U.S. FORESTS A CASUALTY IN DRUG WAR

ENVIRONMENT: Much Of The Nation's Marijuana Is Tilled On Public Lands, And
Pesticides Used By Growers Are Poisoning Waterways And Wildlife.

San Bernardino National Forest -- They were spotted from the air, as
conspicuous as sharks in a school of guppies: Three plots of land,
seemingly stripped of the towering oaks and manzanitas that shroud this
patch of Southern California forest.

These were not natural formations. They were entirely man-made - and
entirely illegal.

A week after the August sighting, a helicopter returned with two dozen
Forest Service agents and sheriff's detectives. They cleared a landing pad
and cut a trail into the site, coming first to a makeshift reservoir. Six
hoses, filtering water from a creek, ran in one end; several more snaked
back out the other.

Moving on, the agents reached the first clearing. They'd been right.

In place of the trees this forest is meant to protect stood a grove of
emerald stalks, 6 to 15 feet tall. They were in full bloom - robust and
ready for harvest.

On two acres of prime forest land, about a half-hour from the city of San
Bernardino and 11/2 hours from Los Angeles, these agents had discovered the
last battle-ground in the war on drugs: a 23,000-plant marijuana plantation.

As money and manpower continue to flow to the Southwest border to stop
illegal drugs coming into this country, traffickers - many employed by
Mexican drug gangs - are producing vast quantities of marijuana right here
in the United States, on land owned by the federal government.

The reasons are obvious: the land is fertile, remote and free. There's no
risk of forfeiture, plantations are difficult to trace, and growers have
land agents outmanned, outspent and outgunned.

"We spend a lot of time and energy stopping stuff from coming into this
country, but we don't really pay much attention to our own back yard," said
Dan Bauer, the Forest Service's drug-program coordinator.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that more
than half of the marijuana consumed in the United States is produced
domestically. Much of that - no one knows how much for sure - is grown on
public lands, primarily the country's 155 national forests.

Pesticides used by the illegal growers poison wildlife and waterways,
although the crop's danger is not just environmental. Park visitors run the
risk of tripping booby traps or encountering armed gangs. After stumbling
upon a marijuana farm, some visitors have been run off at gunpoint, Bauer
said. Forest Service agents have sometimes exchanged gunfire with growers.

The public's perception of the drug war is a border agent pulling bundles
of narcotics from the bed of a truck, Bauer said. "They very rarely think
of the poor forest agent crawling through the bush."

In 1999, 452,330 marijuana plants were removed from national forest land,
mostly in California and Kentucky. With each plant estimated to produce at
least 2.2 pounds of pot, that's 995,126 pounds of marijuana, with an
estimated value of about $700 million.

By comparison, the U.S. Customs Service seized 989,369 pounds of marijuana
along the Southwest border in fiscal year 1999, while the Border Patrol
confiscated just under 1.2 million pounds.

The difference: Customs has 2,900 inspectors and agents manning Southwest
ports of entry; the Border Patrol has 7,761 agents patrolling between those
ports.

There are just 588 Forest Service agents and officers assigned to 192
million acres of national forests, a decline from 625 officers in 1996.
That's nearly 330,000 acres per officer, and only one of them is dedicated
full time to drug enforcement.

Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug in the United States, with about
11 million users, including 8.3 percent of teens, according to government
statistics.

One nationwide program is dedicated to the problem of U.S. -produced
marijuana - the Drug Enforcement Administration's Domestic Cannabis
Eradication and Suppression Program. It receives 1 percent of the agency's
$1.4 billion budget. In 1998 the DEA reported seizing 2.5 million U.S.-
produced marijuana plants, including 232,000 indoor plants. However, those
seizures were done in coordination with state and local agencies; the DEA
doesn't track seizures done by public-land agencies.

"Issues dealing with cocaine and heroin and drugs that people are dying
from tend to have a higher priority as far as enforcement goes," DEA
spokesman Terry Parham said.

Public lands have long been targeted by marijuana producers, but
investigators trace a rise in production to the 1980s, when the government
enacted more stringent asset forfeiture laws.

Before that, "if you were caught growing pot on your own property, you
wouldn't lose your property," Bauer said. "People could grow corn rows of
marijuana literally in corn fields."

In the late '80s and early '90, the profile of a typical grower was a
"white, hippie-type" running 100- to 1,000- plant farms, agents said. These
days the mom-and-pop operations are far outnumbered by major pot
plantations, ranging in size from 1,000 to 10,000 plants or more.

In the Southeast, old moonshining families now run marijuana farms. But
that's only part of the problem in places like Kentucky's Daniel Boone
National Forest, which consistently ranks first among national forests in
marijuana seizures.

"It's a large unorganized coalition of people that live very close to
national forest lands who are generally very close to the poverty level and
looking for any way to try to make a dollar," said Jack Gregory, special
agent in charge of the Forest Service's Southern region.

In the Southwest, Bauer said, most pot operations are run by Mexican drug
organizations that either ship crews across the border or hire undocumented
immigrants to do the work.

"Just the cost of doing business up here makes it great," said Mike Wirz, a
narcotics detective with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department who
works with the Forest Service to investigate marijuana groves on federal
property.

Wirx also said that by growing their product in the United States, Mexican
cartels eliminate the extra cost and risk of paying a courier to bring
drugs into the country.

"This is the land of the free. This is the best thing you could ever ask
for," said Wirz, who believes the federal government has played down the
significance of the problem. "The United States, and even the Drug
Enforcement Administration, doesn't want to admit that we're being
bombarded with domestic marijuana and it's being run by non-U.S. citizens."

Six months after they located the 23,000-plants pot farm in the San
Bernardino Forest, Wirz and Forest Service agent Denese Stokes returned to
the site. They flew in to the same helicopter pad, hiked down the same path
their agents had carved into the land.

The marijuana was long gone, but the destruction remained.

Dried pot stalks, unusable on the market, dotted the three main growing
plots and numerous smaller plots linked by an intricate network of trails.
Where vegetation native to these lands remained, figures of women and
Spanish phrases were carved into the trees, many of which are considered
endangered.

"People are of the opinion, 'Well, they're just growing a plant out there;
what's the big deal?' The environmental damage that it does is horrific,"
Stokes said.

She believes as many as eight people operated the farm, though none was
arrested. They escaped amid the maze of trails they had cut into the forest.

"They'll be back again somewhere," Stokes said. "They won't stop; there's
too much money in it."