U.S. Park Rangers occasionally find fields of marijuana in national parks, but a hiker’s discovery of 40,000 opium poppy plants in California’s Sierra National Forest this June was a first.
The lavender-hued opium poppy plants would yield about 40 lbs. of raw opium, and, according to officials at the Forest Service, a bust of this magnitude is “pretty alarming.”
The plants were found on a 3,000-ft. high slope that had been scorched by a forest fire two years before.
When law enforcement officers burst onto the scene, three men in camouflage were discovered scoring the poppy pods and squeezing the brown juice used to produce raw opium.
The Sierra National Forest is located just south of Yosemite National Park, and according to park law enforcement officer Kevin Mayer in an article for the Sierra Star, “We have never found anything like this in California. There have been times we have found a plant or two in front of someone’s house, but nothing like this.”
Park officials said they planned to incinerate the plants immediately to prevent any further usage.
Growing the poppies was apparently left up to nature and the late rains the mountains enjoy around that time of year was beneficial to the plants.
Papaver somniferum, or opium, as it is more commonly known, is made from the sticky sap of the poppy seedpod. It is rarely used medicinally, save for severe diarrhea, and is rarely abused in this country (although smoking opium is common elsewhere in the world).
Federal officials said they are especially concerned about the issue of public safety the poppy field creates.
Heavily-armed Mexican crime networks have already planted vast marijuana plantations in remote areas throughout California’s parks and forests, and hikers can find their safety threatened if they accidentally stumble upon one of these illegal operations.
Former Los Angeles Police Department officer Michael Grant, now the owner of Stealth Private Investigations, is a narcotics expert familiar with the problems of opium in the United States. “Opium itself is not so popular these days, it’s the heroin made from the opium poppies which is really the problem,” Grant said. “This is not the late 1800’s with opium dens all over the place; now people are much more likely to use the plants to produce heroin.”
“Opium was a lot more popular in the ’60s and ’70s,” Grant said. “Back then, the THC content in marijuana was much lower — 3-6 percent compared to 36-45 percent today — so people often used opium to strengthen the effects of the marijuana they were smoking.”
According to Grant, countries like Cambodia and Thailand have economies very heavily based on opium production, but in the United States, opium is a lot less common.
And though officials initially worried that the opium field was the first step in a possible domestic heroin-processing operation, it is now known that the three men caught at the scene were in fact Asian. Law-enforcement officials believe the Sierra Forest opium was meant for smoking, a habit most prevalent among Southeast Asians.
