By Kevin Paulson
When I think Department of Fish and Game I picture a park ranger snooping around to see if I have my proper fishing permit or they are sitting outside the deer butcher on opening day of deer season to reprimand me because I did not fill out my deer tag correctly. I had no idea the depths of what the Department of Fish and Game actually does until I spoke to Lt. John Nores of the California Fish and Game. John gives us a glimpse in this two part interview as to just how dangerous his job actually is.
Kevin Paulson: We are here with Lieutenant John Nores from the California Department of Fish and Game. He has written a book called The Hidden War and we are going to talk to him a little bit about his book. So tell us about the premise of your book first and foremost.
Lt. John Nores: Sure basically Hidden War goes into the California Department of Fish and Wildlife's effort, the law enforcement divisions effort to fight and stop illegal trespass cannabis production in the California wild lands, private and public lands. Hidden War unlike my first book goes into the first specialized dedicated unit in the country of game wardens specifically game wardens put together for this mission. So this book covers from 2012 up until 2018 when the marijuana enforcement team which is the specialized unit I was fortunate to be able to co-found, develop and then supervise all of those officers and work with them as we develop this team to focus just on that. The unique part of the marijuana enforcement team is that even though we are skilled and have had long careers in doing traditional game Hidden War work, the hunting, the fishing and the poaching enforcement is what the public sees as more traditional game wardens doing. All of us have had a Forte for the Special Operations side of it and doing the more aggressive and dangerous jobs especially when it comes to fighting the drug cartels within our borders that are very dangerous, heavily armed and they are producing poison cannabis and using EPA banned toxins in the waterways, on our wildlife, destroying our wild lands as well as harming our public. So the book's main goal is to educate and make people aware of what is out there. We talk about how we can stop it, support the officers that are trying to stop it and the law-enforcement agencies that are besides the Department of Fish and Wildlife and just have more community awareness, because the book is titled Hidden War because even after 10 years of doing this job and preaching this message and trying to expose the issue on national television and documentaries and investigative news pieces as well as numerous publications, magazines including my first book War in the Woods, I still get even today, "I had no idea this was going on in America." Hence the name Hidden War.
Kevin: So 10 years ago, you and James Swan wrote his first book. What was basically happening at that time?
John: At that time we had the cartel presence all over California definitely embedded in California is the epicenter of it. But we still have that illegal cannabis trade going on and production from, the drug cartels from across the border all over the country. Approximately 23 to 25 other states besides California have the problem just to a lesser extent. California is the epicenter and it's the red hotbed of where it's all happened in the mass quantity, because we are one of only six true Mediterranean climates around the globe. Our soil, our sunlight, our water content, humidity, all those different environmental factors lend themselves to good cannabis cultivation, both legitimate regulated cannabis now outdoor and indoor and of course the dark side, the trespass grow side from the cartels that are doing it on our public wildlands.
Back then it was going on, but we didn't have a formalized team. Us on the law Enforcement Division side of the game warden front, we are starting to integrate and help out Sheriff's Department's and federal agencies go into some of these grow sites and help eradicate them. We try to apprehend the bad guys and then do something with the environmental damage that is left behind. At that time when we wrote the first book we were really kind of new at the game and we did not have all the knowledge we needed. We didn't have all the influence we needed to really handle the problem what we call comprehensively. So when we started the marijuana Enforcement Team pilot program in 2013, we came out with the mission that we would do a three prong approach. We would do the most aggressive apprehension attempts that we could to catch these bad guys, because they're so dangerous both to our public and to our officers. We have had six or seven gun fights in the last decade and we have narrowly avoided about 20 other gunfights because of our good k9 tactics. That just tells you the mindset of how aggressive these guys will be even when they know they are going up against a specialized tactical unit dress the part. We wanted to apprehend them as safely as possible with all the best equipment, all the best tactics, all the best officers, and all the best administrative support to do the job right. That was part one.
Part two is eradicate and get this poison cannabis out of circulation, so it never hits the street, never hits kids that are experimenting with it, never hits medicinal patients. We have to remember that all of the California cannabis grown by the cartels supply a conservative estimate of 70ish percent of the black-market cannabis for the rest of the nation. Especially in the Midwest and eastern seaboard where there is no regulation or legality. All of that is tainted with toxic poisons that were banned by the EPA over a decade ago. It is a felony to possess some of these products. they were used for agriculture, 20 years ago in America until our doctors and scientists realized how deadly they are. They are basically a nerve agent that was developed by the Nazis back in World War II and kill almost immediately when ingested, especially in a lethal quantity. So we needed to get this poison marijuana out of circulation and eradicate as many plants as we can before they ever hit the street. That's part 2.
Part 3, this is the dirty part of the job. It is the environmental reclamation and cleanup of those grow sites that are left out there that the cartels have all over our wilderness areas while public wildlands, national forests, state parks, County Parks, open space lands, and sometimes even in private ranches, very close to affluent communities, large homes, schools. We had a gun fight that I talked about in Chapter nine of the new book Hidden War that was actually in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The grow site was in the headwaters in poisoning Soquel Creek which is one of the last viable steel head migrating trout fisheries in Northern California. Even more alarming than that is a third of that grow site was on a children science camp called Camp Loma, where young kids are going out to learn outdoor education and go hiking in the summer months. That was one of the most aggressive cartel groups we have run into with fortified bunkers, overwatch positions with AK-47s and sawed-off shotguns, SKS rifles, armor-piercing ammunition. This was not your typical ad-hoc 22 rifle out there. We are talking really heavy ordnance that a military unit would be concerned about as would a law enforcement specialized team like us. To see that so close to kids, so close to our waterways, so close to the affluent Silicon Valley, the tech capital of the world just brings home how embedded and how comfortable these groups can be hiding right in plain sight.
Kevin: So these are tremendously bad guys using incredibly bad pesticides and they are controlling currently 70% of the market of illegal marijuana.
John: Exactly.
Kevin: How many people are a member of your tactical team?
John: The team is a little small for the job. Including alternate members we have 12 members on the team. I just recently retired in December. So am no longer an active member on the team but of course I stay in touch with the guys and still have an active role in networking the message and developing and learning new training tactics and staying honed, but they are not growing any larger unfortunately. We are trying to grow them to be a bigger team. They are 12 guys and two dogs. Believe me, when you read into the content in Hidden War it will bring expose to this issue for national awareness. It is to reflect the hard work of my brothers and the work they do on that team every single day. There is not a harder job that I have ever done as a California Fish and Wildlife warden in my 28 years of a blessed amazing career. All of the hot days, the heavy hikes, the dirty jobs doing cleanup. The close scrapes almost weekly with potential gunfights and then training all over the state, educating, doing what we're doing today. My job as a lieutenant and co-founder of that team the supervisor was to do as much outreach in education as I could in addition to pushing the rifle my guys in the field and do as many missions with them as I could, but educating, getting it out to press folks like you that have a good spin on it, want to get the message out in the right way, hence the book, hence the television we do. The pin is mightier than the sword, 10 years since I've written the first book, Here I am at my first you know inter-annual, I've got fellow NRA members that are just brothers and sisters and like-minded and aligned in a beautiful way with all of us on the wildlife enforcement front and they're coming up to me and hearing the story and looking at this book before they buy it and go, we had no idea there was anything like this in America on domestic soil. We have been preaching this message for over a decade since we started doing this work with the first book with three years of national Geographics hit show Wild Justice the first game were in reality TV series, documentaries like Patriot Profiles, Life at Duty, tons of investigative news pieces that they even embedded with for the Met team when I was still running it back before 2018 and it's still truly a Hidden War, hence the name of the book.
So the main goal now is exposure and fighting it as a community, as an American citizen fight through awareness, safety, funding where we need it and education. I'm certainly not going to be the Big Brother cop that is going to tell a kid, don't do drugs, don't try marijuana. That is certainly not going to influence anybody the right or wrong way. I just looked like Big Brother telling somebody is an authoritative figure making a judgment. What I am going to say in a country where we've legalized and regulated cannabis in a lot of states, to good effect in some ways and it's a bad effect in others is, knowledge is power.
So when I do a school assembly and I talk about this and I do a PowerPoint presentation with some of these graphic pictures of environmental damage, poison marijuana, punji pits that these guys are putting out to stop people from getting into their grows, the danger they pose, I want people to know that make sure you know what you're experimenting with, make sure you are not complicit and buying a product that not only may kill you because it is poisoned, but it is kind of a bloody product. You know it was done. It was created in the process of massive environmental destruction in your country basically under your radar. Right under your nose. These guys would just assume kill you then ever let you leave the woods if you run across their cash crop. They would never allow you to foil a multi-million dollar black market enterprise and you do not want to be complicit in that as a cannabis user and you certainly do not want to support that market if you can avoid it. That is something even the legitimate cannabis industry is behind the book 100%. We really saw a shift as we started to do this job on the marijuana enforcement team front fighting a unified enemy with the drug cartels from out of the country and the legitimate growing community would kind of look at what we do. We had no idea you guys were objective. We had no idea you guys were risking your lives was such a dangerous criminal. We did not know people growing cannabis in a absolutely sick way that we would never endorse her to ourselves are out there. And they termed us as a team they are earth warriors. Which was a little unorthodox team for a specialized tactical unit, but we will take it. It is kind of a kind of flattering. When the grower community normally would run from us in fear that we would put handcuffs instead of putting their hands out to be in handcuffs. They are shaking our hand. We know we are making some headway. Now we are not divisive within the cannabis industry when we really need to be against a foreign invader front.
Watch for the Winter Edition of American Outdoor News for Part II of The Hidden War