821: John Nores | Reclaiming America's Wildlands from the Drug Cartels

23:17And the general rule of thumb is on an average about five gallons of water per day per plant for an outdoor cannabis plant. Oh, wow. And Jordan, when we get into the math on that, this grow that we found in 2004 that we got out of safely and later rated with a bunch of agencies because we found it. So we brought everybody in. That was 7 ,000 plants. And those plants were a strain that take about 250 days to get to harvest time. And if you look at 7 ,000 plants for 250 days at five gallons per plant per day and start multiplying it, add up all those zeros, that grow is responsible for probably five or more million gallons of water stolen for one grow site.

23:56Wow. And it's not only about the water loss. I mean, because obviously you and I are both here in California. We know how the drought has stricken this state over the last 10 years, especially now. we're on water rations right now throughout the state of california and other states even in my new home state of montana we're experiencing drought levels like never before as well the whole west and southwest is dealing with this so water is becoming liquid gold man it's becoming a rare precious commodity across the globe and illegal cannabis is one of the biggest water stealers going on anywhere in america and especially in the golden state because what these cartels are doing so i didn't know any of this then i mean i was thinking hey man they're diverting water, they're poisoning it, my fish are dying.

24:35That's a bad problem. It never crossed my mind of what is this impacting for water levels in general, for underground water, for wells, for farmers, for ranchers, for drinking water, for cities. I had no idea. You know, we had never experienced water loss like this. And now that was just one of what would later lead to thousands of grows that we would work until I retired, all stealing millions of gallons of water unless we stopped them and basically stopped the stealing. But we would still have a loss up to the point that we finish the grow off. How do you find them just walking around out there?

25:07There's such a huge amount of land. That's why we didn't know they were there before. So do you just wait for hunters to stumble across them and call you or what? That's a good way we find them because people that go in the outdoors and go off the beaten path, get off the public paved trails and go deep into water sources to hunt, to fish, just to get real serene and have some solitude, those are the folks that find them. And our turn in a poacher hotline when I retired was over 70 % of illegal grows being found by these outdoor enthusiasts, right? And then it gets to the point of what type of safety training, what do you tell people, like, what do you do if you run into a grow site?

25:43And I teach that all over the country now, and we do it at the agency level as well. You know, you may run across these in any state that has a decent climate in summertime months, that could be a cartel grow, you know, and you just want to be really careful when you see it, document it, take a photograph, get a geotag, creep out of there carefully, don't go any further down that trail, and report it immediately when you get out there. And now, you know, this hidden war, as we're calling it, the title of the new book, is aptly named a hidden war, because so many people don't realize this is going on, even though we've been talking about this for 15 years on documentaries, investigative news pieces, high reach podcasts like yours, and Joe Rogan, who's part of the Hidden War fight now and the Thin Green Line and Meat Eater, all of that.

26:28And I still am going across the country with people like, Lieutenant, I had no idea this was going on in our country. I hear about the human trafficking. I hear about fentanyl, but poison cannabis and animals and game wardens, what's going on with that? So there's a lot of water being stolen and it's not only on public land now, man, we got to look at the private land issue and this may jump ahead a little bit in the conversation but it'll all make sense you know one thing that you learn about in and i really go into this and hidden more edition one and then i update with the latest one that just dropped edition two that you've got a copy of how bad has cannabis production how bad have the cartels increase the problem since we regulated under prop 64 as an example in california and it's gotten worse regulating cannabis didn't help stop the black market.

27:16It actually incentivized it. And so now we have the public land threats of these cartels going out that we've been fighting for almost 20 years now. But we've also got private land tracts and outdoor rural communities with these big hoop houses full of illegal cannabis that are in plain view. You don't have to go sneak around to find them because illegal cannabis under Prop 64, they watered it down to a misdemeanor. I see. And if you're a juvenile cartel grower, it's an infraction. So if you have seven illegal plants in your backyard as a mom and pop operation, or you have 7 ,000 in a hoop house with EPA-banned carbofuran sprayed all over them to keep everything off it, but now you have a neurotoxin on the plants that are going out to the consumer on illegal water stealing, illegal wells, all kinds of other crimes, it's a misdemeanor.

28:04misdemeanor. So these guys are doing it in plain sight, knowing that less than 10 percent of their product statewide is ever going to get interdicted and taken. And they're probably not going to see jail time or not lose their property because unless there's aggravated things we can charge felonies on, they're going to face a misdemeanor and they're just overwhelming law enforcement. So we've kind of greenlit the cartels to do more damage than they were back in the days when it was just that outdoor backcountry in the woods, public land grow problem, unfortunately. Yeah, it sounds like a huge mess.

28:35So how do you take them down? I mean, once you find one or somebody reports on one, I assume you raid it. How do you plan something like that? Very carefully, because we've been in, it was six gunfights I had been involved in with my team members, give or take, that we had either experienced together as a unit or individual officers have been involved in gunfights with cartel gunmen by the time I retired in 2018. And I can't tell you how many close-call gunfights we had that, fortunately, we didn't have to press the trigger because we had really advanced, good canines that were able to get a bite apprehension on a cartel gunman that was pulling a gun but got control of them before anybody had to fire a shot.

29:12So everybody went home. So we go to massive lengths of officer safety. You've got to remember that when this started, like when I found that grow in 2004, we brought in a task force of state cops and park rangers and sheriffs that did this type of work. And we had never done it as game wardens. We hadn't raided a cannabis grow site. There was no reason to, you know, nobody knew that there was an environmental crime related to it that game wardens should be involved in. But it was in our area. It was in our backcountry forest. So after that, started working with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Marijuana Eradication Team very closely.

29:43We formed a great relationship. And then we got in the first near fatal where we actually had one of my partner officers shot by an AK-47 round and almost didn't survive that ordeal on Sierra Azul on August 5th of 2005, which is just above the city of Los Gatos that you are very familiar with. We both are. And I remember that day when we were ambushed, raiding that grow site, three game wardens, three sheriff's deputies, and an unarmed ranger from mid-peninsular open space was there with us. And seeing the tactical proficiency they exercised, how they had their grow site set up, how they had cover, how they had tactical advantage with a little bit of uphill advantage as we went in.

30:22And the sheriffs I was working with, you know, were snipers. They were on their SWAT team. I was also outside of fishing game circles, a sniper now and doing sniper class instruction and doing all the SWAT stuff and getting all those skill sets, knowing that we were going to need them someday as game wardens. And now I could not have envisioned it would have been for a cartel targeted fight, but that's what it turned into. And that day when we were ambushed and my partner was shot through both legs and bleeding out of four holes in both thighs and waiting three agonizing hours for an air rescue before he gets airlifted out of there, literally within a couple minutes of dying of blood loss and shock.

30:57tough officer. I mean, he absolutely fought through it every minute, kind of helpless, waiting that long for him to get off the mountain. But he did make a full recovery, and he's had an exemplary career, great, great young man. And we were very lucky that he survived that ordeal, number one, or I'm sure we may not have stayed involved in that type of work as game wardens, and you and I might not be having this conversation first. But secondly, we would not have been able to expose the environmental component of how dangerous these guys are to our wildlife waterway and wild land resources and make it a priority for us and actually form up our own team, which Hidden War goes into in depth in 2013 when we formed that team.

31:38Now the planning was going to be very, very structured. It wasn't going to be ad hoc of just jumping together with other agencies and not having the right equipment, not having compatible radios, not having an air rescue plan and some redundancy in case, you know, you got to get somebody off that hill quickly. We basically changed the game where we will find these grows a lot ourselves, Jordan. We'll find them by just going out and scouting the right hillside that faces to the sun to the south and where waterways are. And 50 % of the time when I'd go on a scout with my sheriff's buddies or with my game-worn partners, we would one out of two times find a grow site in the Silicon Valley foothills, hands down.

32:16Aerial surveillance, we'll find them from the air if you know what to look for. You know, when those plants have an iridescent green to them, even through brush and all the manzanita and oak scrubland we have in all foothills around the Silicon Valley, you can see it that way. And satellite imagery has gotten amazing. You know, we didn't have that in the days when that gunfight happened. And now we can literally scroll through, you know, sensitive satellite military level images and go, wow, man, look at the terracene there. That wasn't there, you know, two weeks ago. So they're a lot easier to find now.

32:45And it's really alarming out of how many you actually find when you just look at a Google image or have that person, that hiker, that hunter, that horseback rider, he or she, and they stumble on something and go, hey, man, I heard about this or I saw a presentation. I saw this on National Geographic, one of your shows or whatever. This looks like a grow. What do I do? And that's exactly what it is. They found it. They got out of there. They stayed safe. They reported it right away. and then nine times out of 10, they're 100 % accurate. It is an active growth site. If it is on private land, but it's a trespasser on private ranch or it's public land on our national parks, public parks, city parks, whatever, nine times out of 10, it's going to be a cartel grow.

33:25And now we're going to plan it carefully to have everything we need the day we raid it. Canines, trauma, medic on staff, additional backup teams. We formed up a very proficient sniper team, the Delta team for the marijuana enforcement team when we formed that unit up. And the reason we had a sniper unit more than anything else was to provide overwatch and cover for our people going in and out of grow sites in areas where the terrain allowed that. Because what a sniper can see ahead of time can save so much violence later rather than us stumbling into somebody. And now we're seven yards from each other in dense brush and the trails meet.

34:01And now it's a mono, a mono gunfight that you can't avoid because he's already got the gun out. So All those things really changed the game. And I can proudly say the guys that continued the team behind me made even more improvements, stepped up their equipment, their tactics continue to evolve to get better. And that team with my old agency haven't, knock on wood, had an officer involved shooting where any of them were hurt or any of our canines were hurt, fortunately, since well after I retired. And we certainly hope that trend stays. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Lieutenant John Norris.

34:38We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Vital Proteins. You've probably heard of Vital Proteins. They're the number one brand of collagen peptides in the U.S., and for good reason. A lot of people, myself included, take it pretty much daily to support things like healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, joints, all the good stuff. That starts to matter more the longer you've been walking around on this planet. But now Vital Proteins is shaking things up. literally, you can tell a dad wrote this copy, with a brand new collagen and protein shake. And this isn't your average protein shake that tastes like chalk and sadness.

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37:48It's a free course. I don't want your credit card information. I'm not trying to do anything with that. This is all the stuff that I teach to military, universities, corporate. It's about improving your relationship building skills, but doing it in a non-cringy down-to-earth way. I don't want you to be embarrassed. I don't want you to think this is creepy or goofy or gross. It's about becoming a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer, a better entrepreneur, if that's what you are. It takes a few minutes a day. You don't have to drive across town in glad hand with people you hate.

38:16and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in Smart Company where you belong and you can find this course at jordanharbinger.com slash course. All right, now back to Lieutenant John Norris. So how many guys work on these sites? You mentioned two in the one that you found. Are there huge ones with like dozens of guys or are they usually pretty small because they have to maintain a low profile? The trend has kind of changed. In the outdoor grow sites, the trespass ones are deep in the woods and those have lessened significantly you don't see a lot of those anymore because under prop 64 now they don't have to hide deep in the woods they can just go on a private land track that a rural dirt road will run up to and the problem though is private land in plain sight super hoop houses you have far more armed growers far more potentially dangerous growers that are cartel based than we did in the outdoors on an outdoor grow you typically have two growers that are very skilled at diverting water, at growing really good marijuana, at keeping, you know, insects and people and everything off their plants, largely by bringing in these EPA banned toxics, insecticides, rodenticides called carbofuran that EPA actually banned from using them for agriculture in America over 20 years ago because they're so toxic, even when they're diluted.

39:33It's a felony to possess these poisons and these insecticide chemicals, but the cartels will bring them from across the border in Tijuana because they know when they get this stuff on the bud that people are smoking, making concentrated cannabis out of, or the leaf or the waterway under, you know, basically the water and the soil all around those plants, nothing's going to get to the plants. Everything's going to die within minutes, if not seconds, whether they're rabbits, they're fox, they're mountain lions, they're black bears. Or if we stumble into one and we don't have our protective equipment on and ingest this or inhale some of this odor, we too could be, you know, severely incapacitated, if not killed.

40:09We're talking about neurotoxins, anticoagulants, really, really potent stuff. And that's what these guys are doing. And now, so the two growers will set that up. And if the grow is typically over 5 ,000 plants come harvest time. And on August 5th, 2005, one of the main reasons we encountered heavily armed gunmen that were ready to go early in the morning is because they were in the middle of harvest time. So that's when they have the most people in these grow sites. That's when they're the most dangerous. That's when they bring in the Sicario-type gunmen to defend the crop from law enforcement, from the public, from other rival gangs from taking their crop during harvest.

40:45And you could have 10 guys in a grow site. Wow. We know that morning, Jordan, on all the Sierra Azul Mountain, that was one of like five grow sites where our gunfight happened. We locked that hillside down for the weekend, and we were all taken off the hill because we had had my partner almost shot near fatally. I had been in a gunfight. I had returned fire on his gunman. Another gunman that had a sawed-off shotgun trained on me and one other game warden at seven yards through the brush that we never saw was seconds from taking me out and my partner out. But a sheriff's deputy, Craig Divert, call sign snake on the sheriff's department, a great sniper, he saw that guy and was able to engage and neutralize that guy before he could shoot us.

41:27Wow. And I mean, I was seconds from taking a face full of buckshot. And I have pictures of that weapon that I show in presentations to go, guys, this is how crazy this gets. And thank heaven for my partners that day that were tactically ready. And all of us kind of fell into suit to doing the right thing. And we didn't have more than one officer hurt, but we didn't ever want that to happen again. So our administration took it very seriously, gave us the tools, gave us the support. It would take another decade plus before we'd have our own specialized team of game wardens just doing that that I was very blessed to co-found and then lead.

42:00But man, we sure do a lot better job having a dedicated force to it and a lot more resources to do it now because this is a domestic eco-terrorist threat and these cartels are not messing around on any level, as you know. Yeah. So they're spraying these band poisons everywhere. I assume that also gets in the water that they're stealing, right? Because they're doing it near these creeks. They probably just dump it all over the place. Absolutely. And it kills everything that it touches. I mean, that's awful. It's wild. I mean, there's so many of these sites out there. It seems terrifying. You mentioned earlier these Vietnam style booby traps.

42:31So they're setting this up, what, around there so that if you happen to stumble upon it, you can just die falling into a pit or something like that? Exactly. And I think the most shocking thing is when in 2015, we found our first punji pit and I have pictures of it in both books, actually. And what's interesting about that is anybody that has relatives that fought in Vietnam know that the punji pit was basically a Viet Cong guerrilla warfare tactic where our adversaries would dig a hole, usually square, rectangular. It would probably be two to three feet deep. And they'd take sharpened bamboo sticks, like razor sharp, stuffed into the ground with the sharp end straight up.

43:10And then they'd put like bamboo thatch over the top and dirt. So you're just walking on a trail. But when you get to a certain part in the trail, you fall into that trap, that rectangular bottomless door, and you fall right into those punji pits. And all those spiked up, sharpened bamboo stakes, what do they do? They shear your ankle, they take out a soldier's foot, inner thigh. And what the Viet Cong would do is they would dip human excrement at the tips of those sticks, knowing that the bacteria infection potential from just aside from, in addition to a sharpened bamboo stick. If it's not going to kill that soldier right away, he's going to have a blood infection.

43:46That guy's taken out. You know, two or three other guys are taken out to get him to help. Well, what we started to see was like Whiskeytown National Park up in Shasta County, Brian Boyd, great operator. You read about him in the books. Canine Phoebe, who had a 13-year legendary career and saved my life and the life of my partners way too many times to count. Amazing dog. She detected a punji pit on a trail right before our lead officer from the sheriff's department stepped into it. And this was several hundred yards from the grow site on a public national park trail that everybody was hiking on, not even close to the grow site.

44:22And it was set there to keep anybody from going any further so they would never discover the grow site. But in it were the sharpened sticks, except the EPA banned carbofuran was smeared all over the tips of them because these cartels know how dangerous those toxics are. And the only reason it was detected is our dogs are in those growth sites so much and trained to detect weird smells. And these toxics have a very unique smell. And Phoebe detected that and alerted before our point man walked right into that trail. Phoebe's your dog? Phoebe was one of our team dogs. It's pretty, pretty miraculous.

44:57But in all of her years of work and she had 116 cartel apprehension bites and eight to 900 more apprehensions where she didn't have to bite, where people just gave up. So, you know, when you look at the numbers, that's about a thousand bad guys that are in this country illegally with criminal felony histories doing a ton of damage to not only our wildlife and our public safety in our woods. We got to remember these cartels that we're apprehending in growth sites are the same ones that are making dirty fentanyl pills in labs, right? And you and I both know right now the fentanyl crisis and we're up, I think we're approaching 200 ,000 nationwide deaths since fentanyl kind of dropped.

45:35These dirty lab cartel lookalike fentanyl pills dropped on America about five years ago. It's blowing minds and it's horrible. The human trafficking cells, the sex trafficking cells, the gun running cells, they're all the same cartels. It's just a different part of the organization doing a different type of crime. So, you know, we've apprehended some of these cartel growers that in the winter, when they're not growing weed in the woods, they're cooking 22 pounds of methamphetamine. Wow. Or they're trafficking dirty pills from dirty labs in Mexico for fentanyl now. And they're all doing human trafficking for big money because it's a big moneymaker for the cartels, as we know, in all 50 states.

46:10And we know now with the border policy changing and becoming little, if any, border policy for, to put it mildly, the cartels have carte blanche to bring contraband people, whatever they're going to do across our southern and now our northern borders, incentivizing more of these crimes. So anytime in the woods, we would go do a cartel weed case, let's say, and Phoebe made a great apprehension. She took a guy out that was doing a lot of other very bad things outside of the weed trade or was working for somebody that was diversifying and doing those activities as well. So, man, I can't talk enough about dogs and everybody loves a good dog story.

46:47We all have dogs or cats or whatever and pets. But, man, they're lifesavers and they're invaluable members of our team. And we have a lot of great dogs working on the team that I can't name, obviously, because they're operational for security reasons. Sure. How do you clean it up? You're going in there and then you get these guys. Hopefully they're there and you can arrest them. But if they're there for months, there's got to be literal human excrement everywhere, trash everywhere, because they got to eat stuff and throw stuff away. They're stealing water. They got pipes or whatever in there and chemicals, weapons.

47:17I've got two little kids here. We throw away a ton of garbage. Maybe they're not doing as much damage with Amazon Prime as we do, but otherwise they're still leaving a lot of crap. That's a lot of crap all over the place. Yeah, I mean, it's a literal shit show of trash out there. No exaggeration. There's a couple of color pictures in the new editions of Hidmore that you've got that go into just one of these growth sites. And I have a couple of snaps of just, we're not even going to get into the deadly poisons and the big water diversions and all the nastiness in the creeks, just the trash. And especially a growth site that's been out there more than a year.

47:50Because, you know, these guys start as early as March, April, getting their plants in the ground. And they might go all the way till September, October, if they're not interdicted by a team like ours. And you're right, it's two guys. And in harvest time, it's up to 10, maybe more guys. And you just get the human excrement. You get the cooking oils. You get the propane bottles. you get the food wrappers, and you just get that stuff stacking up. And they just stuff it in the ground. They might dig a little pit and just like a mini landfill going on in these grow sites. But it's all the fertilizer bags.

48:20It's all the Roundup. And then it's all the Carbofuran and the little deadly pink bottles that we definitely have pictures of in the publication so people can know what this stuff looks like and don't go anywhere near it, right? Don't touch it. Don't breathe it. Make sure the wind is not coming at you. Make sure the wind's going at your back toward it. You don't even want to get a whiff of this stuff. It's so deadly. The hardest part about the job, and when we formed the marijuana enforcement team, and we really needed other agencies to help us with this. And by 2013, when we started that team, everybody was kind of on board that you can't just go in and try to apprehend these guys.

48:52And you can't go in and just try to destroy these poison plants and remove them from the market and from consumption for poison, all that. You got to do something with the trash and you definitely got to restore the waterway. And it's called reclamation or what we call environmental restoration. And it's by far the hardest, most arduous, most time consuming and most resource eating as far as blade time for helicopters and money to clean these sites up. Because if you have a banned poison container in there, that's a hazardous material now, right? Yeah. So you got to handle it with a hazmat team.

49:23We might not even be able to touch it with nitrile gloves, with our N95 masks, with our long sleeve uniforms that we can do decon on. I mean, there's heavy, heavy Cal and federal OSHA protocol now on how we handle this stuff in grow sites. But I can tell you right now, when I retired, we were able to reclimate the day of our missions, about 44 % of all the grows we would raid that day. And that doesn't sound like a big number, but when we were coming from less than 5 % nationally, especially statewide in California, because other agencies were like, hey man, I'm not collecting trash and cleaning up.

49:55We don't have that bandwidth. We're going to go arrest. We're going to eradicate and we're going to helicopter out or we're going to hike out. We're out of there. We have too much other things to do. It's too costly. We can't tie up our SWAT units that long. But that's all changed. And it's changed for the good that everybody's on board, that water is so precious. It's the major, major Achilles heel of what we're losing. And then poison water is even worse. So we're reclamating. And they're reclamating a lot more now. Since I retired, we're bringing civilian teams in that can learn to safely deal with these poisons.

50:25They can get trained in it. that we're getting NGO 5013C funds developed for groups to go in and reclimate sites. And even if there's not another growth site on public land for the next 10 years in California, hypothetically, which will never happen, but if that were to happen hypothetically, we would keep these reclamation crews on historical growth sites that haven't been cleaned up going back 20 years, probably for a decade, conservative estimate. I mean, that's how much stuff is still out there. And not only in California, brother, but in other states that have growing climates, not as good as California, but they can still do it either indoors or outdoors.

50:59If you leave all the stuff there, it's just going to pollute for years and years. I mean, I guess the water is going to get diverted. The chemicals are going to leak out and everything. And it just seems like such a huge mess. Can you even get trucks back there? I mean, what do you do? Just take up hundreds of pounds of garbage and you got to lift it out with a helicopter and plastic pipes? Yeah, no, you're hitting on the head. But what you got to do is we get as far as we can on trucks. We have a landing zone with big dump trucks and trailers. We have to have an airship. We'll usually hike in.

51:28We'll bag all the trash in really, really heavy Caltran contractor bags. We'll tie them up. We'll collect all the water pipe. We'll take out all the poisons. If there's any diversions or things in the creek immediately, we'll rebuild a creek. I can't tell you how many little mini dams we have taken apart slowly, taken out the rock and the concrete they bring in, the dirt and the adobe just to open up that waterway so it'll flow again and then make sure the water diverting pipe is taken out and that black poly pipe that you see the pictures of in all the books, if you leave that stuff out there, they're just going to come back and use it again.

52:01Yeah, that makes sense. Your question is like, well, what happens if you don't clean it up? Two things and you hit it on the head. One, the environmental damage is going to continue. But what we got to realize is if we don't take that infrastructure out, that cartel cell is going to wait a year at the most and go, you know what? I know how tied up law enforcement are right now. And I know that right now in California under Prop 64, everything I'm doing is a misdemeanor and they're going to get less than 10 % of probably our growth statewide. So I'm just going to go use all that infrastructure that's going to cost me nothing.

52:31I'm going to get that water diversion going again because all the water pipes there, I just got to start the flow again. I'm going to set up a camp. I might move a quarter mile downstream where I'm not exactly where my last camp was. And you know what? 70, 80 % chance I'm going to get away with it. And if I do lose that grow, you know, that's my satellite grow to tie up law enforcement resources, say in Los Gatos, because I got 20 other grows I'm responsible for as a plaza boss, which is what they call these guys that are overseeing a particular sector of the state within a particular cell or a particular type of cartel.

52:59And now they're like, hey, it's totally worth it. But I go into this in chapter four of the new book, I got to sit through a debrief of a plaza boss that our white dope team in Santa Clara County sheriff's office interdicted on a 22-pound methamphetamine cook in the winter. And this guy was facing a lot of time. Yeah, sure. 20 pounds. Yeah, it's big, man. That's a big quantity for a better part of probably the West Coast. But obviously, he wanted to be cooperative and, you know, had to be protected and all that, but wanted to speak freely and, you know, maybe affect what was going to happen to him as far as his sentence and things like that.

53:34But it was the first time what we all thought we knew in the green dope side of the illegal cannabis trade from the cartels, I got to ask a lot of questions directly in that interview, along with DEA and officials and interpreters. And we knew that this reclamation wasn't just about environmental restoration. We all wanted to convince other agencies that, hey, it's not just about, you know, Smokey the Bear cleaning up the woods, restoring waterways, protecting, you know, what they've destroyed. Think about if we take all that out and we've already raided it, maybe we've caught a few guys. What are the odds of guys going back there from that organization to affect that particular sensitive waterway.

54:11And I said, it's slim to nil because we were seeing a site we'd reclimate and we'd watch it year after year after year. And very rarely, if ever, would a cartel come back and use that site. But if we didn't reclimate it, like in the example we just discussed, about 50 % chance by the next year, a cartel group was going to use it because they knew it had water. They could set it up very easily. They didn't have to go find a new creek. And I asked him that. And he basically said, you know, it's interesting. He said, I had not seen our grow sites that you guys had raided up until a couple years ago actually cleaned up and were like, what's going on?

54:43And I knew that our agency, Department of Fish and Wildlife, Forest Service, and very like-minded sheriff's departments like Santa Clara that were very environmentally conscious and were putting their resources as a sheriff's department, not a conservation agency by define. And they were doing cleanup. And the cartels were starting to notice like, why are they cleaning crows up, man? That's weird. We've never seen this in 20 years. These things never get cleaned up. But he validated what we're talking about. He said, no, I'm not going to go back in there. It's cost me$30 ,000,$40 ,000 of our organization's money to set up the waterline and get all the camping equipment and get these guys equipped and across the border if they're not already embedded and bring the poisons up from Mexico.

55:21So I'm not going to risk that. Why would I go back into an area that you guys have cleaned up, spend the money again, and it's already on your radar? So that was like a Yahoo victory moment where we could tell other agencies, hey, guys, help us reclimate. Even if it's in the offseason, we'll bag it. We'll bring in a helicopter in the middle of winter. We'll hoist it all out. We'll do the heavy lifting, whatever. And that's made a dent, but it's also helped deter the cartels from doing what they're doing in the woods. And it's going well. And we still do that every year, constantly. You know, I'm not going to say it's the most important job, because obviously, if you've got an armed cartel gunman that's doing a whole lot of other human public safety crimes, you want to get him out of circulation for sure.

55:59But it's that lasting effect on the environmental side. You know, it's public safety first and it's the triple W's, wildlife, waterway, wild lands that we're all about on the thin green line. And when we can do both, that feels really good. So maybe I'm naive here. Obviously, I know nothing about catching criminals, but would it not be worth luring these guys to come back to the same site and just check those sites and then arrest the guys because you have essentially a honeypot to where these guys, you know, they're coming back. So just watch it with a drone. And then it's like, yep, these idiots are back.

56:28And then you go raid them or whatever. What am I missing? Why do you want them to go to a new site? That's what I don't understand. Yeah, yeah. You're making good sense. And you're actually, without going into, you know, Intel and how we do business. Yeah. Let's just say what you just said makes a lot of sense. And it's been done and it's worked. Okay. We've had different cat and mouse games of doing things. The only thing is, if you're going to try that tactic, you kind of got to look at, okay, If I'm going to do that, I'm not going to do it on a sensitive waterway that has like migraine Yeah, of course.

56:56Trout in it. I'm going to do it where the water diversion is kind of contained. Maybe they're not taking too much water from a creek or they're doing it with what they call check dams. And it's a series of dams that they fill up in the heavy winter floods. Then they don't pull from the creek anymore. We've seen that. And, you know, ones that are accessible, you know, that you can go in and actually have a honeypot and catch some people. And it is, it's a cat mouse game. It's an evolving science. the ultimate goal of what we're trying to do is put enough pressure on them knowing that there's skilled teams that are not going to just chase you around or fly the helicopter over so you get scared away you hide in your little hole for a while we leave after we cut all your plants and clean up the grow site and you just go okay well i'm not going to work this grow site but my boss on my burner cell phone that i'm going to call tonight he's going to have another grow that he's going to have me in in a day and it might be 200 miles in northern california these guys think of it like a contractor crew of skilled builders, right?

57:48You're finishing one house and the drywall guys are coming in and you framed it, but you're a framer. And now all of a sudden your framing's done for any reason, maybe because the house burned down or the guys moved on to another stage, you're just going to be moved to another complex to go frame another house. That's how these guys work. They're very skilled, man. And let's just say they're a very formal enemy, given how proficient they are and how skilled they are at camouflage and hiding in plain sight. As you and I start to talk of the story, you're seeing the different layers of what means they're going to go to to make the money they can make.

58:20And it's a lot of money. How long are these growth sites in use? Are they around for months or do they just use the same places for years on end until they get raided or discovered or they fall apart for some reason? Yeah, that's a great question. I'm going to take the Sierra Azul 2005 shootout site, August 5th. We went into what we knew was one site that was being used again that had been used at least two or three seasons before what our intel and our pre-scouts with the sheriffs and what the sheriffs had done ahead ahead of us even being involved. dictated. But that weekend, when we locked that mountain down and there were guys camped out with MBGs and all of our officers from multiple agencies, because we knew there were a lot of bad guys in the area and we wanted to catch people that might've gotten away.

59:03And when our helicopter teams and our other officers started to hike that mountain, they found like five other grow sites on an entire hillside that spanned over a mile, actually a couple of miles. And when we started to look at the leaf litter, the cuts in the trees, the amount of trash, that grow site had been in play for at least five years before it was detected. And so these growers, man, they are going to use that same site as long as they don't get caught. So if we never interdict it and it's in Sierra Azul, it's in Los Gatos, it's over in Santa Cruz County on that side of the mid-pin. If it's in Henry Coast State Park, they're just going to keep stealing water, adding to the trash pile, killing a lot of stuff downstream until they finally get caught.

59:44And some of these don't get caught. A lot of times we've had situations where the growth site will have been used for two, three, four, five, 10 years. And then the water table just changed or we went into a drought and they didn't have water anymore. So they just left. They never got caught. They did a ton of damage in a decade. And then bighorn sheep biologists say in the Eastern Sierras that works for our agency as a biologist finds this thing on a survey and goes, oh my God, man, I can't believe what I walked into. I mean, it looked like an after-growth site, like as if you took that snapshot in time, right?

1:00:14Like a crazy movie and you walk into it and it's like everything's frozen and the camp is there, dead plants are there, water diversions are there, all the supplies, old food is still there. There might be guns, there might be camos, there might be tents, bunks, whatever, but they never got caught. They just left because they ran out of water. And now that's been there for all those many more years that a biologist had to find. And we're going to go reclimate that even though we never rated it. So long-windedly, it could be two months because we catch it early and we burn it to the ground and capture them.

1:00:45And that's ideal. I always like when we would find these growth sites really early in the late winter, like about now, like right now we're talking March-ish, right? Beginning of March. This is when everything kind of gets started, whether it's a wet year or a dry year. And we can start finding these growth sites when they're in the ground by April and May, and the plants are like two inches tall and you have 10 ,000 plants that are two inches tall and you fill a Safeway plastic shopping bag and your eradication's done. They haven't stolen that much water. That's the ideal scenario. It's when it gets late in the summer and the plants are 11 feet tall.

1:01:16They've stolen millions, if not upon millions of gallons of water and tons of dead wildlife. They're very comfortable in their environment. They know every sound. They know every trail. They're armed. They have escape routes. Now it becomes far more dangerous for us. And it's already had a massive environmental impact. And 11 foot plants aren't fun to destroy no matter how you do it. You know, we like the little babies. So what do you do with the marijuana after you seize it? I assume you can't sell it even though it's legal in California because of Prop 64. I mean, that might sound like a dumb question to some people, but I know if you seize a house or a car belonging to a drug dealer, you auction it off.

1:01:49But I guess if you seize cocaine from a drug dealer, you don't sell it. This is somewhere in between, but the whole toxic, super toxic, poisonous pesticide all over it might preclude that. Yeah. You know, and I don't get that question very often. So it's a great question. You're right. It's an illegal cannabis product, so it can never be in the legal market. And under the legal market, under Prop 64, you basically have to trace seed to sale. You have certain protocols and permits you need. You have to be able to document where the plant was grown, where it was processed, ultimately what dispensary or what consumer outlet it went to.

1:02:20And usually that's through a distributor, right? Everything is documented. There's a lot of money. There's a lot of overhead. There's a lot of red tape, just like a normal American business where you pay taxes and you have health and human safety protocols. All this stuff is strictly black market. It would never be legal, even if it was a organically pure product grown in the outdoors or even in an indoor operation, because it came from an illegal source. So we have to destroy it very carefully. Sometimes if it's not budded, we can cut it. We can destroy it in place where it's just, it's not going to be a poison or pollutant out there.

1:02:50It's just going to be a dried up plant out of the way where it's going to not get into water. We will hoist out a lot of it in helicopter nets. We've had to carry that stuff out, wrapped up in tarps on our backs. We even had, and Hidmore, we talk about canine Phoebe, armed gunman, and a pack mule named Stanley, where we had Stanley, one pack mule. And I knew the pack mule handler very close to where I grew up in Morgan Hill. And we didn't have any helicopter that day. And he had one pack mule out of 20 because 19 of his other pack mules were already up in the Yosemite basin to run pack trips. And I said, John, can we use pack mule?

1:03:23Anything, man. We can not lug this out ourselves. Yeah, it seems like a good idea to use a mule. It's a great idea. Whatever you can use. Helicopters are great, but ultimately you can't just dump that stuff in the dump. This stuff goes to landfills that are specially selected. You know, a specific hole is dug. It's mulched up carefully. It's witnessed. It's videotaped. It's buried. It's destroyed. So it can never be used, never be dug up. when it comes to the banned poisons, if some of that stuff has banned toxics on it, we have to dispose of it very carefully, whether it's a non-penetrable liner in a landfill so it can't seep into waterways, all kinds of stuff like thinking about a waste product from another hazardous material.

1:04:00How do you deal with that stuff? You can't just put it in the ground because you're going to have residual into the water table, into the soil. And carbofuran is that bad. Metaphos, all of these things. So it's pretty involved. And one of the challenges when we started the team was making those accounts with certain landfills around the state of California that were on board that, hey, you know, anytime where we can't tell you when we're going to raid, but have your landfill ready because we might be bringing you a whole lot of weed that's got to get destroyed and buried. And these organizations have been really good.

1:04:31They get it. And the other thing is, like I said, we're allied with legitimate cannabis and legitimate cannabis, the guys and gals that are trying to do it right, that are being pushed out of business by these cartels because the black market is undermining them and they're all going under. Right. If you don't pay for your water and you don't pay for your land, you can undercut on price probably pretty easily from the guy who has to pay for certifications and everything. Right. And imagine how saturated the black market for cannabis is in California right now, driving the legal market price down, saturating the market, and just incentivizing more interstate transport to other states where it's illegal, which now becomes a smuggling trafficking operation for illegal weed.

1:05:11So there's a lot of messy problems with regulation in general. And something I always talk about when I speak to this, and I'm glad we brought it up randomly right now, is, like I said in Hidden War, if you're going to regulate cannabis, it doesn't matter where you sit on legal cannabis, illegal, just regulate it right. Regulate it in such a way that people doing it by the numbers are making sure they get an organic, pure product to legal consumers that are now legally allowed to use cannabis. And we're at, what, 45-plus million Americans are regular repeat cannabis users. You know, deal with that.

1:05:44Make sure that cannabis is quality, man. Make sure it's coming from a good source. Make sure it's coming from a legitimate market. Don't mix in this toxically tainted, very potent, very accessible cartel weed that's all over the country into that equation. And that's when I talk about when I start to get a little bit political on policy. That's where things like Prop 64, the structure needs to change. If we're looking at national legalization, because this question comes up all the time, you got to make sure you go after illegal cannabis with felony statutes, because you're always going to have water loss.

1:06:17You're always going to have environmental destruction. You get a lot of violence, a lot of human trafficking, a lot of banned poisons. We saw that on all the private land grows up in Siskiyou County when filming the Narcophornia documentary up in Siskiyou County just last summer. And Jordan, I was blown away. And that's kind of what got you and I connected was one of our listeners and followers going, dude, you got to talk about this. I think Jordan would love this story. And it's what it kind of evolved into. You know, now you got the Asian cartels coming from back east, the Hmongs and the Chinese and the Mexican cartels.

1:06:48all over NorCal and literally coming into counties where they are so remote, they have so little law enforcement presence. But the sad part about that situation of these remote counties is they have the best water resources left, like Mount Shasta, right? 13 plus thousand feet, seventh natural mountain wonder of the world. Mount Shasta with all that glacier whitewater we see every year. that's pristine as it gets for Siskiyou County. And all of that water is being stolen, illegal wells, water trucks stealing city water in the middle of the night, ranchers, farmers being threatened at gunpoint to say, hey, your water table is going to drop.

1:07:24You may run out of water. Don't make a problem and you'll survive. I mean, literally having cartels taking over Siskiyou County, trying to actually manipulate politics in a way. And people that have been there for a hundred years, ranchers, farmers, true Americans, families said, I'm out. I'm moving to Washington. I'm going to Alaska, man. I'm surrounded by cartel growers. I hear gunfire at night. I got dogs fighting. I got dogs that are all cut up and animal abuse by the neighbor's dog that's supposed to be a guard dog for this cartel grow house. And all of these grows, bud, they're not deep in the forest.

1:07:56They're in a very remote area you can get to on a road, but they're next to a house. And they're a big hoop house with big plastic lined tops, you know, white. And what we noticed, which I wasn't even privy to, I'd been that operations for about three and a half years at that point. And now I'm going back in with Siskiyou County sheriffs I worked with previously and watching what they're up against as we're doing that documentary and blown away that all those same toxic poisons I'm talking about that the Mexican cartels use in the outdoor deep woods are on a majority of these plants, adhesive spray glue, other pesticides and toxics, carbofuran, just a malt off of junk.

1:08:33And it's sprayed all over these plants to go to the ultimate consumer on the black market, but it's not in the open air where it's still so deadly. It's in a tarped in like hoop house. And until we could ventilate that and open it up, you can't even go in that thing, man, without being completely asphyxiated on the poison. Crazy. It was even more concentrated, more of a problem, but that just comes down to taking what we've learned and applying it to sensible regulations and trying to keep political gain and financial gain out of it. Because I've always said when politics are about personal gain or they're about some sort of revenue generation, public safety and wildlife resources are going to suffer.

1:09:14And Prop 64 epitomizes that problem. And that is the big debate in our state of California that you and I spend a lot of time in. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Lieutenant John Norris. We'll be right back. The wait is over. Dive into Audible's most anticipated collection, The Best of 2025, featuring top audiobooks, podcasts, and originals across all genres. Our editors have carefully curated this year's must-listens, from brilliant hidden gems to the buzziest new releases. Every title in this collection has earned its spot. This is your go-to for the absolute best in 2025 audio entertainment.

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1:10:30It's always packed with sharp, thought-provoking takes. What I love about the gist is that it's not stuck in a partisan box. Mike, he's a really smart dude. He digs into real questions, the kind that most shows avoid because they don't fit neatly into a political lane. He'll challenge the right. He keeps the left honest. He dives into stuff like the New York City mayoral race, that whole cluster, and the chaos of sports betting, or even whether talking to your plants actually does anything. He's an award-winning journalist. He's not some schmo like me who's totally unqualified. You've probably seen his work in the Atlantic, the Free Press, the Washington Post.

1:10:58He's got that rare mix of wit, skepticism, and depth that makes even heavy topics fun to listen to. And he's a great dinner guest, just saying. So if you want your daily news with more brains and less noise, check out The Gist with Mike Peska every weekday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like this episode of the show, I would love it if you would do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support one of our sponsors. That's what keeps the lights on around here. All of the deals and discount codes and ways to support the show are all in one place.

1:11:27JordanHarbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well. JordanHarbinger.com slash AI. You can ask it about any promo code and it should spit it right out. Let's see what happens. Thank you so much for supporting those who support us. Now for the rest of my conversation with Lieutenant John Norris. I would have thought that legalizing marijuana would change the equation here for the better, but it seems like then you just have lighter penalties and you also have the fact that you can always undercut legitimate operations by doing something illegally, except the market is bigger and you can hide your stuff.

1:12:05So that definitely makes sense that that's a problem. Actually, a long time ago, or a year or two ago, we had somebody write into Feedback Friday, which is our advice segment on the show, And they said they rented a house that was sort of remote. It was a farmhouse. They rented it to somebody. And that person illegally subletted that house to these growers. I can't remember why the landlord or the renter actually showed up. And he's like, these guys were like, get out of here. And he's like, this is my place. There were locks that were changed. He just saw that there was a marijuana grow and he called the guy he rented to.

1:12:37And the guy was like, I don't know. I just subletted it to these guys on the internet illegally. What happened? And what happened, which now I think that guy was probably just a cutout for the cartel renting for them on their behalf. But he was like, what do I do? And we're like, don't go back there. You know, because he's like, I'm going to go back there and tell these guys to get out. I'm like, you don't know who you're dealing with, man. These guys, if they have a million dollars worth of weed or whatever, how much are these grows worth? Actually, I don't even know. What are 7000 marijuana plants valued at?

1:13:04Wow, man. Right now in the legal market, the price per pound, I think, is like$300. It's ridiculously low for tier one cannabis, right? Which I'm going to get into why that's so bad for the legit cannabis industry and some examples working with some very legal, very conservation, water conservation oriented growers that we just interviewed for our next film project. But basically, I know that the Asian cartel sales have such a distribution route and they keep a high profit margin going because most of their stuff is going to the Midwest and the Eastern seaboard from Siskiyou County. And we were watching that plainclothes of the U-Haul trucks leaving and heading east like every hour.

1:13:44A U-Haul truck was, without having any pressure put on it, just taking this stuff back east to be sold. And they're still getting over$1 ,000 a pound, probably more actually, for high THC content. But again, not dispensary weed, not organic, probably has a bunch of this crap on it. But because the black market's thriving so much at$1 ,000 or$1 ,200, maybe$2 ,000 a pound for the black market weed on a good day, what are our legal growers doing at the dispensary level? They're having to get so low on their price that they're able to sell this stuff. and then they look at their overhead and all the oversight and all the taxation and inspections and permits needed that so many good growers are leaving the industry.

1:14:26They're just going away. And we interviewed two growers back in the days way before Prop 64. They were organically pure. They weren't poisoning anybody, but they were black market farmers. They just ran the black market. That's how they made their living. You know, they did it illegally, but they weren't hurting anybody directly from that. They weren't violent. They weren't stealing a bunch of water. They weren't using poisons and they definitely weren't cartel. Now they go to get regulated like, okay, I'm going to give this Prop 64 a chance. And we filmed and interviewed up in Lake County, a multimillion dollar cannabis farm that looked like the best citrus farm I'd ever seen or the best Christmas tree farm.

1:15:09It was fenced. It had the California Department of Fish and Wildlife inspection, you know, posters on it. The water from their own wells was being uber conserved. I mean, it was just the conservation on a Jordan was crazy. I was listening to these growers talk to me about the five gallon per plant per day figure that I put out there. And they're both telling me the gals are going, oh no, that's totally accurate. That's an average. If you got an illegal group that doesn't care about water conservation on a hot day in Mendo County or in Lake County, they can burn 12 gallons per plant per day to get to harvest.

1:15:41They said, we're getting it down to like two gallons or less a day. And I said, how is that even possible? And they were actually taking tree branches and other substrate and burying it under the ground of their farm that would hold the water like a sponge. So they would water very limited through the drought situation and get still very good dispensary level cannabis. I mean, award-winning cannabis like the Emerald Cup actually, where these farms are producing. And they were using a fraction of the water. And they're authorized to use as much water as they need within what their wells can do.

1:16:13But even being unconscious of just not wanting to take too much water, they were going to the next level. We highlight that and we're going to talk about that. You're going to see those interviews in the Call Sign Trailblazer documentary. It's in post-production right now. But that was encouraging to see people like that completely put off by these cartel groups, disgusted by it, not just talking the talk, but walking the walk. And the sad part is because these people haven't been paid by their distributors for like two or three years. And one gal has owed like$600 ,000 of basically revenue that she hasn't been paid for.

1:16:46There's no enforcement right now or enough with Department of Cannabis Control in California to recover that money. She and her husband are leaving the business this year. And if you're going to regulate cannabis and you're going to do it right, those are the people you want to do it. And they're getting run out. So cartels are sitting back going, hey, man, this is great. Hey, don't change that law. We like that misdemeanor. And we like a kind of a chaotic situation on how these good growers are going to get paid. So when you muddle deeper into the politics and the policy and really the abuses within a system that's still kind of new, we've only been at it like five and a half years in California.

1:17:22I mean, we're the weed state of the country, brother. We're one of six Mediterranean climates. We're known for wine, vineyards, the Napa Valley wine. Well, we're the same way with cannabis, man. We're the cannabis state of the world. Having done so much work in that area environmentally, man, I'd like to see us be exemplary in the world and not be the poor example that we are. And I hope we're just learning nationally from these mistakes. I want to go back to some of the tactical stuff that you mentioned in the book. You mentioned doing a longer hike to get to a grow area rather than going in from a shorter distance.

1:17:52Why do you do that? I mean, I know it's a good workout, but what else? Why start from further away when you're going to raid a grow site. Yeah, a lot of it comes into stalking and stealth tactics to be effective at catching people. A lot of these grow sites are set up in such a way that if you come in really close, you're going to make a lot of noise no matter what you do. And some of these grows might be way into a national forest, way into a wilderness area. And we've had those where we've hiked like eight miles one day and then set up on a ridge not too far from the grow site. So we can move again, you know, in a timeframe, I won't say exactly how, but we're going to basically be where we need to be silently that when these guys are moving around, we can apprehend them as safely as possible.

1:18:37Where we're not going to make a bunch of noise and go through one of their trip wires, one of their punji pits, or what they do is they cut down a bunch of manzanita branches and put fishing line out with empty cans with rocks in them. And now that blocks their trail and they have hidden little trails that they got to move all these little noisemakers. And we run into that and we've got a certain number of operators and a dog or several dogs. And now we got to move through that and stop the team. And you know what? Being a still target is a very scary proposition. We kind of have a saying on the team, stillness is death.

1:19:07You want to be really hidden or you want to be on the move when you need to be on the move. So sometimes we'll come in from a very far distance so we can get set up appropriately and then deal with those little traps I talked about at a good, convenient time. So when it comes to raid moment, nothing's holding us up. Because if we get hung up on a trail and that guy's got a gun or there's a punji pit there and our dog can't get to where our dog needs to get to, or I can't cover with a rifle or my guys can't or whatever the case may be, that could be a really bad day for all of us. We've had too much gunplay to even take the chance.

1:19:39And one thing that was cool about when the marijuana enforcement team was greenlit, the whole hidden war period, is that that's all we had to do. So it wasn't like we had to go to fishing patrol. I didn't have to teach a hunter education class, you know, that night. I didn't have to go to a water district meeting. I'm strictly operating on this unit statewide, no boundaries. And, you know, we'd be on the road sometimes six, seven days a week and work through weekends if we were on a particular operation that demanded that level of attention. And we'll take the time we need to do it safely. And that's the only way you can do it safely, is not rushing things and having to drop when you need to.

1:20:12Yeah, I remember you said you take boats or even kayaks in because those are quiet and you're listening and looking around. I mean, it really does sound like jungle warfare. You're just in there for, like you said, several days. And I would imagine if these guys are there for months, they're attuned to all the animals and the wildlife and if it's too quiet or whatever. So you kind of have to get that same advantage and you can't get that in an afternoon. That is spot on, man. California is so diverse in terrain. And we have seen growth sites literally in eyesight of the waters crashing on the Pacific Ocean on the Big Sur coastline.

1:20:45And then we've seen growth sites at 11 ,000, 12 ,000 feet just below Mount Whitney, where glacier water is being diverted by black poly pipe. And we're hiking with the endangered threatened bighorn sheep as we're going into a growth site. I mean, just some of the most beautiful country you'd see, not just in California, brother, but like all over the nation, the world, Redwoods up north, the Redwood Forest, the dry, hot deserts down in Southern California, Riverside, where I'm from, San Bernardino, North LA County, all of those areas have plenty of cartel cannabis going on either in hoop houses or in the outdoors.

1:21:20And yeah, we've had to do everything. We've had to come in on helicopters, a lot on foot. You know, we use ATVs where we need to. We've had to go in on horseback before. One of the coolest trainings I think I ever got to coordinate and be part of with the unit before I retired was Wilderness Horse Patrol. Some of us have grown up on horses like myself and some even better riders that were on the team. And some of our guys and gals are like, oh man, I think I rode a pumpkin patch once for five bucks when I was a kid. right? And now here we are, you know, going through a whole day or two on saddles and tack and how to prep this horse and then taking them into wilderness areas in steep terrain, switchbacks, cliff country with kit gear on, with overnight gear to actually go get close enough and execute a raid on a horse because you can't have a motorized vehicle in wilderness areas.

1:22:09So we can't take a helicopter. We can't take an ATV or a motorcycle. The electric machines, like the bikes and stuff, just don't quite have what we need them to do. So we've done it all. And I got to say, that was one of the, I think, most rewarding parts about the job. Because I come from the Silicon Valley originally, but I grew up around still the iconic cattle ranchers, true cowboy families that are here in the Silicon Valley foothills today. And people think of the Silicon Valley where you and I are at, and they're like, what? There's cattle ranches and brandings. And, you know, you don't have Yellowstone, the show, happening in Silicon Valley.

1:22:42And you know what we do? I was on a cattle branding yesterday, right before the rain hit, with rancher friends of mine helping out that have had grows on their property before. They've had hunter trespass. They've had all kinds of poaching animals, mountain lions depredating their livestock. I mean, that's the type of stuff we get to do that makes that community connection so cool. And being a lover of all things outdoors, I'm just glad that the contradiction of the tech capital of the world and some of the finest cattle families in the tech capital foothills coexisting and still keeping that trend going.

1:23:13man, it's just magical. And those are the folks that see us on horses and go, okay, you know, you guys just aren't on the steel horses coming out of the big helicopters. You can actually ride a horse. I'll give you some respect for that. And we can go in a little quieter. So yeah, we've pretty much done it all. You know, California is a great state, man. I think I'm preaching to the choir here. I definitely have a concern with the politics and the safety issues going on and things I don't think are being done right. But the people and the diversity and the wildlife resources and what we have coast to coast, border to border is unmatched by any other state.

1:23:44This is a beautiful freaking state. And I still love being here and representing for our people. And I hope someday, somehow it just gets better and we get to turn things around. How many people are involved in these grows? Do you have an estimation of how many people are coming up from the cartels to run these trespass grows? And are they all illegal or are there people from all over doing this? Generally speaking, they are illegal. Generally speaking, a good percentage of them are what are called deportable felons. They basically qualify because of criminal activity that they've either been involved in, maybe not convicted or accused of.

1:24:15You don't know whether it's narcotics trafficking, gun running, sexual assault, aggravated assault, whatever. Most of the cartel gunmen we run into, actually all of them, of the ones we have run into, and a majority of the growers have that criminal background. And they're not citizens of the U.S. They're basically here illegally. And certainly before the very lax opening of the borders, if you will, the end of Title 42 that just recently happened, when we did have some semblance of proactive border protection policy and trying to solidify a solid, sensible immigration policy, it was hard then to keep these guys out of the country.

1:24:52I mean, when we debriefed that meth cooker I talked about that also oversaw 50 grows, we talked about that issue. I said, you know, we have actually caught a grower that was a gunman, pulled a gun, maybe got bit by one of our dogs, had tons of aggregated felonies. ICE and CBP handled that. He was a deportable felon. He got deported. And a week later, another one of our teams found this guy in a grow again. And I'm not kidding you. We had the same repeat offender that had murder raps, highly violent. I can't even remember how many times, but it was over double digits. This guy was back in California in a year's time and different dogs from different teams.

1:25:30And now we're all comparing notes like, and this guy laughed during the interview and he goes, look, man, that thing you call the border between Southern California, San Diego County, we call that a road bump. You know, we consider California, Mexico North. We never lost it. So I'm going to make multiple hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm like 50 cannabis markets I'm doing this year as an example. I'm going to make so many hundreds of millions of dollars on that, that the four to$7 ,000 it's going to cost me to have one of my cartel guys on the border, get this guy back across right after he's deported, it's a drop in the bucket.

1:26:02It's a time inconvenience. We've seen him back within 48 hours, 72 hours. Just crazy, man. That is crazy. That's terrible. It is horrible. And the sad part about it is being a California native most of my life, you know, it's sometimes ignorance is bliss, right? And when I started to realize how many cartel guys are embedded in California doing all of these crimes, not just the cannabis. You know, I think on a rough conservative estimate, if you look at two growers per grow cartel related, and you look at four or 5 ,000 grow sites back around the time when we had that many grow sites, say in Cali, just for illegal weed cannabis, you're looking at at least 10 ,000 cartel members.

1:26:42Just for a very conservative estimate of outdoor growers. But now, Jordan, with it not being the outdoor trespass grows so much, but now the indoor grows that are incentivized inside these hoop houses. And when you add the Asian contingent now of cartel members, the Mexican cartel members, you add in the ones that aren't growing weed, that are doing fentanyl production, distribution, meth, human trafficking. I mean, we're not in the 10 ,000 number range. We're in the 100 ,000 member range, realistically, if you just do basic math. And the idea of thinking that they're just coming across doing their business going back is a misnomer.

1:27:19They are embedded. They are comfortable. And under the current administration, operating with impunity and getting very bold, especially on our Southwest border, as we just saw, what, last week, you know, the four folks that went down South to do that medical procedure, got abducted, two were killed. That's a hot button item. Some of the Instagram reels going around with Sicario gunman in an Escalade and a BMG Barrett .50 caliber heavy gun and an AK going right down through Phoenix, Arizona. And there's a police department substation to the right. And they're just laughing as their music continues to play and putting that anonymously on Instagram and saying, we're here.

1:27:59No one's stopping us. That's crazy. It is crazy. And, you know, I think one of the coolest things about getting to talk about it with you is, one, your listeners will know and viewers will know a little bit more about what's really going on. And that even though they may not be affected by it, there's no way this isn't affecting us as a country, as a community. When you look at fentanyl, you look at human trafficking with the children and everything else. And the fact that we have to have some situational awareness, even in the affluent Silicon Valley, because I know what's lurking here. And I know what's lurking in rural Montana, where I'm a full-time resident of now, especially with the meth fentanyl and the trafficking.

1:28:34And we just have to be aware of it. And enough people need to say we've had enough and make it a national priority to slow it down, if not stop it. And it's just not right now. And the cartels are showing us that it's not. What percentage of these guys are we catching, you think? It would be a hard guess, bud, but I would say optimistically 10%. Oh, man. I think that's me being in a good mood today, man, because it's Friday and we're having a great conversation together. It's a lot less than that. I just look at the number of arrests you see and the number of people we actually take down, but you look at just the sheer statistics of the number of people that have to be here to do in the operation and that are very good at it and just don't get caught unless they sometimes do something really dumb, it's not many.

1:29:18It's a very, very small percentage. I'd say under 10%. Jeez, that's really, really crappy. That sucks. And it seems hopeless because even when you catch them, they turn around and come back three days later. Yeah, you know, I always have a little bit of hope and a little bit of optimism. When I talk to my old teammates from Met and what they're doing. And they're doing a really important job because when they hit an illegal growth site, they're basically impacting those other cartel crimes we talked about indirectly with public safety being at the top of the priority list. And with the laws kind of against our mission, with the incentivizing we talked about, Prop 64 and all those things, I just kind of tell them and I tell other agencies that I talk to or other people I train, I go, look, look at this as a marathon, not a sprint.

1:29:59Look at it as a long-term war that is really a hidden war and name the book that for no reason. I mean, it really is a truly hidden war. We wouldn't have this magnitude of problem if it was a little more overt and a national priority. But the thing I tell the guys is, hey, man, if you get one illegal hoop house taken out and that product never makes it to the market to poison some high schooler that's trying cannabis for the first time that has a big football scholarship or she's a valedictorian or something, right? And you stop that water from being stolen and you saved, I don't know, four million gallons of underground groundwater in California's worst drought, even if you make no arrests and you know they're going to go do it 50 other places, you still made a little bit of a dent on that one side.

1:30:39So it's like an NFL chunk play, man. You're not going to get the vertical 70-yard freaking wide receiver into the end zone, but you're going to get a ground and pound three-yard victory every time you take one of those raids out and you keep a dent. And I got to tell you, as stacked as the politics are against my teammates and my old agency doing the job they're doing, I just admire and respect. And those are my heroes because it's gotten a lot worse since I left agency, you know, pushing three, four or five years now. And they just stay in the fight, you know, and what's really going to help is awareness of people saying, hey, it's not just game wardens, not just DEA or sheriffs.

1:31:16It's all of our LEOs, all of our first law enforcement officers, our first responders that are dealing with this cartel threat on some level. They may not be in the woods doing the game warden sheriff thing, but they're surely going to experience a fentanyl interdiction or a crisis or know somebody that died in the family. And I now have friends and family members of friends right here in the Silicon Valley that have taken a dirty pill from a fentanyl bottle that looked like an oxycodone. And she was slated. She had a great scholarship, valedictorian, doing a bunch of sports, star volleyball player, a lot of inner knee soreness and took a pill from a friend for pain relief, not even to like get high at a party and didn't wake up to go to school the next day.

1:31:53Oh my God. That's awful. Right here in, you know, the Los Altos area of Silicon Valley. And a friend told me that story just a couple months ago, and she was related to that young lady. And man, if that doesn't make it any more personal, I don't know what is. And that's why every little bit our guys are doing out there and every little bit, the public that are watching this podcast or watching any of these documentaries just go, okay, this is bullshit. I got to learn more about it. And next time policy comes up like a Prop 64, I need to read the fine print. Because Jordan, ironically, one of my jobs as a lieutenant team leader of MET was 30 % of that was outreach and education.

1:32:28So the PowerPoint roadshow, speaking at conferences, but talking to lobbyists, legislature groups under the previous governor, before we regulated especially, and telling them the story and showing them the graphic pictures, I said, look, we know regulation is coming. We know it can be done right. Just if you regulate, please keep the bite against the cartels or trespass growers or illegal growers. keep a deterrence factor in there, keep the felony, keep aggravated charges and penalties for water stealing. And it was, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We got to do that, man. Thanks for all you're doing.

1:33:03Yeah, that's horrible. We have that happening in the state. And then when it passed and I saw the language, I just, I can't tell you how shell-shocked I was, man. I was like, what just happened? So we watered it down to a misdemeanor and an infraction for juveniles to get it to pass? Was this just something someone needed for the revenue or the taxation they thought? Because there wasn't any logical reason to do it unless it was financially based and it was vote based just to get cannabis passed. And it can be done so well. And there are some underground movements. There have been some bills recently proposed that I don't think will see the light of day currently in California, but basically to repeal and amend Prop 64.

1:33:43Sure. I mean, look, pain pills are legal, but I can't produce them at home and then not get in trouble for it. So what the hell? I mean, this should be regulated like the drug that it is. And look, I'm sympathetic if somebody is like, look, I grow my own weed. I got five plants in the backyard, 10 or 20, whatever it is. It's on my property. Fine, whatever. But when you have 7 ,000, it's kind of hard to argue like, hey, man, it's just a hobby. Look, I broke into this guy's land and I set up a giant farm illegally in the middle of a nationally protected forest. But it's just it's kind of a little side hustle that I got going.

1:34:14Come on. Yeah. Makes no sense. I think you hit it on the head. This isn't just the Cheech and Chong days of a couple of hippies in Humboldt County, you know, that are growing for a little personal consumption. Maybe they're going to trade it, make a couple bucks at the farmer's market. We're way past that. You know, we are way past that. And it's not going to fix overnight. But you can kind of arm people doing what I used to do. and the women and the men that are the real heroes of the day under very tough laws right now, continuing to do it, give them a better tool belt with a better law to enforce and see legitimate cannabis thrive and actually have these cannabis farmers like the two gals I just mentioned that we're going to feature, have them celebrated for doing it by the numbers and taking the good steps to come out of the dark when they could have made a bunch of money on the black market that was completely cash, that was never going to be taxed.

1:35:03They were never going to need to spend$80 ,000 on 10 different permits from agencies to have a legal growing farm, but they elected to do that just to try to do it right. And you know what? You look at that and you ask them, wow, how's that going? And I'm like, can I honestly say that I recommend you go legal as a law enforcement officer that enforced marijuana for the latter half of my career? I can't ethically tell them that's a good idea because it's not. And they're finding that out on their own. And that's why things like laws have to change so we can get more legitimate cannabis working in California as it needs to and be a better example because other states are regulating.

1:35:36My new home state of Montana has got some recreational legislation coming and going. They're dabbling and doing, they've just made some changes. A lot of states are doing it, but not everybody's doing it well. We got to look big picture. There's too many lives at risk. And you said it, the 7 ,000 plants or these manufacturing, these dirty pills, come on. This is home-based stuff. Thanks for coming on the show, man. I guarantee you most people have never heard of this and I'm glad we're able to bring awareness to the issue. It's creepy that there's drug cartel operations and the scale of environmental damage just kind of literally right in our backyard.

1:36:08Yeah, man, it's great to finally connect with you. I've been following your stuff, man. Keep it up. Thanks a bunch. And thanks for helping promoting just kind of what we're doing. I do want to let people know that if people want more information on this, they want any speaking done on it. I speak all over the country to this. I educate. Just go to johnnorris.com. It's J-O-H-N-N-O-R-E-S. You can get to my email for any questions related to this subject or even people wanting to go into conservation law enforcement be a game ward. I can't tell you how many hundreds, if not thousands of young folks and older folks that are coming over to this profession and wanting to do it.

1:36:41And I know you've got a copy, but if I could just throw it out there, the second printing, second edition of Hidden War just dropped. You got one of the first copies. I did, yeah. And it's got updated information in it to take us into some of what we discussed. It's on Amazon, in print copy, Kindle, Audible. And if you want a personalized copy, hit me up through my email and I do a lot of those orders. And everyone that's getting into the book and getting into the story are helping become part of that thin green line. And that's what we're going to need. And I can't thank you enough, man. Thank you very much.

1:37:11You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with a former DEA agents that brought down Colombian drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar. If you've watched the TV show Narcos, These are the real-life Steve Murphy and Javier Pena. The whole war of Pablo Escobar is based on extradition. Colombia wanted to extradite him, and that's when he started the war. Colombia backed down on the extradition. So for me personally, I always thought Pablo would never be taken to life. Here's a guy that's responsible for, we estimate, 10, 15, maybe 20 ,000 murders. Bombing of a commercial airline, killing of a presidential candidate, putting a bomb at the newspaper editor because they wrote a bad story on him.

1:37:57It's outrageous. Innocent people getting killed every day. You know, car bombs 10 to 15 on a daily basis. That was his war on Colombia. And it was just all innocent people being at the wrong place at the wrong time. They made it clear to us this is all about killing Pablo Escobar. And the real heroes in the search of Pablo Escobar were the Colombian National Police. They're the ones who took down Escobar. Absolutely. People are still out there that think Pablo Escobar is some kind of hero, but they have no idea what they're talking about when they're talking about, you know, he's a hero. Oh, he did this for his community.

1:38:34He didn't do anything. He killed people. What he was, in reality, was a manipulator. He was a master manipulator. Yep. We understand that we as a world cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem. You know, we cannot put enough people in jail to stop it because there's so many evil people out there waiting to take advantage of you and us. They'll do anything to make money and take advantage of others. To hear what it was like to chase the slippery drug kingpin responsible for thousands of deaths, check out episode 453 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. A little bit depressing, a little bit scary.

1:39:08He's arrested over a thousand people, all from grow-ups. I'm sure that number is, that's just him, not the whole unit. And the unit's been going for a while since he's been retired. When they find these areas, not only are they full of garbage, poisons, plastic, trash, human excrement, they find shrines and Santa Muerte icons. And if you haven't been watching Narcos or Dexter or whatever, those are very common among narco traffickers, basically patron saints of death. and they require kind of gross diabolical stuff to stay in their good graces. It's this weird mixture of Catholicism and paganism and witchcraft and all this kooky stuff.

1:39:45It's really interesting. We talked about it a little bit with Ed Calderon on episode 500. And John told me that he can actually tell which cartel is doing the grow by the candles and the icons that they're using. So these saints, so-called saints of death, they require torture, they require killing, they require other brutal acts as tribute. So if you're wondering one of the reasons why there's so many really disgusting cartel murderers, this is one reason cartels do so much horrific stuff. The other stuff is, of course, to scare their rivals, and it works. The average financial value of one grow, I looked this up, it's approximately$16 million.

1:40:20Now, this is an average, so it varies wildly. $16 million. That's a pretty good haul if you've got a big old grow in some rancher's backyard, and you don't have to pay for any sort of inputs, water, land. And unfortunately, a lot of our sanctuary laws here in California prevent his unit working with ice and immigration. So a lot of these guys, they turn right around and come straight back, which is not the way these laws, I assume, were intended to be. Growers will often do really clever stuff to hide their tracks going into the woods. John told me they find these boots that have felt on the bottom or stilts that look like cow hooves.

1:40:56So they will walk into the site on what looks like cow hooves. So if people are tracking them, they're like, oh, well, that's not a person. it's a cow and they'll just let the trail go. It's pretty damn creative. I have to hand it to them. I assume they found out about that because they found cow hoof stilts when they did a raid. I really don't know. I would imagine those were an interesting souvenir. Now what you're thinking is, oh my gosh, if I live in California, I got to wear Kevlar and go horseback riding or pick berries because I'm going to get shot by growers. Don't be afraid to go hiking.

1:41:23These grows now, they don't have to be too deep in the woods. So it's decreased 90%. The growers have actually become more brazen, fortunately or unfortunately. So the likelihood of you running into that danger out in the middle of nowhere is actually quite minimal. But here's the number to call. If you do need to report something, whether it's poaching, a marijuana grow, anything like that, call 888-334-2258. That's 888-334-2258 or text TIP411. That's TIP411. And you can report poachers, growers. Don't do it right, it staying in there. But if you find a grow and you can take pictures or drop a pin, get the GPS, whatever it is, fine.

1:42:01But do not engage the growers, obviously, and get the hell out of there. Stay safe. And hopefully, Lieutenant John Norris unit will come and get these guys out of there, or at least clean up the grow site. Big thank you to Lieutenant John Norris. All things John Norris will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Our chat GPT bot, if you want to go give that a shot, grab anything from any show we've ever done, is over at jordanharbinger.com slash AI. Transcripts are in the show notes, videos up on YouTube, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support this show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

1:42:33Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same system, software, tiny habits that I use every single day in very non-cringy ways, I'd like to think. It's a free course, jordanharbinger.com slash course. I want you to dig the well before you get thirsty, build relationships before you need them, and realize that, hey, many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to this course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with Podcast One.

1:43:04My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who'd be into this episode, loves the outdoors, interested in this kind of thing, share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. And in the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time.

1:43:38This episode is sponsored in part by Conspirituality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspirituality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

1:44:10An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspirituality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspirituality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is sponsored in part by Everything Everywhere Daily.

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