C.A.M.P. 2009

California’s annual Campaign Against Marijuana Planting is underway again, and so is the debate over its effectiveness.

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The photograph above was taken at a CAMP raid in Shasta County, which has become the county where the state marijuana eradication program is now most active. Sonoma County ranks sixth.

CAMP is a project of the California Attorney General's Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. Spokeswoman Michelle Gregory says an increasing number of the pot growing operations they find are in hard-to-reach areas of the state. But not all of them.

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Aaron Smith is the California Policy Director for the national Marijuana Policy Project. He says the state’s aggressive attempts to reduce marijuana growing have actually contributed to the spread of new and better financed farms into remote public lands in California.

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Marijuana advocates have for years claimed that pot is California's biggest crop, and now cite govenment figures to support that claim. CAMP spokeswoman Gregory affirmed that much of California's cannabis is exported to other states. Surprisingly, Tennessee is reportedly the second leading pot producing state, far behind California.

The two tables below, as well as the graph above, are taken from the CAMP website.

Below, some of the marijuana plants shown in the earlier picture are loaded onto trucks to be taken away and destroyed. Photographs from the San Francisco Chronicle.