Jefferson County leads the state in pot plants seized, report reveals
Deschutes also makes the list of Oregon counties with significant drug trafficking
Published: November 16. 2009 4:00AM PST
More marijuana plants were seized and destroyed in Jefferson County than in any other Oregon county in 2008, according to a recently released report.
The Oregon High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area 2010 Threat Assessment Report also identifies Deschutes County as one of eight significant drug trafficking counties in the state, along with Clackamas, Douglas, Jackson, Marion, Multnomah, Umatilla and Washington counties. The list includes counties that are both hubs for drug distribution and have developed a coordinated law enforcement strategy for combating drug trafficking.
Chris Gibson, director of the Oregon HIDTA office, said the highways running through Central Oregon contribute to the designation of Deschutes County as an HIDTA county. U.S. Highway 97 is widely used by drug trafficking organizations, the report states, and as an alternative to Interstate 5, the state’s primary smuggling route. U.S. Highway 20 is described as an alternative east-west route to the more heavily patrolled Interstate 84.
Gibson said Deschutes County also is considered a distribution center for drug trafficking organizations supplying Central and Eastern Oregon.
The HIDTA program provides funding to the Central Oregon Drug Enforcement team, a cooperative effort between federal and state agencies, local sheriff’s offices and police departments.
Bend Police Lt. John Gautney, head of CODE, said he’s seen few significant changes in drug usage and drug distribution patterns in the area in recent years.
“We have more meth seizures this year than we had last year, more than half again as much. Marijuana plants in the past three years have been higher than in the years prior to that. We’re seeing more outdoor grows in the Central Oregon forests than we have in the past. That’s about it.”
Locally produced methamphetamine is all but nonexistent in Oregon, the report states, with just 21 methamphetamine labs seized in 2008, down 95 percent from the 448 seized in 2004. No methamphetamine labs have been seized in Deschutes County since 2004.
Gautney said there’s a lot of luck involved in uncovering outdoor marijuana growing operations, and the number of plants seized doesn’t necessarily reflect the efforts of law enforcement or the prevalence of outdoor grow sites. Seizures of marijuana grown outdoors were down nearly 70 percent statewide, and 90 percent in HIDTA counties in 2008.
“The outdoor grows this year statewide have been up over the past; last year was a pretty low year for outdoor grows, and this year it blossomed again,” he said. “It seems to go in patterns. Every so often you’ll have changes like that — you’ll have a time when you don’t have a whole lot of outdoor grows, and the next year you’ll be overrun with them.”
Deschutes County had the second-largest number of indoor marijuana plants destroyed in 2008, at 943, behind only Multnomah County’s 2,615.
The report states that heroin is available in Deschutes County in quantities of up to 1 ounce, but that larger wholesale quantities are only available in the more populous Portland metro area.
Although HIDTA’s primary focus is law enforcement, Gibson said it’s starting to entertain a more broad-based approach that focuses on prevention and treatment. Earlier this year, the Oregon HIDTA office provided a Portland-area prevention initiative with $50,000 in grant funding, he said, a first in the program’s history.
“I think were starting to move in that direction a lot more. In talking to people from the prevention and treatment world, we’ve all got this desire to work more closely together,” Gibson said. “From a national level, we’re starting to see that, and we’re sitting down at the table a lot more to talk about things.”
Scott Hammers can be reached at 541-383-0387 or at shammers@bendbulletin.com.
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