Marijuana Confiscation 1983
[Photo by Kim Sallaway]
That same year, CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) was formed. Cal Poly Humboldt (formerly Humboldt State University) archives have the 1983 CAMP final report.
The report, in part, states:
The actual raids began on August 15 and continued for ten weeks, ending on October 19, 1983. A total of 524 sites were raided resulting in the seizure of 64,579 plants with a total weight of over 271,000 pounds. Seventy-eight persons were arrested and at least seventy persons have since been taken into custody or ·are pending arrest. More
than 80 weapons were also confiscated.
To view the entire document, click here.
Note: Particular thanks to Kim Sallaway, Southern Humboldt’s wonderful photographer who has documented so much of our local history. [Click here to follow him on Facebook]
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The good old days..
Oh yea, Good Old Days, right up there with Kent State and the civil unrest of the 60s as far as using US military personnel against its own citizens.
One person’s nostalgia goggles are another’s life-altering traumatic memories. What was it the hippies used to say? Hocus pocus, it’s all where you focus!
Thx, yes, hocus pocus!
These are citizens committing felonies getting busted… Kent State isn’t remotely related…
Some of that weight was thistles! In those Zero Tolerance days people had to buy their properties back from Asset Forfeitures. Kids did mandatory minimum sentences of over a decade. All during that time hard drugs were being flown in by the cargo plane-load under cover of “fightn Commies” to Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Texas!
War on Drugs!! Let’s get the dope growers and the psychedelic people- Lock ’em up! While we flood the place with crack and heroin! It’s a Drug War alright- our drugs vs. their drugs…and we will get the taxpayers to fund it all!!!
How do you and your alter ego Legallettuce even leave your bunkers (aka moms basement)?
lol, all you got. Not even close and I am sure farce manages his life in comfort as well. Mom died long ago and never had a basement.
Wow- you are very dimly lit! 1983 I was out of Willits, just over the hill into the very upper watershed of Big River. We hiked in 5 miles through logging land to out guerrilla patch on that hill. Didn’t own land and there was really no way forward for a poor man to own land…so we squatted on land that had been raped and scraped to feed the ever-thirsty investors who lived in the cities. There was a war over whose drugs would be allowed but also there was a war at that time over our very survival on the planet. We lost. These are the mopping up times now, waiting to see what comes to decimate our massive, consumptive overpopulation- famine, war, disease? 1983 many of us still had hope for the future but we knew we were up against large forces of evil and destruction. Where were you?
1983 was the early stages of CAMP and also the nationwide War On Drugs. A war that would join Reagan, Bush and Biden (yes- he was actually harsher than the others) together in making America the most incarcerated nation in the world. Fighting the drugs that their own CIA was bringing in and distributing. (refer to Contra funding and Freeway Ricky, Arkansas air fields, etc). By mid-80’s the FBI had a program called Operation Dead End that focused on my friends in the Grateful Dead scene and was arresting people, refusing them bail and handing them mandatory 20 year sentences for “conspiracy to distribute”. That could mean making a phone call, being in the room, hell- they did not care. Many urban folks had the same thing happen in crack neighborhoods. WAR ON DRUGS. I was a part of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) as we sought for relief against these Stalinist-type tactics. Where were you? In your Mommy’s basement?
The CAMP tactics of warrantlessly kicking down doors and holding children at gunpoint was real. Our local hero attorney Ed Denson formed Citizens Observation Groups (COG) and trained many of us to observe, record and report. I followed raids in the Laytonville area and recorded what I could. Boy- they didn’t like me! But I did not like letting them get away with what they did. Oh yeah- where were you? Were you even here?! I could write a book about the War On Drugs. We who were here understood what it really was- a War on Certain Drugs. Weed and psychedelics. Cocaine/Crack and Heroin were government-approved. Just like the pharmaceutical mood-changers and anti-depressants that were being forced down the throats of troublesome children across America…yeah-that was just getting started too. Why was Dan Quayle ever installed as Vice-President? His father was the head of Lilly Pharmaceutical out of Indianapolis. Nancy (Just Say No) Reagan’s maiden name was Davis. Nancy Davis. Yes of Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals. Coincidences? No. It was a War On Our Drugs….it was a War On Us, the marginalized….for Money…And it is still going
If you can’t do the time, don’t do the time…
And pot being flown out of Humboldt for the same reason.
Um, last I checked murder is and was a felony. “But we heard a noise so we opened fire . . .” said the scared little armed killers. Covered up by the corrupt administration that ordered them there in the first place.
Is that where the Sheriff trimmed their haul?
I remember when I was a kid they was a weed called diesel weed where people use to go to where the cops burned it and they would collect the weed and bring it into market 😂😂😂
My neighbor got “abated” this year. The deputies came in with machetes. They chopped down about half the plants, left them lying on the ground and left many plants untouched. Lazy or just weird???
Yes most of it wreaked from being soaked in diesel fuel before burning.
Baked Columbian out of the teepee burner, they thought it was all destroyed.
Glad they were able to wipe out marijuana.
They sure did! Good job, government boys!! And it only cost us…hmm….how much did that cost us again?
CAMP program caused the price to go up 150%, literally, gram per gram, being worth more than gold. Current ganja prices, adjusted for inflation, sell for less than the brown compacted bricks of cheap Mexican. That Old Grey Mare she ain’t what she used to be, many long years ago.
I’ve always grown my own variety every year since 1980 so price is of no concern.
CAMP program caused the price to go up 150%, literally, gram per gram, being worth more than gold. Current ganja prices, adjusted for inflation, sell for less than the brown, stem and seed filled compacted kilo bricks of cheap Mexican I could get in high school. “That Old Grey Mare she ain’t what she used to be, many long years ago.”
It’s an agricultural commodity just like corn or soybeans. You can’t grow your way out of an oversupply..
Crazy that those numbers from over a month of raids are almost equal to just a few raids on a few large properties. Hmm, do you think people got a little greedy in the last 40 years??
Only 64,579 plants ? Today that would be one agro farm. Times sure have changed, and, not for the better…
some of the grass in the background is still green and I would assume this photo is in October.
Little did they know all they had to do was legalize it and the industry would crash and burn.
$400 an ounce straight up back in the day….easy $5,000-$6,400 a pound…..now a pound is $200…..
I just traded a cord of fir firewood for a fantastic pound…
Those are the plants 🪴 that built Southern Humboldt and today’s legal cannabis industry……
Whoever they stole the herb from? They stole his truck too! Look close. That is not a sheriff vehicle. [edit] will always be the same until we as a society reject their rape and pillage attitudes.