Pubdate: Sat, 25 Nov 2006
Source: Lexington Herald-Leader (KY)
Copyright: 2006 Lexington Herald-Leader
Contact:  http://www.kentucky.com/mld/heraldleader/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/240
Author: Bill Estep, South-Central Kentucky Bureau
Cited: Appalachia HIDTA 
http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/hidta/appalachia.html
Cited: Drug Policy Alliance http://www.drugpolicy.org
Cited: National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws 
http://www.norml.org
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Marijuana)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/National+Guard
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?246 (Policing - United States)

AFTER 20 YEARS, WAR ON MARIJUANA CHANGES

Police destroyed more marijuana growing outdoors in Kentucky this 
year than they had in more than a decade, according to numbers 
compiled by state police.

One factor in the increase was that the U.S. Drug Enforcement 
Administration brought in several helicopters and an airplane for six 
weeks during the summer, creating more opportunity for airborne 
spotters to find pot patches, said Lt. Ed Shemelya, head of the 
marijuana-eradication program for the Kentucky State Police.

"Anybody in this business will tell you the more eyes you get in the 
sky, the more dope you'll find," Shemelya said.

Police cut and burned 557,276 plants this year, up nearly 50,000 from 
the 2005 total and the most since 1995. Arrests also were up: 475 in 
2006 compared to 452 in 2005.

It's been 20 years since the state police and Kentucky National Guard 
carried out their first coordinated effort to destroy cultivated 
marijuana in 1986. The story since has been what Shemelya calls a 
"cat and mouse game" in which each side has gotten more sophisticated 
and changed tactics.

That first joint effort by state police and the Guard in 1986 was a 
one-day sweep, essentially a media event to publicize eradication efforts.

Now Kentucky's eradication -- cited as one of the top efforts in the 
nation -- runs year round and uses a task force that involves many 
more police, troops and agencies, including the state police and 
National Guard, the DEA, the U.S. Forest Service, the Appalachia High 
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force and local officers.

The technology also has improved. At one time, when a spotter saw a 
marijuana patch from the air, police would calculate the location by 
hand; now the National Guard helicopters used for spotting have 
computers to generate maps that plot the location of pot patches with 
the click of a cursor, Shemelya said.

Booby Traps

Growers responded to increased scrutiny through the years by 
improving techniques and doing more to hide their crops, including 
reducing the size of their plots and spreading them out among the 
woods and hills.

Police sometimes found hundreds of plants together 20 years ago, but 
the average number of plants in a plot the last few years has been in 
the 60s or below.

One anomaly this year was that the average number of plants per plot 
jumped to 83.

Growers may have put out larger patches because they thought the 
National Guard wouldn't be as active in hunting for pot as a result 
of deployments to the war in Iraq, Shemelya said.

That wasn't the case, Shemelya said; the number of Guard personnel 
involved in the marijuana-cutting program was about the same as always.

"They were unfortunately fooled badly," Shemelya said of growers.

The Guard has adequate troops to support law enforcement or respond 
to disasters at home even with troops overseas, said spokesman Col. 
Phil Miller.

Police also found far more booby traps at pot patches this year than 
they had for several years. In 2005, for instance, there were two, 
but police found 20 this year.

In one case, a grower had driven dozens of nails through a piece of 
wood and put it in a pit with the nails sticking up. An officer was 
hurt when he stepped into the hidden pit, Shemelya said.

At another plot, police found inert pipe bombs that didn't have any 
explosives in them, set up to scare people away. It isn't clear 
sometimes whether booby traps are directed at police or people trying 
to steal marijuana crops.

One thing that hasn't changed from 20 years ago is that after someone 
in the air sees a pot patch, police on the ground still have the 
sweaty job of hiking in to cut the plants.

Kentucky has long ranked as one of the top outdoor pot producers in 
the nation for a number of reasons, including that it has a conducive 
climate, lots of places to hide patches and experienced growers.

Pot production began taking root in the 1970s and spread in the 
1980s, often in poorer areas of the state. Over time, some places and 
people began to tolerate or even accept marijuana-growing as a way to 
make money in areas without a lot of other opportunities, police said.

"They don't like the state police coming in messing with their 
economy," said Danny Webb, who is now Letcher County sheriff but 
earlier was captain of the state-police post in Hazard, which covers 
a five-county area in Eastern Kentucky.

However, most people in Letcher County and others do not support 
marijuana growing, Webb said.

In 2005, the state ranked second behind California in the number of 
plants eradicated, according to the DEA.

Another way to describe the area's pot production: The 68 counties in 
Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee and West Virginia that make up the 
Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) have only .87 
percent of the nation's population, but accounted for 25 percent of 
the plants eradicated nationwide in 2003, according to the most 
recent annual report from the task force.

$1 Billion Worth of Pot

If police are finding that much marijuana, Shemelya said, it means 
there is a lot more they aren't finding. Even with additional flight 
time, police can't cover all the primary pot-growing area of Southern 
and Eastern Kentucky and probably don't find more than half the crop, he said.

Kentucky pot growers have upgraded the potency of their product over 
the last two decades, making it a prized drug outside the state.

In the 1970s, the amount of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the main 
hallucinogen) in marijuana was between 1 percent and 6 percent, but 
tests of marijuana eradicated in Eastern Kentucky in 2005 showed an 
average THC content of 15 percent, according to the 2005 annual 
report from the Appalachia HIDTA.

Police say much of the high-quality marijuana grown outdoors in 
Kentucky goes to markets out of state, moved out in private vehicles 
a few pounds at a time. A pound can command $3,000 or more, Shemelya said.

Police use a standard estimate that each plant they destroy would 
have produced one pound of pot worth $2,000. At that estimate, the 
plants destroyed this year would have been worth more than $1 billion.

Critics of the war on drugs say that figure is inflated -- a way to 
justify continued funding for the eradication effort -- because some 
plants would have been worth little or nothing and many do not 
produce a pound of pot.

Police defend the $2,000 figure as valid, however, because many 
plants would produce more than that amount.

Groups that advocate legalizing marijuana use for adults, such as the 
Drug Policy Alliance and the National Organization for the Reform of 
Marijuana Laws (NORML) argue that eradication programs such as 
Kentucky's are a waste of money, doing little to cut the supply of 
pot while helping keep prices artificially high on the black market.

"They've accomplished a price support in an unintended way," said 
Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML.

But police say every plant they cut keeps marijuana off the street.

It's vital to do that because marijuana is a much more powerful drug 
than it once was, because it's the most-used illegal substance in the 
country and because it's the drug that many abusers of harder drugs 
start with, according to the DEA and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

"If we can keep them off marijuana, we've got a chance to keep them 
off drugs," C. Frank Rapier, director of the Appalachia HIDTA, said 
of young people.

And if police hadn't eradicated more than 500,000 pot plants in 
Kentucky this year, there would be more cash in the hands of people 
who could use it -- and have at times -- to corrupt police, courts 
and local officials, Rapier said.

No one expects growers to give up, even with increased enforcement. 
The Appalachia HIDTA forecast in its 2007 "threat assessment" that 
pot cultivation will continue at "historical levels."

"Individuals involved in this activity are resilient and do not give 
up despite repeated losses of crops to eradication," the report said. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake