Herbicide spraying in the United States

Herbicide spraying in the United States was the destruction of marijuana fields inside the United States with herbicides, first paraquat and later glyphosate. Florida police sprayed a field with paraquat in August 1982. In August 1983 the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sprayed paraquat on marijuana in national forests in Georgia and Kentucky, until lawsuits by local residents, environmental groups and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) stopped it; a consent judgment of 8 November 1983 barred paraquat on federal land until the DEA had prepared an environmental impact statement.^: 126–127 In 1990 the DEA sprayed marijuana in Hawaii from helicopters with glyphosate. NORML reported in 1996 that such spraying had gone on there for nearly a decade.

Paraquat-contaminated marijuana from the Mexican programme had led Congress to bar foreign aid for such spraying from 1979 to 1981 (see Herbicide spraying in Mexico). Both the Florida and the federal sprayings were presented as demonstrations for the Latin American governments that the United States was urging to spray. The campaign is one of several described at Herbicide spraying of cannabis.

Background

The DEA began its Domestic Marijuana Eradication Program in 1978, working with the states, in response to growing illegal cultivation on public and private land. It destroyed plants by hand, by burning and by spraying herbicides. In 1981 the DEA prepared an environmental assessment that found paraquat did not significantly affect the environment. It therefore filed no environmental impact statement; a federal court upheld that conclusion in 1982 in a case brought by NORML.

Marijuana growing in the national forests came before a Senate subcommittee in September 1982. A Family Weekly article reprinted in the printed transcript of a Senate hearing that September reported a Forest Service estimate that more than a quarter of the marijuana harvested in the country the year before had come from them, and called California the country's top producer, with Hawaii, Oregon, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Tennessee close behind. The article quoted NORML's California coordinator, Fran McDermott, who said that there had been "virtually no domestic cultivation" until 1978 and that the panic over paraquat in Mexico "was the immediate impetus for starting a new cultivation industry".^: 138–141 In 1982 the Forest Service asked the DEA for help. The DEA decided to use herbicides in the 1983 harvest season. The House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control wrote that Colombia's continued reluctance to spray marijuana with paraquat, together with the growth of domestic cultivation, led the DEA to spray at home.^: 127

Florida, 1982

In July 1982 the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) announced that it would spray marijuana fields in remote areas of central Florida with paraquat. State officials said that federal efforts to block marijuana shipped through Florida had raised the demand for marijuana grown in the state. They planned to use hand sprayers and to guard each field for about 72 hours until the leaves had wilted, so that none of the sprayed crop could be sold. NORML sued in state court on 19 July to stop the spraying. Chevron Chemical, the main American distributor of paraquat, said that the product had never been meant for use on marijuana fields. The Family Weekly article reported that Chevron joined NORML as a plaintiff and that the suit halted the programme for a time.^: 141

On 28 August 1982 the FDLE and the Walton County sheriff's office sprayed a field at Red Bay, in the Florida panhandle. United Press International reported that this was the first use of paraquat on a marijuana field in the United States, that the field covered 80 acres and held an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 plants and that a 500-gallon spray truck did the work in two hours. The spraying was meant to show South American governments that Florida practised what it urged on them. The FDLE's letter to the Senate subcommittee describes a smaller operation: one quart of paraquat, applied from 10:07 in the morning over about two hours. The plants had dried within 30 hours and were burned within 48. The department concluded that paraquat was a "viable and cost effective alternative to manual eradication" where a site suited it.^: 141–142

The federal spraying of 1983

The DEA sprayed paraquat on marijuana in the Chattahoochee National Forest in northern Georgia on 12 August 1983, without disclosing the time or the exact site. North Georgia residents and citizens' groups sued. On 15 August the federal court in Atlanta restrained the DEA from spraying again in Georgia. On 19 August a DEA helicopter took less than seven minutes to spray three plots of 20 by 40 feet, holding about 160 plants, at Bullskin Ridge in the Redbird Purchase area of the Daniel Boone National Forest, near London, Kentucky. Two more helicopters carried government film crews. The government planned to show the film to Latin American officials whom it had asked to start similar programmes. The spraying went ahead over the objections of Kentucky's governor, John Y. Brown Jr., and of the state's congressional delegation. A federal judge refused a restraining order. Nine other plots were cut by hand because spraying them was judged an environmental hazard. The plan would also have taken in national parks and forests in Tennessee.^: 127

On 1 September 1983 the Sierra Club, two other environmental groups and NORML sued in Washington to stop the DEA spraying paraquat anywhere in the country without an environmental impact statement. On 13 September Judge June L. Green of the federal district court in Washington granted a temporary restraining order, saying that the government appeared to have needed an impact statement before it began; the DEA gave up spraying for the rest of the season. On 8 November she entered a consent judgment that barred the DEA from using or authorising paraquat on federal land until it had prepared the statement.^: 127 A DEA official told The Christian Science Monitor in December that the statement could be filed by the following spring or summer. In June 1984 the Atlanta court refused the Georgia plaintiffs their legal fees, holding that the government's position had been substantially justified.

The House narcotics committee supported the DEA's aim. It urged the agency to meet every statutory requirement before acting, warning that the effort to persuade other countries to spray paraquat would be "irreparably damaged" if the United States became caught up in an unnecessary controversy over the herbicide at home.^: 127

Glyphosate and Hawaii

In July 1988 the DEA said that its new campaign against home-grown marijuana, Operation Stop Crop, might spray paraquat, 2,4-D and glyphosate; it then said that paraquat would be used only on private land.

In 1990 the DEA, the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources and the National Guard ran Operation Wipeout against growers of high-grade cannabis across Hawaii, funded by a federal grant. With herbicidal spraying and cutting by hand, it destroyed more than 700,000 plants, by the Justice Department's estimate three-quarters of the state's summer crop. William W. Mendel of the Army's Foreign Military Studies Office wrote in 1992 that during the operation, from August to October 1990, the DEA's experimental spot-spraying from helicopters had used glyphosate, sold as Roundup, mixed with soap as a sticking agent and Red Dye No. 23.

In October 1996 NORML reported that DEA-coordinated eradication had for nearly a decade sprayed a glyphosate herbicide from low-flying helicopters over suspected marijuana patches on Hawaii Island. Residents of Kaʻū complained of nausea, headaches, eye irritation and bronchial trouble. One campaigner alleged that diesel fuel was sometimes added to the mix. An official of the state land department told NORML that the claims were "erroneous", that nothing was added to the herbicide and that the helicopters did not spray near houses. A DEA spokesman told a local television station that the procedure was under review and that an updated environmental impact statement would follow the next year.

Effects on growers

The Family Weekly article of 1982 described growers in the national forests turning to several small patches in place of one field, so that only one or two would be found.^: 140 Mendel wrote that Operation Wipeout forced Hawaiian growers off public land into more expensive indoor sites and that the price of marijuana there rose from $2,500 to $6,000 a pound.

Map

Eradication event locations

Timeline

	Date	Category	Event	State	Locality
News:1990-08-01/Eradication/dea-hawaiis-land-department-and-the-national-guard-spray-and-cut-marijuana-in-operation-wipeout	1 August 1990	Eradication	DEA, Hawaii's land department and the National Guard spray and cut marijuana in Operation Wipeout	Hawaii
News:1983-08-19/Eradication/dea-helicopter-sprays-paraquat-on-three-marijuana-plots-at-bullskin-ridge-in-kentucky	19 August 1983	Eradication	DEA helicopter sprays paraquat on three marijuana plots at Bullskin Ridge in Kentucky	Kentucky
News:1983-08-12/Eradication/dea-and-georgia-begin-spraying-marijuana-with-paraquat-in-the-chattahoochee-national-forest	12 August 1983	Eradication	DEA and Georgia begin spraying marijuana with paraquat in the Chattahoochee National Forest	Georgia (U.S. state)
News:1982-08-28/Eradication/florida-police-spray-a-marijuana-field-at-red-bay-with-paraquat	28 August 1982	Eradication	Florida police spray a marijuana field at Red Bay with paraquat	Florida

See also

• Carlton E. Turner
• Herbicide spraying in Mexico
• Herbicide spraying of cannabis
• United States
• United States and cannabis eradication abroad