A California county cuts off water to Asian pot growers. Is it racism or crime crackdown?

Even by the standards of drought-stricken California, conditions in Mount Shasta Vista had become desperate.

A sheriff’s deputy serving a search warrant takes photographs inside a plywood home in the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision. ., Siskiyou County’s crackdown would erupt in violence and draw national attention to a bitter conflict involving race, water and the legalization of marijuana. It would also cause a federal court judge to openly question the county’s motives for implementing such harsh measures, coming as they were at a time of severe drought, record heat and extreme wildfire risk.

“In some cases, the people try to make an honest living. In other cases, we settle here to get away from cities,” said Bee Xiong, 59, who retired early and relocated his family of six from Wisconsin to start anew on 40 acres.Today, some 1,000 Hmong live in the subdivision, but county officials complain that only 80 to 84 of the numerous structures there were erected with permits.

“There have been white people growing cannabis in the county for a long time, at least back to the ’60s, without anybody batting an eye and with little mention in county records,” Petersen-Rockney said. “It just seems very coincidental that this Hmong community comes into the area, and the county is suddenly obsessed with cannabis.”

Stephen Griset turns on water for irrigation on his farm near the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision. After area residents’ wells started going dry, some blamed local farmers like Griset who were selling water from their own wells to the subdivision. The next month, the county sued Griset and another farmer for allegedly continuing to supply water to the cannabis farms.Illegal pot invades California’s deserts, bringing violence, fear, ecological destruction

For some in the Hmong community, the county’s water crackdown revived memories of the hardships they suffered while hiding from communist forces in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

What a story! Well worth reading.

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