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Hikers stumble upon marijuana plantation in Cuyamaca State Park
Dear Reader, I was pretty disgusted by last week’s feature article by Chuck Harper, “Citizen Pot Bust” about a bunch of wanna-be DEA douchebags playing jungle-commando in Cuyamaca for ostensibly no real reason other than the excitement of a “purpose” they discovered by accident. It was a Kipling-esque tale of how a group of friends who enjoy hiking stumble upon some pot fields by pure random chance and then thoughtlessly attribute some higher virtue and moral righteousness to the kind of crap my friends and I did when we were 11 years old and bored as hell on summer vacation. Like a group of mindless, adrenaline-fueled robots, unhinged from any moral responsibility about the greater implications of their actions, they just glom onto the Drug War bandwagon as a practical excuse for painting their faces, dressing up in camo, and running around the forest on a snipe hunt with walkie-talkies and firearms. It was the perfect amalgam of “Stand By Me” and the “Just Say No” campaign…only more trite. And if the anti-pot/pro-Drug War cause celebre wasn’t enough of a moral justification for their otherwise pointless excursions, they take it one step further with their environmentalist crusade, bemoaning the trash left behind by growers. This comes after describing in painstaking detail how exceedingly difficult it was for them to crawl and climb hand-over-fist to the most remote areas of the wild where these growers had been alone for years. Well, let’s give them a big hand for their hard-earned efforts to find a pile of sh*t in the middle of nowhere. I’ll sleep so much better tonight. It was a fitting (and, I must admit, comforting) irony to learn that after all the sweat equity they gave to their new, beloved pals in the DEA, they didn’t get one penny in compensation for their efforts. With all the impotence of a middle-school principal, the DEA offered them nothing more than a colorful sash reading, “Hall Monitor” and these jackasses are foolish enough to wear it with pride. Meanwhile, on the playground, the rest of us are waiting to kick their f*cking teeth in. Chuck, I hope you’re still out there somewhere in Cuyamaca, or Palomar, or Laguna, or Siberia for all I care, eating MRE’s and testing the batteries on your bullhorn waiting for the next Big Bust. But while you’re batting mosquitoes, sweating balls and fantasizing about the possibility of military accolades or a Guns and Ammo cover-shot, it might interest you to know that in the grander scheme of things, you are nothing more than the epitome of a “grunt” – a worthless, expendable drone to be dropped into the meat-grinder at the behest of any power-hungry thug to increase their political clout. There is nothing more un-American than you. If you truly want to serve your country, serve yourself to a mountain lion. You’ll be making the world a much better, safer place. - Michael La Jolla— February 13, 2012 1:54 p.m.