On the morning of 13 May 2021, investigators from the San Bernardino County sheriff’s Marijuana Enforcement Team, with the county agriculture department and code enforcement, inspected an outdoor cultivation site in Lucerne Valley after numerous complaints.[1] The 40-acre site held 199 greenhouses and about 25 travel trailers with workers living in them, most of them dumping sewage into containers buried in the desert floor.[1]
The growers presented the site as hemp cultivation, but the agriculture department confirmed it had never issued the site a county hemp permit and that its nursery-stock licence application to the state was dubious.[1] The site had ignored an earlier order to abate the cultivation, and field tests showed THC levels that ruled out hemp status under any conditions.[1] Agriculture personnel destroyed all 76,118 plants in place.[1][2]
The sheriff’s gangs and narcotics division said it would keep enforcing the state’s cannabis law and the county’s ban on commercial outdoor cultivation, under which violators face fines, prosecution and seizure of property.[1]
