“You can ask a high dollar around the world for it,” she said. Lily Morgan, a Republican from the small city of Grants Pass, the county seat of Josephine County. The region produces top-quality weed that is “the microbrew of cannabis,” said state Rep. Officials believe the cartels selected southern Oregon because it’s considered part of the the fabled marijuana-growing Emerald Triangle, a zone in which California’s Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties form the major part.
They produce tons of marijuana that is sold outside the state. The number of illegal marijuana farms in the region, which are not part of Oregon’s legal and regulated marijuana system, surged this year, with some even emerging alongside state highways.
“Many times they’ll just pay them because they don’t want any kind of interaction with the state,” Keesee-Morales said. Some of workers who say they were cheated have contacted Unete, which has tried to help by calling the pot-farm managers and warning them that they could face complaints filed with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industry if they don’t pay the workers what they are owed, Keesee-Morales said. “We’ve had several cases in Josephine County, where they were threatened with guns to their heads, ‘If you guys tell anybody, we’re going to harm your family in Mexico,’ or ‘We’re going to shoot you,’” said Kathy Keesee-Morales, co-director of Unete, an immigrant and farmworker advocacy group based in Medford, Oregon. And some managers of the illegal operations are refusing to pay workers and have threatened them with violence if they go to the authorities or try to quit, according to law enforcement officials and a group that advocates for the migrant and farm worker rights.