Sheriff William Honsal on Cartel Infiltration, Trafficking and Illegal Grows — Watch the Full Interview

In an interview on California Insider, an online political and cultural show hosted by Siyamak Khorrami and affiliated with The Epoch Times, Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal lays out his position on how cartels and transnational criminal networks have driven illegal marijuana cultivation across the North State, bringing forced labor, violence, pesticides, environmental destruction, and organized crime into California rural communities.

Honsal described how a five-county coalition—Humboldt, Mendocino, Trinity, Lake, and Siskiyou—was formed to tackle these issues. He says that what started as small-scale farming decades ago has morphed into big money and cartels with foreign syndicates running operations and bringing in cheap and sometimes slave labor.

According to Honsal, “It’s a misdemeanor if you’re growing seven plants or 7,000 plants,” so law enforcement is using other charges related to environmental crimes and labor violations to build cases that lead to stiffer punishments and they are going after the landowners.

“Marijuana is very labor intensive,” he said, noting that labor has become the biggest cost. “When the growers were actually able to sell the product for $3,000 a pound, labor was nothing.”

But he goes on to explain,

They could pay someone $200 a day or $200 a pound and that was no problem for a grower to do that because they’re making three grand. Well, the price has plummeted. The price is anywhere between four to five $600 a pound depending on where you’re going to sell it here legally and illegally. They can’t afford to spend even money on minimum wage jobs to bring people in to grow marijuana. At least that’s what they say. And so what they’re going to do is they brought in illegal labor.

Honsal said his team frequently encounters people who have been brought in from other countries to work on grow sites, sometimes under conditions that may amount to labor or human trafficking. “These people aren’t even the midlevel bosses,” Honsal said. “We want to get to the point where we’re taking down the the criminal organization and the people that are in charge.”

Honsal draws a distinction between human trafficking and labor trafficking. Some workers are essentially enslaved, not paid and held against their will and that’s human trafficking. Others, he explained, are brought in under poor labor conditions with minimal pay and inadequate living standards and that’s labor trafficking.

He underscores a shift in enforcement, saying, “15 years ago, everyone on a marijuana grow site was a suspect. They were handcuffed. They were taken to jail…But realistically, these people aren’t really making the money off of it…Now we want to get to the point where we’re taking down the criminal organization and the people that are in charge.”

Honsal urges harsher penalties and stronger enforcement mechanisms.

“It’s too much of a slap on the wrist, you know, for growing illegally.” He urges harsher penalties and stronger enforcement mechanisms. “[T]he state has to become serious when it comes to Track and Trace. They have to start regulating a little bit better.”

He argues, “The Department of Cannabis Control has to take an active effort in order to work with their local partners to investigate and to help regulate marijuana up and down the state. It is something that we can’t be separate. We have to work together in this. We have to again educate the public on how dangerous illegal marijuana is, what it’s doing to our environment, how people are being trafficked… .”

Honsal highlights Humboldt County’s strategy to hold landowners directly accountable for illegal grows on their properties — a shift that forced some to self-regulate after facing steep fines. He believes this model should be duplicated across the state to clamp down on the illegal market.

Watch Honsal’s full video interview on California Insider embedded above for much more on Honsal’s views and the five county coalition.