Hmong cannabis growers pouring into Siskiyou County
SISKIYOU COUNTY - The narcotics officer stood on a windswept ridge near the Oregon border and surveyed the fields cut into the hills below, a landscape resembling a lost piece of wine country.
The terraces of Siskiyou County, however, were planted in cannabis.
More than 1,500 Hmong farmers in the past two years have poured into this remote county, so vast it encompasses two western mountain ranges.
By the second growing season in 2016, satellite images showed nearly 1,000 parcels laden with dark green crops. Depending on whose yield estimates and black market prices you rely on, the Hmong's Siskiyou crop had a value as high as $1 billion.
Where it was bound for, the growers would not say.
Mouying Lee, a businessman whose name surfaces in every facet of the Siskiyou marijuana story, said with a deadpan delivery that his clansmen came here “for the feng shui” of the mountains. He pointed out that most of the landholders are elderly: Former factory workers and mechanics from Wisconsin. Old aunts and uncles.
The abundant crop is grown for personal use, Lee said. For poultices and shower rinses. For broth and tea.
County officials don't buy it. They say that Siskiyou is being forced into the nation's $49 billion black market for marijuana, sparking a modern range war.
So much land has changed hands so quickly in cash deals that Sheriff Jon Lopey is convinced he is fighting the hidden hand of organized crime. He has asked Gov. Jerry Brown for help.
Land speculators more than a half-century ago carved Siskiyou County's unbuildable high desert and mountain slopes into half a dozen large subdivisions with “vacation” parcels - many of which did not sell and later wound up trading for $500 an acre on eBay.
Mount Shasta Vista rose along the western edge of the valley, a floor of volcanic debris crusted by a thin growth of stunted juniper and bitterbrush. Southerly breezes catch glacier-capped Shasta to the east, and Mount Eddy on the Trinity Range to the west, squeezing through the valley in gusts that commonly reach 70 mph.
Satellite images in 2014 of the fallow development, with its 1,641 lots and mostly absentee owners, showed a few houses, some rusted junk and two marijuana patches.
The Hmong began arriving in earnest in early 2015.
A third of the Mount Shasta Vista parcels bore Hmong names by the end of 2016. They sold at five times their assessed value, and the subdivision's moonscape supported 508 telltale gardens of green.
With them came makeshift fences, trash piles and swimming pools converted into cheap water tanks. The newcomers hauled in soil, erected drying racks from plastic pipe and slept in plywood sheds. If there was power, it came from a generator, and a portable toilet stood sentry at each gate - sometimes with an American flag.
A similar scene played out in four other developments throughout the county.
Lee's house, unusual because it is a permanent structure, sits in the center of the 2½-acre plots dedicated to growing marijuana. Six cars and three water trucks are parked out front.
A new home
Lee is a child of the Hmong refugee camps in Thailand. He said he worked in Fresno as a computer programmer and contractor before joining the migration to Siskiyou County in 2016 to build the small wood sheds that growers live in.
California permits marijuana cultivation for personal medical use, but leaves local governments to decide how much - if any - to allow.
It took a single growing season in 2015 for Siskiyou County supervisors to ban outdoor cultivation, punishable by a fine. The crops could also be destroyed if authorities determined they were for commercial sale.
As unease with marijuana grew into complaints and then scrutiny from county supervisors, Lee organized a community collective. Following the first harvest of 2015, the Hmong council handed out frozen turkeys as a gesture of goodwill.
When that didn't calm the waters, Lee retained lawyers from the legal group Pier 5 - champions of controversial clients, such as the Black Panthers and San Francisco Chinatown mobsters.
Public records show Lee and a relative, Vince Wavue Lee, tracked down the absentee owners of more than 50 lots, paid them above-market prices, and then transferred the properties as “gifts” to other Hmong.
They were friends and family members who didn't like to conduct business in English, the two said. Sometimes they fronted the money, trusting they would be paid back. They said they made no profit. Mouying Lee said the subdivisions in Siskiyou County are the start of a new home for his people.
“To see the image of the mountain form, this is a better place for the elders,” he said. He likened the volcanic ranges to the karst outcrops and verdant jungle of northern Laos.
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