Archives for May 26, 2019

Authorities said Friday they raided hundreds of black market marijuana operations in Colorado that flouted the state’s cannabis law by growing tens of thousands of plants in Denver-area homes and selling the drugs out of state.

Investigators seized more than 80,000 plants and 2,040 kilograms of harvested marijuana, state and federal prosecutors said at a news conference. Officers raided 247 homes and eight businesses and arrested 42 people in Denver and seven nearby counties.

State law allows up to 12 marijuana plants per residence for personal use, but some of the homes had more than 1,000 and many had hundreds, said U.S. Attorney Jason Dunn.

Colorado and nine other states have broadly legalized marijuana use but it remains illegal under federal law. That has created tension between some state and federal officials.

But George Brauchler, district attorney for the south and east Denver suburbs, stressed the investigation was a joint state-federal operation, not the U.S. Department of Justice imposing its will on Colorado.

“Make no mistake, we are equal partners in this,” Brauchler said.

State and federal officials said the nearly three-year investigation showed that illegal marijuana trafficking mushroomed after voters approved recreational use in 2012.

Dunn said Colorado has become the epicenter for a nationwide black market in marijuana.

Brauchler warned that Colorado is becoming “the wild West of weed.” He said the provision in the law that allows small-scale home marijuana cultivation opened the door to big, illegal operations.

Brauchler warned that other states considering allowing home marijuana plants could expect the same but added he was not trying to discourage them from doing so.

“I think states are entitled to do whatever they want,” he said. “But they need to know the reality of this.”

Mason Tvert, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, which advocates for decriminalizing marijuana, questioned how prosecutors know that Colorado’s law attracted illegal growers.

“Did they conduct a survey of illegal marijuana cultivators to determine why they decided to operate where they did?” he said. “Are they able to know whether those operations existed prior to legalization or not?”

Tvert blamed the illegal operations on states that still ban marijuana, and said if they legalized and regulated it as Colorado does, there would be little illegal production.

Dunn said investigators plan to use federal forfeiture laws to seize 41 homes, 25 vehicles and $2.2 million in cash connected to the marijuana operations.

He said the 41 homes have an average market value of $400,000.

“These grow operations are not occurring in abandoned houses or poor parts of the metro area,” he said. “These are happening in middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods where many of us live and raise families, and they’re occurring all over the metro area.”

William McDermott of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency said the Colorado operations did not appear to be violent. He said officers seized a few guns but would not say how many.

Sixteen of the suspects were arrested on federal drug charges and 26 on state charges.

Members of the Lummi Nation, Swinomish, Suquamish and Tulalip Tribes will speak at review

In a lifetime of fishing on the Salish Sea, Jay Julius of the Lummi Nation in Washington State says he’s seen environmental degradation in the area first-hand.

“We are at the tipping point and I think Mother Nature is speaking very loudly — the salmon, the conditions of the salmon, the conditions of the orca,” said Julius, one of the nation’s leaders. 

Lummi, a Coast Salish nation near Bellingham, is one of four Indigenous communities from the state just south of B.C.’s Lower Mainland sending members to present their case at a federal review panel hearing on the proposed Roberts Bank terminal expansion on Saturday.

The Swinomish, Suquamish and Tulalip Tribes will also be represented.

The Roberts Bank Terminal 2 (RBT2) expansion project would more than double the capacity of the current terminal which sits just north of the U.S. border in Delta.

The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority project would create 108 hectares of new land and add enough capacity to handle 2.4 million 20-foot shipping containers per year.

For Julius, the expansion sounds like a bad idea.

“We know that this is not going in the right direction,” he said, adding that his livelihood — and that of his nation — depends on fishing.

“Is this going to improve the environment? Is it going to improve the condition of the Salish Sea as a whole? Is it going to improve the starvation the orcas are facing and the destruction that we’re doing today to the Salish Sea?” Julius said.

He said he hopes Canadian authorities take the views of First Nations seriously — even if they’re based in the United States — before making a decision on RBT2. Julius noted that his nation has ties to communities, lands and waters in Canada that go back generations — long before the international boundary was created.

Enviro design

Duncan Wilson with the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority says it will work with Indigenous communities to address concerns.

The expansion project has been designed to minimize environmental impacts. Wilson says there are also other environmental initiatives in place such as having vessels are slow down where whales are currently active.

Public hearings on the project began May 14 and will continue through to June 24.

‘There’s this potential for regular bombardment,’ researcher says

Over the past few decades, astronomers have wondered if a nearby swarm of material — one through which Earth crosses — may hold rocks that could pose a danger to people on Earth.

Now a Canadian research team is calling for closer examination of this region, called the Taurid meteor swarm, as it prepares for its closest pass in more than 40 years during an upcoming meteor shower in June.

David Clark, Peter Brown and Paul Weigert, of Western University in London, Ont., have published a paper in the online repository arXiv.org, outlining the best time for astronomers to search the Taurid meteor swarm for any sign of large, dangerous rocks. The paper has also been accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“In the next month or so, we’re going to be making the closest pass to the centre of this Taurid swarm — the closest we’ve made since 1975,” said Brown, a professor of physics and astronomy at Western.

“So for the first time with modern instruments, we can actually test the hypothesis that there’s all this very dense material, home to tens [of metres] to hundreds of metres-sized objects, by actually looking … at that centre.”

Though meteors can be seen on any given night, we also get meteor showers, or times of increased activity. There is, on average, a major meteor shower almost every month; they happen because Earth is plowing through debris left behind by a passing comet or asteroid.

The Taurids — associated with the Comet 2P, or Encke — are meteor showers that occur twice a year: Once in June (during the day) and again in October through November (at night).

It’s also believed that Comet Encke is a piece of a larger comet that broke apart, creating a pile of debris that is being held in its orbit by Jupiter’s gravity. This pile is massive: Roughly 75 million kilometres by 150 million kilometres — a ribbon of rocks going around the sun.

Few of the meteors we see in the night sky reach the ground, instead burning up in our atmosphere.

But that isn’t always true for some of the larger rocks, like the 20-metre-wide object that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, injuring more than 1,000 people after an accompanying air burst caused windows to explode.

Finding clues

Some astronomers, including Brown and his team, believe the core of the Taurid swarm could be hiding Chelyabinsk-sized rocks — or larger. And if it is, it could mean that Earth is likely to experience a large space rock exploding in the atmosphere more often than once in a thousand years, as is the current belief. 

The largest impact event ever recorded on Earth took place on June 30, 1908, when the sky over central Siberia seemed as though it had been set afire and a loud bang echoed across the forested landscape.

An occurrence now known as the Tunguska event, it saw a 37-metre-wide, 100,000-kilogram rock enter our atmosphere, travelling at 54,000 km/h, and explode, releasing energy equivalent to 185 Hiroshima bombs.

It’s believed to have flattened more than 80 million trees.

Brown and others believe the Tunguska meteor was consistent with the Taurid meteor swarm.

More recently, in 2015, the orbits of two large asteroids — one measuring 250 metres in diameter — were traced back to the Taurid meteor swarm, further strengthening the argument.

‘Potential for regular bombardment’

Astronomers and telescopic sky surveys, however, have already found about 90 per cent of objects large enough that they would cause damage should they collide with Earth. These near-Earth objects, or NEOs, typically originate from two areas: the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the Kuiper belt, beyond the orbit of Pluto.

But the rocks that could be lurking in the Taurids would be very different.

“The Taurid swarm is a totally different animal. It’s suspected of having relatively large objects, from 100 metres to one kilometre … and they’re clustered, so they’re not hitting at random times,” said the paper’s lead author, David Clark.

“There’s this potential for regular bombardment. That just changes the stats altogether, both from what’s the probability of us getting hit by something … [to] the distribution. It’s a regular pounding.”

Looking ahead

While this June will mark the closest that Earth has passed to the swarm since 1975, even closer passes are still to come — in 2032 and 2036.

According to Brown, that could be worrisome.

“If the hypothesis of the Taurid swarm being really, really dense is correct, it means, in fact, the impact hazard to Earth may not be a random … process,” said Brown. “In fact, there may be periods of time where the impact hazard is thousands or millions of times greater than the random background [meteors], and there are very specific intervals where we should be concerned about impacts.”

However, these intervals might only come once every century, said Brown.

Finding these large objects will be a challenge, as they will be quite dim. But both Clark and Brown hope to get some time on large telescopes capable of handling the challenge.

Whether or not large objects are found during the June shower, Clark believes the swarm is worthy of further study.

“If we’re talking a 100-metre object, we’re not talking civilization-destroying event. But we’re talking a potential Tunguska ground-clearing event over Toronto, over New York City. It would be a disaster,” Clark said. “It behooves us to understand these objects.”