US OR: Major Marijuana Grow Operation Foiled

[Binky]

Seven Cornelius residents arrested in multi-agency bust that seizes 5,500 plants

By Christian Gaston

A multi-agency drug task force arrested seven Cornelius residents yesterday in connection marijuana growing operations on public and private forest land in Washington, Yamhill and Tillamook counties.

The Washington County Sheriff’s department reported yesterday that search warrants executed on three houses and five vehicles in Cornelius led to the arrests, which were made in two sweeps.

The search warrants were obtained based on information gathered during an investigation that over the last month led to the seizure of 5,500 marijuana plants in three northwestern Oregon counties

In most cases, police said, the grow operations were guarded by armed men who were sleeping in the vicinity of the marijuana gardens. Some of the grow operations were being carried out on Bureau of Land Management land. The rest of the marijuana was found on private forest land. Officials said none of the land was owned by Stimson Lumber, Co., one the largest private landowners in the area.

Israel Tinoco-Cervantes, 31, was charged with manufacturing a controlled substance, Veronia Carrera-Garcia, 21, and Adriana Jacobo-Ortiz, 31, were charged with conspiracy to manufacture a controlled substance, and Maul Nieto-Velasquez, 21, was charged with frequenting a place where controlled substances are used.

Later in the day, Jesus Tinoco-Cervantes, 20, Agustin Tinoco-Cervantes, 22, and Jose Magdelano Tovar-Perez, 22, were arrested and charged with manufacturing and distributing a controlled substance.

According to Washington County Jail records, Immigration and Customs Enforcement holds have been placed on Nieto-Velasquez and Israel, Jesus and Augustin Tinoco-Cervantes.

In addition, Israel Tinoco-Cervantes was taken into custody by U.S. Marshalls on a drug-related federal warrant yesterday and was booked at the Multnomah County Jail.

Several law-enforcement agencies participated in the investigation and execution of the warrants, including the Westside Interagency Narcotics team (a coalition of Westside police agencies and the national guard), McMinnville Police, Newberg Police, the Yamhill County and Tillamook County Sherriff’s Offices, Oregon Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Bureau of Land Management and two SWAT teams.

http://www.forestgrovenewstimes.com/...00920721287400

[pflover]

Interesting, Cornelius is the town where Lisa and I had been looking to buy a house last winter. Would have been interesting to see all that go down.

wonder what impact that is going to have on our local green economy..... right at harvest time too.

[Binky]

I wouldn't worry about the supply, theres always another field down the road

[pflover]

LOL yeah true that.... but it almost always effects local availability for a few weeks when something like that goes down here. hehehe the patterns of supply have facinated me for some time now.

[saeon-tsion]

I am mostly concerned with understanding how people get in contact with LE in the first place; I want to ensure that I just plain never get noticed or investigated. I don't do anything worth LE's time, and any sane officer would realize that eventually once they properly researched my background and my situation especially with my health. I am just trying to take care of my family; without cannabis I would be completely useless. As it is, I have very serious sleep problems due to the extreme pain and frequent nausea that I experience.

With time, I hope to hone my pain management and medicinal cannabis regimens as well as find ways to treat the underlying disease processes....but I can't do that if our already very strained life were devastated by the stress of LE encounter, a "bust," court case et cetera.

Anyhow, I'm sure that many people here are in the same boat. Most of us get by much the same as I do....lay low, keep our noses clean, rely on the compassion of others in the possible event that somehow our security were compromised despite our best efforts. And also do our absolute damnedest to make sure that our security & growing/usage practices are good enough never to be compromised, of course.

May God, all the Buddhas and all the Angels and Powers that Be bless & watch over me, my family, friends, loved ones and fellow MMJ users around the globe. We have already suffered so much, and the forces of this Universe/Multiverse brought us this sacred medicinal herb to alleviate much of that suffering in ways no other medicine can....who are these lawmakers, politicians, LE and judges to argue with that?! The fools, the absolute lunacy of it.

Anyhow, preaching to the choir, I know. But it's something that weighs very heavily on my mind.

If I didn't have to worry about LE issues and so forth, I and any designated growers who might help me in the future, could carry out large scale outdoor grows on ample rural land around here and drastically reduce cost/effort versus indoor growing! Of course there's the inevitable outdoor losses to bugs and so forth, but this year I actually have had more problems with bugs and mold indoors than out!

I've had to throw away whole plants because they were SATURATED with nasty little white bugs of unknown origin that even 1,500 ladybugs couldn't seem to make a dent in! Other plants that I've just harvested have a lot more of them than i'd like, and even have serious interior mold problems where the bugs are doing so much damage to the plant tissue that it's easy prey for mold spores to set up shop.....I just pray that now that I've harvested all of the affected flowering plants, that the next generation of plants in the same Homebox XL won't be infected by the same bug problems!

It's ironic, right now my outdoor plants seem the safest from most types of bug problems! Of course, some are losing significant leaf mass to unknown attackers, but it's better than having your buds chewed up and turning moldy from hundreds of thousands of aphid-like bugs in nasty looking hordes all through your prized Indica buds?!

Sigh. I just pray that my prized new TGA & sativa-dom. genetics won't fall prey to the same fate. That would just break my heart, having invested so much energy and therefore money (which I don't have, with deep-painful-crippling medical debts to pay off) in plants that I may not be able to use -- or may have to make hash with, when my only hashmaking equipment available is a crude ISO extraction method, and I'm not sure that I can make good use of that ISO hash for oral/capsule use since we haven't been getting enough practice at oral medicine preparation for a long time......

Anyhow, I digress. I hate to see grows foiled, even when they're not medicinal. As far as I'm concerned, this whole country needs to be "overgrown" with those extra seeds that many of us throw out or otherwise waste.....if a seed isn't good enough for you to grow out yourself, then Johnny Potseed-it! :-)

[pflover]

Saeon? I'm mildly confused about your posting those thoughts in this thread..... A) This was an article about a LARGE commercial bust and all comments thus far were concerning the commercial market, and B) this bust occurred in a medical state with a very very good track record of treating it's therapeutic cannabis patients well as long as they follow the state guidelines. I admit that in some of the more rural eastern OR counties things a bit more hit or miss when it comes to how the local LE treat therapeutic cannabis users but in the area the bust occurred usually they are pritty keen to leave the law abiding TC users alone.

I don't have anything against your words just confused on why you choose here to post them.