In late June of 2015, a convoy of vehicles carrying enforcement officers from four different counties of northern California drove up and into the remote and rugged slopes of Island Mountain. The mountain had been given its name by eighteenth century settlers who observed that it was nearly surrounded by the waters of the Eel River and its tributaries. 2 Today it represents" the dark green heart of the Emerald Triangle," a region known for its prolific cultivation of marijuana. 3 The enforcement officers conducted open field searches on private lands, and by the end of the weeklong" Operation Emerald Tri-County," had confiscated 86,578 marijuana plants. 4

While police raids of marijuana farms are nothing new for the area, this particular operation raised some eyebrows. Unusually for a raid of this magnitude, no federal officials were involved-the raid was a wholly state operation. 5 Since legalizing the medicinal use and cultivation of 6 marijuana in 1996, California has been reticent to allocate state resources toward marijuana enforcement, decriminalizing possession of small amounts statewide in 20O and capping civil fines at $ ioo.'Also unusual were the lands being targeted by the county officers. Seventy percent of marijuana plants seized by law enforcement are illegally grown on public lands, 8 but this operation went after privately held marijuana grows with some measure of legal protection under the state's Compassionate Use Act. 9 Until this point, a state raid of private lands was uncommon. The raid thus signaled a shift in the enforcement of marijuana laws, but not because the counties were cracking down on marijuana per se. Marijuana, like every other crop in the state, had fallen victim to water scarcity.