I gotta tell y'all about this meeting I was at the other night, where a lot of us found out about the latest threat to our nation's old-growth. It wasn't the "evil-timber-corporations" greedily raping our forests for profit as a lot of you might suspect...uh-uh. It's actually meth addicts looking for fast cash to fund their habits. (sigh)
Apparently, in the Olympic National Forest, forestry authorities believe more than 44 trees--including a 400-year-old western red cedar 7 feet across--were destroyed by methamphetamine users, according to the Seattle Times.
Six men from Grays Harbor County, Washington, were charged with first-degree theft from forests. The men are accused of having stolen wood from numerous sites and cutting down at least 19 old-growth trees to pay for their drug habits, the Times reported.
Crimes and other incidents have doubled on national forests and grasslands in the past five years, but the number of Forest Service personnel and investigators available to deal with them has remained the same.
Lack of Federal funds.
Losses on public lands in Washington alone total more than $1 million each month, says Dennis Heryford, chief investigator for Washington's Department of Natural Resources.
So it is clear to me, (and a lot of others as well) that the 21st century meth-user is a different breed of drug addict. Aside from their psychotic, sociopathic behavior, there is still the on-going scourge of mobile meth labs damaging our rivers and streams with toxic byproducts from their meth-manufacturing waste.
Talk about terrorism.
Which begs me to wonder here: just where is the right-wing/Neo-Con outrage, and subsequent "war" on this actual terrorism that is happening right here on our own homefront every day?
It seems all our worry around the "manufactured" war over "people's freedoms" in the Middle-East, (yeah...right) has led to a complete cease-fire on the war on drugs here. This nonsense has in turn produced a real, tangible form of terrorism that is wreaking havoc on us everyday, and which now looks to be taking a significant toll on our forests and land.
And this says a lot, if you ask me. Because afterall, I see meth-addicts everyday - in every state I pass through. And I still haven't run across any Al Qaeda "terrorists" yet. Not a one.
-Tom
2 comments:
really, a person should be asking him/herself - how are the Bush criminals profiting off methamphetemine?
I'm not sure I can equate drug addiction with terrorism, nevertheless, its an interesting point you make: our social/societal problems being totally neglected while we waste time, money, focus and human life in the middle east.
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