Apparently our "gun-free" national parks are plagued by gun toting illegal aliens growing pot.

Marijuana cultivation in the park has increased steadily over the past 10 years. Since 2001, however, the number of plants seized in California's oldest national park has jumped eightfold.

The pot fields are financed by the Mexican drug cartels that dominate the methamphetamine trade in the adjacent Central Valley, drug-enforcement officials say. The officials say there is evidence that the cartels, in turn, have financial ties to Middle Eastern smugglers linked to Hezbollah and other groups accused of terrorism.

This is the most serious and largest assault on this park since we took control of the land in the 19th century," said Bill Tweed, Sequoia's chief naturalist. The park was established in 1890, one week before Yosemite was designated a national park.

"To have people out there, showing up with AK-47s to greet visitors � that's not how it's supposed to be in a national park. The premise of the park as a special place is now in trouble," Tweed said. So is the idea that you can put a " 'fence of law' around a national park," he said, adding that the park is "not immune from the ills of society."

So drugs are illegal, guns in National Parks are illegal, and illegal immigrants are illegal. Somewhere out there, a politician is busy thinking up a new law for these bad guys to disobey.