California's New Pot Patch

Los Angeles County Blossoms as a Rival to North's Renowned 'Emerald Triangle'

By TAMARA AUDI
WSJ

Northern California's so-called Emerald Triangle, famous for marijuana farms that supply much of the U.S. with high-quality pot, is facing competition from hundreds of miles away—in Los Angeles County.

As this year's marijuana-harvest season gets under way, law-enforcement officials are focused on the Southern California county, which by some measures has bloomed into the nation's most productive pot garden.

A marijuana-eradication operation in September 2009 in the Angeles National Forest north of Los Angeles, where cultivation is on the rise.

Law-enforcement agents seized more than 734,000 pot plants in Los Angeles County last year—the highest number of seizures in the country for that year. The haul surpassed those even in California's most-prolific northern counties, with the biggest 2009 seizure coming from Shasta County at 629,000 plants.

Northern California as a whole still grows most of the nation's pot, according to law-enforcement officials. But the drastic spike in Los Angeles County pot-plant seizures has law-enforcement officials trying to figure out what is behind the increase, and whether it represents a real shift in the lucrative pot trade.

"Is it that there are more grows out there, or are we getting better at finding them?" said Federal Drug Enforcement Administration spokeswoman Sarah Pullen of the pot-growing camps being set up in Southern California. "Was last year an anomaly, or is there something different going on in the state?"

(Original here.)