[American Thinker] A few days ago, The Daily Caller released its first investigative documentary: Cartelville USA. The film is short — only 36 minutes — and you can watch it here with a subscription or free trial. There is also an interview on the Federalist Radio Hour with the director, Jorge Ventura, which is nearly as long as the documentary itself.
In case the title doesn't give it away, the topic of Cartelville USA is a string of communities in the California desert that have been taken over by drug cartels. The cartels grow marijuana in hoop houses on land that may or may not be theirs, using slave labor and stolen water. They pack heavy weapons and gun down whoever looks too much like a rival or a threat, and they generally do as they wish.
"These drug cartels are wreaking havoc on the entire antelope valley, and nobody is talking about it," says the narrator near the beginning of the film. "This is the cartels. We are very, very close to driving down the freeway, and seeing bodies hanging from the overpasses. That is what's coming."
Ventura's disturbing look into the growing power of drug cartels on this side of the border caught my interest because it has two important political ramifications, one short-term and the other long-term. But before I discuss those in detail, a summary of what I learned from the documentary is in order.
The setting is, for the most part, in rural Los Angeles County, though it extends into neighboring counties as well. The inhabitants are, for the most part, old, working-class conservatives who settled there in their twilight years to get away from the bustle of city life, only to be rudely surprised by what is going on. And you can tell that something is deeply wrong from the get-go by the fact that most of the people Ventura interviews (the sheriff and Congressman Mike Garcia being notable exceptions) have their faces blurred to avoid recognition.
Ventura and his crew reveal how a combination of Mexican, Chinese, and Armenian organized crime syndicates are growing marijuana in hoop houses in the California desert. Some growers own the land or are in league with absentee landlords, while others are just squatters. The hoop houses, complete with lights and irrigation systems, can be set up in just a day or two, and even when police get a search warrant, the law usually allows them to take only the marijuana plants, while leaving everything else, so the whole enterprise carries surprisingly little risk.
Labor is provided by illegal aliens brought from Mexico or China and forced to work by their traffickers; water is simply stolen, often from fire hydrants.
Most Californians are unaware of the severity of the problem: in their minds, since their state already legalized marijuana, they shouldn't have to worry about this kind of thing anymore. "People just shrug their shoulders," says Ventura. "Who cares, it's just pot, like, why are we even wasting our tax dollars fighting this issue?"
Yet Proposition 64, which passed in 2016, was in many ways a half-measure. While Californians can now legally grow weed under some circumstances, there are enough licensing requirements, regulatory requirements, and production limits to ensure that it's still much more profitable to do it illegally — and that's before you add in the fact that, due to federal law still frowning on everyone involved in the cannabis trade, no money earned by selling the stuff can be deposited into a bank account. Then tally up the costs saved by using stolen water and forced labor, and it's easy to see why working outside the law is still the most profitable option. 
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