A recent story in the San Jose Mercury News really rustled my jimmies, because it was entitled “Rim Fire: Did illegal marijuana growers start the blaze?” Basically, the Rim Fire in the Yosemite area is now one of the largest and most destructive fires in California history, and the thrust of the article is to start the blame rolling on “illegal marijuana growers” without showing a shred of evidence.

This seems to be the age-old technique of ending an insinuating headline on a questionable article with a question mark to avoid being sued for libel. Newspapers would do this with things like “Did So-and-So Really Cheat On His Wife?” and then claim in court that they were simply “discussing the issue in a public forum” rather than actually accusing Mr. So-and-So.

But here are the money quotes, such as they are, from Todd McNeal, Twain Harte fire chief, so you can judge for yourself: “We don’t know the exact cause…we know it’s human caused.” He also said “there might have been some sort of illicit grove, a marijuana-grow-type thing.”

A fire chief, who is a public official, should know better than to whip up public anger based on incomplete information. That’s the kind of rumor-mongering that has caused ugly incidents like lynching in the past.

We Could Play This Game Too

Let me be frank with you, dear readers. We here at Weedist were in possession of this information ourselves — the unsubstantiated rumor, at least — a full week before this story hit the news. We could have gone public with it ourselves, and made a big splash with lots of publicity. Wow, a scoop! Stop the presses!

But it would have been highly irresponsible to do so, especially given the fact that there is actually no story here.

Read the linked article again. McNeal basically says that nobody knows the cause of the fire, other than that people probably started it, because there was no lightning. So I guess the natural thing is to blame it on “marijuana growers”, because you can’t really prove it wasn’t! After all, illegal marijuana growers don’t exactly sign up at the ranger station before planting their crops.

Well, I’m not a fire chief, and I haven’t been down there, and I’ve never been an illegal marijuana grower, but since I don’t know the cause of the fire either, my guess is as good as McNeal’s. Maybe some law enforcement unit discovered an illegal marijuana grow, and they were all excited, drank a bunch of beer to celebrate, and tried to burn down the plants, and they started the fire, and now they’re trying to cover it up. Hell, we could have even printed that one: “Did Drug Warriors Start the Yosemite Fire?” with exactly the same amount of corroborating evidence (i.e., none). After all, it’s quite well-known that law enforcement has gleefully burned many tons of seized marijuana in the past.

Or maybe McNeal is just assuming the fire was caused by humans, simply because there was no lightning. Maybe we’re actually missing the biggest story in history: “Did Space Aliens Start the Yosemite Blaze?”

I guess we’re just trying to be a little more responsible than the San Jose Mercury News.

Look, even if it does turn out that there is some connection to illegal marijuana growers, many or most of the people caught growing these crops on public land have been shown to have close ties to Mexican cartels or other organized crime segments. These are not serious breeders of important medical strains, they are criminals by virtue of despoiling public lands, and there’s nobody I know in any part of the cannabis community — recreational or medical — that would defend them from a moral standpoint.

There’s a bigger story here, and you probably already know it. Only the illegality of the cannabis plant makes the price so high and the profits so great that so many people are tempted to “manufacture it illegally”. If it was legal, it could be grown and priced like oregano. Nobody does this “illegal grow on the side of a hill near a national park” stuff for hops, grain, or grapes even though they make alcohol from those crops, and alcohol is taxed and restricted. Instead, people make a lot of money growing these crops, they don’t have to hide anything, nobody looks down on them even though they’re “making booze”, the government (i.e., the public) gets a cut, and everything’s just fine. Keeping it illegal just means that the public (i.e., the government) no longer gets a cut, although plenty of politicians and law enforcement people seem to.