there's an audible version that I got to narrate. Cool. Which was amazing. Trammell Stark's, Billboard Artist's Record Producer out of Atlanta. I got teamed up with him through the publisher. This was the first audible or publishing group, Caribou from Gun Digest, Recoil, or that group of the bookside.

We've never done it. And he didn't know the story. So he did all the sound effects of water through pipes, the creeks, the canines, the helicopters, the guns, the wind, the guy, you know. But he originally scored it for no charge with our budget. He goes, I need to score this. I had no idea. I am part of the thin green line. I want to fight this hit more.

So the audibles, cool. I recommend if you guys. You can get that on audible. You get it on audible. And like everything, I don't watch news. I listen to a good podcast. And I don't really read the books I get from other authors. I buy their audible.

Same. And I listen to it. Same. I want to just hear it. I'm not sitting down like you. We're both wired guys. We're moving all the time. But I really appreciate the support man on it.

And it goes without saying, I hope we have more conversations and anything I can help you. Oh, absolutely. I would love to film something with you in the future. So John Norris, thank you so much, my man. I really, really appreciate it. Really appreciate it. My honor, man. And then go get Hidden War.

We'll have a link to that in the description and in the comment and go support this guy, man. You're doing good work. Thank you. All right, guys. Thanks for having me. You got it. Take care.