Last week, there was a huge bust of pot growers in Northern California.

It turns out that the primary motivation for the bust was not the growing of Marijuana, but the illegal taking of water required to grow Cannabis:

There were helicopters, SWAT teams, and nearly 100,000 marijuana plants yanked out of the ground, but last week’s massive raid in Northern California’s rugged Emerald Triangle was not your father’s pot bust. Carried out by county law enforcement with no help from the DEA, it targeted private landowners—and not just because they were growing pot, police say, but because they were illegally sucking some 500,000 gallons of water a day from a section of the nearby Eel river that is now stagnant and moss-ridden.

When pot is legal, it will no longer be grown in environmentally disastrous ways in national park land, because the growers won’t find it economically viable to do this.