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Officers with the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Department participate in an operation targeting illegal marijuana farms growing outside of Montague, Calif., on June 4, 2026. Violent crime associated with illegal marijuana grow farms has increased significantly, the sheriff said. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Inside California’s Battle With the Marijuana Black Market

A convoy of sheriff’s deputies heads into a vast network of illegal marijuana grow operations in the foothills of Mount Shasta in California’s Siskiyou County.

They drive into a dusty encampment strewn with garbage and piles of empty plastic fertilizer containers, a blight on the otherwise scenic landscape.

The morning raid is nothing new for Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue.

Thousands of makeshift greenhouses known as “hoop houses”—each one containing hundreds of illegally grown cannabis plants—are operating in the county at any given time, LaRue told The Epoch Times, as his deputies scoured the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision, a 20-minute drive northeast of Weed, Calif.

The sheriff’s office has counted 2,732 hoop houses using satellite and aerial imagery in the subdivision alone.

By the time he arrived at the scene on June 4, all the occupants had fled.

Spotters at these illegal grow sites—sometimes armed with AK-47s and rifles, according to nearby residents—alert laborers to leave the camp when they see sheriff’s deputies approaching.

Except for a few roosters, an older German shepherd, and a couple of curious pups, the site was abandoned. The occupants had already cleared out when an advance team of investigators approached the camp earlier that morning.

They know the drill.

About 430 flowering marijuana plants were found in each of two 30-by-100 foot hoop houses. Agents from the regional North State Marijuana Investigation Team weighed about 900 pounds of freshly cut marijuana plants that were hanging to dry in another slightly larger greenhouse.

All the marijuana was destroyed. No one was arrested, according to the sheriff’s office.

The team had served a search warrant on the same property last August and arrested the property owner, Haizhou Wang, then 56, who was on-site at the time.

Cannabis industry experts estimate that more than 30 million pounds of illicit marijuana are grown in the United States annually.

Siskiyou County alone produces about 17.8 million pounds of illegal marijuana every year, with a “low-end” estimated local street value of about $3.6 billion based on sales at $200 a pound, according to the sheriff’s office. (More)

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A lady knows how to host a dinner or party with grace and good etiquette. (FreshSplash/Getty Images)

What Is a Lady in the 21st Century?  

For many people, that question raises up a thicket of snags and thorns, equivalent to Winston Churchill’s description of Russian geopolitical ambitions as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Certain traditional signs of etiquette readily identify a gentleman, at least as a starting point of definition and discussion. On public transportation, for instance, a gentleman stands to offer his seat to an elderly grandmother or a pregnant mom. He holds the door of a café open for others. Inside the café, he offers his companion the seat with the best view of the room. He stands when greeting a friend or a stranger.

It’s different for women. When they extend these same courtesies, they are more often tagged as nice or polite than as ladylike. In fact, the very word “lady” is far less common in today’s society than “gentleman.” 

As writer and fashion designer Marisa Pereira noted in “When Is a Woman a ‘Lady’?,” our culture has pushed “lady” aside as having “a pejorative connotation,” especially when “used as an informal, often brusque, form of address to a woman: I’m sorry, lady, but you have the wrong number.”

Meanwhile, we frequently read or hear that chivalry and gentlemanly conduct are dead, though many of us see it exhibited in our everyday lives. But what about the gentlewoman? Has she gone the way of fans and parasols? What, if anything, does it mean to be a lady these days? (More)

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