SOS Forests

An Interview with John Twiss

“Mexican drug cartels today are on 57 national forests, in 15 states, that we know of, and they operate in every region with the exception of Regions 1, 2, and 10.  A large grow operation today would be 125,000 plants plus, on 2 to 10 acres of land.  The growers today are armed, often with automatic weapons, and violent.  Given the right situation they will protect that plantation and they’ll shoot at you. It’s a very rapidly expanding, dangerous situation.”

“The issue at hand is the illegal occupancy of your National Forests by armed foreign nationals who will hurt you if you threaten their income stream - and it doesn’t matter who you are.”

From An Interview with John Twiss, the Director of Law Enforcement and Investigations, US Forest Service. The entire interview is posted below:

***************

FS Today, 09/05/2008, [here]

The late days of summer and early days of fall are the harvest times on the marijuana plots that appear in many of the national forests.

These are the days when Forest Service Law Enforcement Officers and Agents, often accompanied by local, state and federal authorities, confiscate the largest number of plants. The figures increase each year.

Forest Service Director of Law Enforcement and Investigations (LEI), John Twiss has characterized this situation as, “… the illegal occupancy of your Federal public lands by armed foreign nationals.”

An Oregon native, John Twiss earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Forest Management in 1973 from Oregon State University following military service. He assumed the position as Director of Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations in Washington, DC in July of 2005.

Prior to that, Twiss served as the Forest Service Liaison to Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey and as Special Assistant to Forest Service Chief, Dale Bosworth. From 1995 to 2005, he was the Forest Supervisor of the 1.2 million acre Black Hills National Forest, located in South Dakota and Wyoming.

Twiss started his career in federal service in 1965 as a seasonal employee with the National Park Service at Yellowstone National Park.  He next served as a Forest Service smokejumper for 9 years at Redmond, Oregon. After assignments in Nevada, Utah, and Idaho, Twiss served as a District Ranger in Idaho and Oregon, Deputy Forest Supervisor in Minnesota and as the Agency’s National Wilderness Leader in Washington, DC.

John’s wife Jackie is a graphic illustrator with the Forest Service. Their daughter Jill is a comedian in New York City.

FS Today: What is LEI’s role in the Forest Service?

Twiss:  It’s really to protect the natural resources, the public, and our employees. You do that through enforcement and investigation efforts.  Protection of our visitors and employees is our highest priority.

Our uniformed Law Enforcement Officers handle most of the field violations and our Special Agents take on the more complex investigations.

FS Today: Do they conduct crime scene investigations such as those you would see on television?

Twiss:  Yes, they are very similar. Our folks go through all the analysis that you’d see in a lot of the crime shows, for resource crimes and crimes against people. We have exceptional expertise in natural resource crimes and complex fire investigations.

We are often asked to share our resource and fire investigative techniques and experience with others. We work with countries like Jordan, Bulgaria, Greece, Canada, Australia, Indonesia, Thailand and some of the South American countries to help them with their issues.  Part of it is forensics, but a lot of it is experience, technique and prevention.

FS Today:  Are resource crimes a problem in the United States?

Twiss:  Resource theft is an ongoing problem, particularly on the national forests, because you can make a lot of money stealing the public’s trees, forest products and natural resources.  Resource damage is also a large problem.

FS Today:  There’s another area where people are making a lot of money.  Probably the most dynamic activity I think LEI gets involved in is marijuana eradication. Speak a little bit about the change in the grow patterns that you’ve seen in the last 10 or 15 years.

Twiss:  Let’s go back 20 years. Marijuana being grown on the national forests, primarily by local residents, was primarily in Western Oregon, California and the South.  About 15 years ago we started to notice Mexican nationals growing marijuana on about ten national forests in the country, mostly in Southern and Central California.

We then started to see that a lot of these Mexican nationals were displacing local growers and the plantations were getting far bigger.  Ten years ago if we found a marijuana plantation of 5,000 plants that was a very big plantation.

Mexican drug cartels today are on 57 national forests, in 15 states, that we know of, and they operate in every region with the exception of Regions 1, 2, and 10.  A large grow operation today would be 125,000 plants plus, on 2 to 10 acres of land.  The growers today are armed, often with automatic weapons, and violent.  Given the right situation they will protect that plantation and they’ll shoot at you. It’s a very rapidly expanding, dangerous situation.

The issue at hand is the illegal occupancy of your National Forests by armed foreign nationals who will hurt you if you threaten their income stream - and it doesn’t matter who you are.

I think you should be able to go out on your favorite Forest safely without worrying about being harmed by somebody simply because you’re hiking near their dope patch.

The second issue besides the safety of our visitors and employees is the resource damage that is caused by the drug organizations’ activities.

Toxic chemicals such as herbicides, pesticides, animal poisons, and fertilizers that they often bring in from Mexico and are often banned in this country, leach into the soil.  They cut trees, start fires and kill wildlife on a regular basis.  The amount of garbage that they leave behind is huge.  The diversion and pollution that they cause to our streams and the compaction and erosion on the soils is significant. It’s a large problem from several different aspects, not to mention the miles and miles of plastic water pipe that are out there. These folks know how to move water a long way.

Another fact that I think is appalling is that 75% of the marijuana being grown on Federal public lands is being grown on the national forests.  We estimate there are 4,500+ Mexican growers today on our national forests.  The forests have become a major supplier of the marijuana consumed in this country.

FS Today:  It’s a pretty profitable venture isn’t it? It has a pretty good profit margin.

Twiss:  All the research done by DEA and other law enforcement agencies show marijuana as the most profitable drug.  It’s often the drug that supports other drugs.  We’ve learned that the Mexican cartels are poly-drug organizations; they deal with any kind of drug where they can make money.  They are dealing with cocaine, with methamphetamines, and with heroin.

Mexico is the Colombia of today.  Ninety-five percent of the drugs that come into this country are coming through Mexico.

The cartel wars have gotten so violent on the Mexican side of the border and down around the border areas of the United States that it’s almost rampant.  The government of Mexico has a huge battle going with the drug cartels, and these are the same cartels we suspect are growing marijuana up in our national forests. It’s not a good situation.

The Forest Service has recognized this danger and, in Forest Service law enforcement, it’s our number-one priority to solve.  We’ve partnered with just about everybody that we know that has an interest or responsibility here and developed a strategy that we think is going to be effective.  It’s going to require some money, resources, and dedication.  And it’s going to have to be flexible - to shift - because as we’re successful in certain areas we know they’re going to adjust their methods and strategies.

We’re dealing with many different federal, state and local agencies and our strategy is twofold; it’s to investigate and eradicate.  If you’re able to follow the money, seize it, and make arrests, you’re eventually going to dismantle the organization.  If you’re able to locate and remove their crop, obviously their profits are gone and they will move elsewhere.  That’s our strategy.

FS Today:  What about methamphetamine labs?  That was a hot topic five years ago.  Is it as much of a problem or…

Twiss:  It’s not as large of a problem as it used to be, but it’s still a problem.  You still find them out in the national forests, but it’s far less of a problem than it was five to ten years ago.

One of the reasons I hear most often cited was the law that eliminated the large amounts of pseudo-ephedrine that you used to be able to get in the United States.  Now we’re finding that the methamphetamines are being imported from Mexico.

FS Today:  If you weren’t tying up all of these resources on eradication and investigation, how would you be able to use your funding?

Twiss:  We’d be investigating a lot more resource crimes out on the national forests; crimes such as forest products theft.  We’re not doing anywhere near the work that we should be doing there.  OHV (off highway vehicle) violations, resource damage, property theft, trespass, fire investigations, vandalism, illegal dumping, and crime prevention need a lot more attention.

I also think we would be quicker to respond to crimes against people.  We are seeing more violent crimes out in the forest than we’ve seen in the past. One of the theories behind this increase is simply the growth of the urban interface; a lot more people are living closer to the forest.

With the number of violent people in our forests and the number of assaults that we have had on officers, we need to invest more in safety training and better defensive tools.  We never envisioned ten years ago that it would be necessary for us to invest in riot control training, pepperball guns, and Tasers to survive.

FS Today:  Since we’re talking about technology, speak a little bit about the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - UAVs, drones.

Twiss:  We’re looking for any kind of technology that gives our officers an advantage when they’re out there working around dangerous people.  The small UAVs were a tool we examined to enable us to get a look at people in marijuana gardens before we went in to raid them.  The UAVs, we think, will be able to tell us how many people we have in a marijuana plantation and if they’re armed.  Our hope is that we can take a little bit closer look before we go in and avoid getting into a shoot-out.

FS Today:  Are you learning anything in the eradication effort that’s helping the general workload of LEOs and special agents?  Is there a positive aspect?

Twiss:  That’s a good question.  Yes.  The biggest thing that I think is going to benefit us in the long run is the building of new partnerships.

In order to run these Mexican drug trafficking organizations off our National Forests, it’s going to take the help of everyone.  I’m happy to say that we have cooperation today at unprecedented levels and we are learning how to be better partners.  It’s to our advantage to blur the lines of responsibility on occasion.

We are beyond our capability as an agency in dealing with international drug organizations.  We are really good in forested settings and we have some top-notch investigators and officers.  As you start to leave the national forests, which are where the drugs and the money go, we have to ask for help from others.  And as you leave this country to pursue the Mexican cartels, obviously we need help from investigators that work internationally.

Learning the culture of some of these agencies so that we can work with them is really an ongoing effort. Learning the priorities and values of the FBI, DEA, and ATF, for example, is very important. You have to understand them before you can work with them successfully. It’s interesting, frustrating, and rewarding at times.

In the long term, I think that as we build coalitions with Federal and State and local agencies that also deal with these kinds of issues, we’re all going to be really well prepared for any kind of forest problems we have in the future and we’ll have trust and bonds built.

FS Today:  That brings up the subject of new technology and the way you have to adapt to it. Now you have satellite and GPS and GIS, UAVs - all of those tools. That has to increase the learning curve of all your personnel.

Twiss:  It definitely has and we’ve had to work with agencies and companies that have expertise in these areas to help us become proficient.  The growers are also improving their technology.

Here’s a good example. We were out in a marijuana garden recently and we found cameras that the growers had mounted in the trees. The cameras are tripped simply by motion detection and then the cameras start to transmit and record our activities.  We needed to learn the cameras’ capabilities. We know the growers have lookouts and listening devices.  We know that they have radios that are often better than ours, so we have to learn and adapt.  They are very smart.

FS Today:  The DEA estimates the profit margin for an investment of $10,000 is $2 million or something like that.  It’s a very lucrative business.  The DEA values are about $2,000 a plant.

Twiss:  According to the Gettman report marijuana is the largest cash crop in the U.S., more valuable than corn and wheat combined. $2,000 a plant, which is one pound of processed marijuana, is a pretty conservative wholesale value.  The value can range up to $3,500 a pound wholesale.

In 2007, we cut 2.1 million marijuana plants off 57 national forests that were worth almost $5 billion - wholesale.  That’s greater than the Forest Service budget.  And we estimated that we got a small percentage of what’s actually out there.  The total value of marijuana being grown on the National Forests today is estimated at $20 - $25 billion.

Ten years ago, we eradicated 318,000 plants off 14 National Forests for a value of $636 million. You can see the rapid growth and money involved.

FS Today:  You’ve spoken primarily about the West.  There’s a cannabis problem in Kentucky.  Can you talk a little bit about that?

Twiss:  There’s been an area that for years has been heavy in illegal drugs and alcohol.  You find a lot of methamphetamine in the Daniel Boone National Forest and a lot of marijuana.  The Forest Service has joined a drug task force in Kentucky to focus on drugs on the Daniel Boone and it’s been very successful.  But what we found is the people that are growing marijuana or making meth are almost all locals.  They haven’t been penetrated by the Mexican nationals and I guess you can speculate on the reasons why.

FS Today:  It harkens back to moonshining?

Twiss:  That’s what the local agents think.  It’s kind of a substitute for money they used to make for moonshine.

FS Today:  Thank you for your time John.