IMAGINATIVE GROWERS STRIVE TO BE STEALTHY

It was subterfuge worthy of a James Bond movie. Tucked under the garage of
a Hillside home was a secret room reachable only by a stairway hidden under
a workbench that weighed several hundred pounds.

Only the maker knew what to do. He'd flip a hidden switch on the bench, and
with a gentle push, the seemingly immovable bench slid forward on concealed
steel rails, revealing the stairs below.

Even then, the owner wasn't satisfied, adding a fake bookcase below in a
last-ditch attempt to conceal the rooms he used to grow and process
marijuana. The officers who showed up at his home weren't fooled, however.

The case is one of hundreds that Lt. Col. Bob Kean has worked on as head of
the National Guard Counterdrug Support Program for the past 11 years.

Mat-Su drug officers have seen a whole range of cases, from small
mom-and-pop growers to sophisticated operations. Trooper Lt. Ed Harrington,
who spent three years with the Mat-Su drug team, remembers one in Big Lake.

"He had a video camera unbeknownst to us on the road and a cable across the
road," he said. "As we were cutting the cable, he was running out the back
door."

The three-story house was filled with marijuana, Harrington said. The man
had lined the floor with plastic and then filled it with dirt. Only one
room didn't contain pot. "It was wall to wall," he said.

The team makes garden-variety busts all the time, in all corners of the
Valley. In October of last year, for example, authorities reported finding:

33 plants, scales and growing equipment in Palmer. A man from Chickaloon
was arrested.

Seven pit bulls, 66 marijuana plants and a loaded .357 Magnum handgun in a
cabin in the Caswell Lakes Subdivision.

153 pot plants in a Houston home where two residents had just been beaten
and tied up by armed robbers.

36 plants and assorted growing equipment on Clark-Wolverine Road.

165 plants in a grow vented through the septic system at a home in Skyline
Estates Subdivision in Wasilla.

The following month, drug agents made busts in Talkeetna, Houston, Wasilla,
Big Lake, Hatcher Pass and Willow. They made four busts in a one-week sweep
last December, taking down marijuana grows in Wasilla, on the Hatcher Pass
Road and in Palmer, confiscating more than 1,000 plants.

On Thursday of last week, the Mat-Su Narcotics Unit issued two more press
releases: They had discovered, just the previous day, 262 plants in two
buildings on Knik River Road and 102 plants in the garage of a home in Butte.

It's not just Mat-Su. Kean has binders full of pictures from marijuana
grows from all over the state.

There's one in an abandoned gold mine in Tok lighted with generator power
and insulated with blankets and cardboard. And a floating marijuana
greenhouse near Ketchikan, kept on a barge next to the growers' home. On
Prince of Wales Island, one grower camouflaged his crop in a forest,
cutting trees to chest-high level and placing green painted pots on top of
the stumps.