ALASKA'S TOP CROP

Marijuana Farms Sprout In Valley Despite Crackdown

Wasilla -- The police knew they were close. They could smell it.

The resinous reek in the workshop off Knik-Goose Bay Road could mean only
one thing: marijuana. But where was the crop? There were no plants, no grow
lights in sight.

But there was a man, who after some persuading picked up a drill and walked
to the back wall. With a few quick moves he removed two screws and slid back
a panel to reveal a secret room. From there, it was a 10-foot drop by ladder
to a concrete bunker. Inside a space the size of a small cabin, 400 green
leafy plants sported enough bud, about 12 pounds, to keep dozens of tokers
happily glazed for months.

The estimated street value: between $36,000 and $48,000.

POT FARMS GROW LIKE WEEDS

The Matanuska Valley is home to carrots, potatoes and giant vegetables, all
displayed as the public face of northern agriculture. But the undisputed
king of Alaska farming, the most profitable crop, is marijuana. A good batch
sells, ounce for ounce, for as much as gold.

State government touts "Alaska Grown," but over the past two decades it has
done its best to put this homegrown crop out of business. Police and drug
agents have arrested growers by the hundreds, ripped up plants by the
thousands and burned them in smoky pyres.

Nowhere in Alaska have pot growing and efforts to stop it been as
concentrated as here in Valley.

But despite the nonstop multimillion-dollar effort that draws from state and
local police, the National Guard and the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration, marijuana farming remains rampant here.

Last year, 211 people in the Mat-Su area were arrested on suspicion of or
charged with growing or selling marijuana. They were men and women, young
and old, married and single, employed and unemployed. Some were
first-timers. Some had been busted before. So far this year, another 60 have
been busted.

Statewide, as many as 113 people are in jail on state marijuana offenses.
Another 600 are on probation. A quarter of them are in the Matanuska-Susitna
Borough, where the cases make up nearly a third of the local probation
office's caseload. Because no agency tracks marijuana cases, those numbers
are estimates based on the most common marijuana charge: misconduct
involving a controlled substance in the fourth degree. In Mat-Su, more than
90 percent of the cases for that charge were for marijuana cases, according
to prosecutors and the local public defender.

Some people question whether this expense of time and money is worth the
trouble.

"It's absurd," said Ken Goldman, who headed the Palmer district attorney's
office for 10 years before starting a private practice last year. "We're
penalizing people that are average citizens whose only crime for the most
part is they enjoy smoking."

Law enforcement officials defend the effort as necessary to keep marijuana
use in check. But even they estimate at best they intercept 10 percent of
the crop. New pot farms pop up to replace old ones as tenaciously as the
nickname "weed" implies.

Sometimes even in the same place.

Six months after they first visited the home off Knik-Goosebay Road, the
cops came back. This time they didn't need help finding the secret entrance,
much to the dismay of the five men inside.

'IT'S EVERYWHERE'

Alaska and marijuana have had a long and curious relationship. It was
illegal for years, and then in 1975, for all practical purposes, its use in
small amounts became legal. In 1990, residents voted to make it illegal. Two
years ago, voters made it legal again for people with certain medical
conditions to use with a doctor's recommendation. Now pot is on the ballot
once more, to again legalize its use.

Meanwhile, enforcement of marijuana laws, especially aimed at growers, has
escalated. Since the early 1980s, when a drug unit was first set up in
Mat-Su, the number of marijuana-grow busts has climbed from a few a year to
nearly 100 last year.

The five-person unit spends nearly all of its time investigating and busting
growers, said Lt. Don Bowman, who headed the Alaska State Troopers statewide
drug unit until this summer.

The troopers operate similar teams in Fairbanks and Juneau and have two
Anchorage-based teams, which focus on the city's international airport and
Western Alaska. They draw their members from the ranks of troopers as well
as from local police with assistance from the National Guard.

The Mat-Su office is in a nondescript gray building near Wasilla. An
adjoining garage holds stacks of evidence collected over the years: fans and
other electrical equipment, scales, police scanners and enough bongs to
equip a Grateful Dead concert. Many of the pipes have a personal touch, from
the modified cigarette lighter with a hole punched in the base to a gas mask
that straps over the smoker's face.

Business is brisk here.

Thirty to 40 tips a week pour in, so many that the officers rarely travel to
the farther-flung areas of the Valley unless there are at least two or three
locations to check during the trip. It's not worth their time otherwise.
They joke about how easy it is to find pot farms. But they know they face an
uphill battle.

While no one knows exactly how widespread marijuana growing is in Alaska and
Mat-Su, one amazing statistic turned up during the 1996 Big Lake wildfire.
Of the 400 buildings and homes burnt, 20 of them, 5 percent, contained
remnants of marijuana grows, according to trooper Sgt. Tim Bleicher, who
headed the Valley drug team. If that figure is representative, it would make
Mat-Su home to more than 1,200 pot farms.

If anything, that estimate is probably conservative, said trooper Steve
Adams, who spent the past two years on the Mat-Su drug team.

"It's everywhere," he said.

Entire cul-de-sacs are populated with people growing marijuana, said Rick
Manrique, a Wasilla police officer and former member of the Mat-Su drug
team.

"Talk about your neighborhood watch program," he said.

A READY MARKET

Marijuana is by far the most popular illicit drug in the nation. By official
estimates, 72 million people, about a third of the population, have tried it
and nearly 19 million use it regularly. People in this country spend
something like $7 billion a year on pot, according to one government
estimate, as much as shoppers spent online last year.

Pot use among high school students has risen over the past decade, national
surveys show. In Alaska, nearly a third of high school students surveyed
last year reported they had smoked marijuana in the previous month,
according to study by the state Division of Public Health.

In other words, there's a market. Growers say the attraction is simple: easy
money. A good crop of Alaska weed, costing relatively little to produce,
sells for $3,000 to $4,000 a pound locally and can fetch much more in the
bush. Growers can easily produce two to three pounds every three months, and
some are set up to harvest each month. While costs vary, growers say the
profits are good.

An ounce, about enough to fit in a small sandwich bag, can sell for up to
$360, said Keith Berggren, who was fined $5,000 and is serving five years'
probation for his 60-plant growing operation. That kind of money makes for a
better living than Wal-Mart wages.

Berggren, 45, a cook who lives near Palmer, describes himself as an old
hippie who grew up smoking pot. He said he grew for himself and for his
adult friends, to whom he sold at a discount.

"It's a lot of money," he said. But the appeal went beyond that. Berggren
said his crop was like a fine wine.

"Two hits and you were on your tail," he said.

His boast is backed by government-funded testing that found Berggren's
marijuana among the elite, containing almost three times the national
average of THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient that makes
users feel high.

His growing days ended three years ago when troopers came to his door to
serve a warrant on an old DWI case.

"I had just got done blowing a bowl, and I guess I got them high on the
landing there," he said, laughing in retrospect. "That's how it all went
down the tubes."

Steve Baker's growing operation came to a similarly unexpected end when, in
1996, police officers responded to a domestic violence call at his house.
The officers said they smelled pot. Baker thinks otherwise.

"I think somebody told them," he said.

A heavy-equipment operator, Baker said he grew solely for profit. He was
making a tax-free $30,000 every three months with an 80-plant grow he kept
in a garage next to his house north of Wasilla. He held power costs down by
tapping directly into an underground electric line, something he says that
is done "very carefully" and never when it's raining. Electric bills for
heat and the high-wattage lights are among the biggest expenses for growers.

In addition to being sentenced to three years' probation, Baker was ordered
to pay back $20,000 to Matanuska Electric Association for power he stole.

Baker and Berggren said they think marijuana should be legalized, though
neither knew the details of the proposed ballot initiative.

"We should be able to manufacture our own stuff," Berggren said. "We're not
hurting anybody. We're not in the black market."

At the same time, he says he worries about people who will abuse pot.
"Mankind in general, there's some who just want to go out and get blotto,"
he said. "It comes down to the individual. It's a hard call."

Berggren said enforcement has made it harder to buy marijuana.

"If you go to the street right now, my information is that 'there's nothing
out there,' " he said.

But Baker said the busts put only a small dent in the industry and the
potential profit keeps people growing.

"People are always going to smoke it, and it's surprising how high the price
of it is," he said. "You can grow some of this and make a lot of money on
it."

'A GET-OUT-OF-JAIL-FREE CARD'

People trying to put growers out of business say the laws are too lenient
and should be toughened. Most first-time offenders get probation, community
work service and a fine, usually $2,000 a pound.

That's not enough to deter people from a growing a crop that can bring in
several thousand dollars in a few months, Adams said. Or as Wasilla police
officer Doug Sonerholm, another member of the Mat-Su drug team, puts it: "I
don't want to tell you anything because everything I say will encourage
people to grow pot."

Federal sentences are much stiffer -- up to five years for a small
first-time offense and potential loss of homes and property. But federal
authorities take on few marijuana cases in Alaska, typically fewer than a
dozen a year.

In the nine months ending Oct. 1, Palmer assistant district attorney Jack
Smith, who handled only drug cases, never took a marijuana case to trial.
People don't fight the charges because they know they'll get little or no
jail time, he said.

"It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card," he said.

Some couples work the system to get two free passes. The first time, the man
will claim it's his grow. The second time the woman takes responsibility.
The court rolls are filled with these kinds of cases.

"In essence, they get two bites of the apple," Smith said.

Critics like Goldman said most marijuana growers get probation because they
don't have serious criminal records. In his decade as prosecutor, Goldman
said he did his best to minimize the time spent on marijuana cases. Few
growers had any criminal history and convictions did little to slow
marijuana growing, sales or use, he said.

"Look at what's happening in the Valley," he said. "On every block, there's
a grow. Who doesn't have a friend who knows a grow? Everybody knows
somebody. What are we trying to do?"

Lt. Al Storey, who heads the troopers' statewide drug enforcement unit, said
his work and that of other officers holds a line on marijuana use in Alaska.

"It's not a war on drugs," he said. "It's a drug enforcement effort. We're
not going to win this. What we're trying to do is make society better
overall through the enforcement effort."

Victory, he says, is measured in what doesn't happen: people who aren't
killed in car accidents, teenagers who never start smoking pot. He worries
about people driving, flying aircraft or operating heavy equipment while
high on pot.

Legalized pot would bring an increase in all sorts of social ills, including
more domestic violence, in a "continued downslide in society," he said.

Goldman says there's no evidence to support such claims. "Why would we" have
an increase, he asked.

As a prosecutor, he remembers only one case of someone driving under the
influence of marijuana and never an assault caused by someone high on pot.
The crime most often associated with pot, according to the former
prosecutor, was people trying to rip off growers, which has resulted in
homicides.

But those crimes are motivated by the price of marijuana, which is kept high
by enforcement, he said.

"I don't see (growers) getting into the same degrees of trouble that I see
in alcohol," Goldman said.

PRICEY ENFORCEMENT

How much money is being spent in Alaska's war on marijuana?

Multiple state and federal agencies are involved. Officials say no one keeps
track of the total. But research by the Daily News, based on figures from
state agencies, suggests it added up to at least $6 million last year. That
includes about $3.5 million to house up to 113 people serving time for
marijuana offenses and another $1.3 million to supervise as many as 600
people on probation.

The National Guard estimates it spends about $1 million a year helping
dismantle pot farms, flying officers around and taking and investigating
tips. In addition, Alaska State Troopers spend $4.7 million a year for drug
enforcement, but officials couldn't say how much of that is spent on
marijuana eradication or on its Mat-Su office.

The total does not include the salaries of court clerks and judges who
handle the cases, public defenders who represent many of the people accused
of drug charges, prosecutors, any work done by the Anchorage Police
Department or federal agencies.

That money could be put to better use combating the use of harder, addictive
drugs, argues Verne Rupright, a Wasilla-based defense attorney and former
jail guard. Rupright does a steady trade defending people charged with
marijuana offenses at about $5,000 a case. But he said he would gladly forgo
the income.

"I look at the national cost, and then I look at the cost to the state of
Alaska in dollars spent in enforcement and court time, and I think that
could be better spent targeting crack and methamphetamine and the rise again
in heroin use," he said.

Unlike other drugs, including alcohol, marijuana isn't linked with violent
behavior just from its use, he said.

"I mean, when's the last time you heard about a shoot'em-up at a marijuana
bust," he said.

Others argue the crackdown fuels the pot industry by keeping the price
artificially high. Like any business, the higher the potential profit, the
more people who want to get into it.

"It's the prohibition of anything that has a popular demand," said Palmer
City Councilman Tony Pippel. "You can't stop it. All you do is empower bad
people to make a lot of money."

He recently voted, unsuccessfully, against loaning a Palmer police officer
to the drug unit even though doing so benefits the city financially. The
federal government pays most of the officer's salary, and the city gets the
money from confiscated assets, which last year brought Palmer $81,000.

VALLEY ATTRACTIVE TO GROWERS

Though marijuana is grown all over the state, Mat-Su is the center of the
pot battle. The Valley's farming history, relatively cheap land, isolated
but road-accessible houses and proximity to the main population base in
Anchorage make it attractive to growers, Storey said.

And, growers say, they can get ordinary jobs like snowplowing or
landscaping, which makes it easier to blend in and explain that new pickup
or snowmachine to the neighbors.

And, of course, Valley pot has marketing cachet, a brand name of sorts,
being widely known as Matanuska Thunder -- -- (rhymes with thunderstruck).
The name originally described a particular strain but now has become a
generic label for Alaska weed. Other strains include Northern Lights #7.

Of the 144 grow busts in Alaska last year, 97 were in the Valley. Mat-Su pot
farms raised 13,611 of the more than 18,000 plants confiscated.

Most busts involved a couple hundred plants or fewer. But some were much
larger. One at a Wasilla home turned up more than 1,300.

Trooper Adams said he knows of entire streets lined with homes growing pot.
He calls one of them Dope Street. Residents of nearly every house have been
busted, he said.

People trying to report growing operations sometimes struggle to give a
location. "They say, 'I think someone in the neighborhood is growing, but it
smells like pot everywhere,' " Storey said.

"Some places are just constructed ideally for growing marijuana," Adams
said. Grows are often tucked on back roads in sparsely populated areas and
in homes that have built-in crawl spaces and other nooks good for hiding
plants, he said. Some people even advertise to growers with a real estate
code, he said, selling property described as "secluded," with a "large
unfinished basement" or a "generator shed."

MUM'S THE WORD

In this unending game of pursuit and deception, growers and drug agents hold
their secrets close.

Members of the drug unit would not be photographed for this story, citing
safety concerns and the need to work undercover. They also asked that the
location of their office and its security measures not be revealed.

Trooper officials would not allow a photographer or reporter to go along on
a bust or sit in on a briefing, citing the need to keep the details of their
work secret.

Some details could be gleaned from interviews and court case files.

Tips are the main source of information. They come in from suspicious
landlords, disgruntled spouses and watchful neighbors and sometimes,
officers suspect, from other growers who want to knock out some competition.

Authorities are occasionally alerted by a sudden jump in electric power
consumption.

Sometimes acting on tips, drug investigators just walk up to residents'
doors to chat in what is known in the bust business as a "knock and talk."
If they smell marijuana, they ask to come in. If the answer is no, they get
a warrant.

More often than not, people let them in. Why not, Sonerholm explains. They
know they're caught, so they might as well cooperate.

There are the other tricks of the trade. Adams will admit to one: dog
treats. Biscuits, granola bars and jerky have gotten him past many a pit
bull and Rottweiler guard dog, he said. He smiled as he recalled cleaning
out entire grows, then putting "Rover" back in for the owner to come home
and find.

The growers have also developed strategies.

They use dehumidifiers to soak up moisture and air filters to mask the musky
telltale smell. At least one vented the smell from his grow room into the
septic system.

They tamper with meters to disguise power use or use generators and propane
for power. One man arranged deliveries from five propane companies to
disguise his fuel consumption.

Some set up elaborate security systems to protect their crops from cops and
thieves. The most sophisticated growers hire people, often teenagers, to
watch their crop. They pay them thousands to sit around and play Nintendo
and basically baby-sit the plants, Storey said.

But most know the best security measure is keeping their mouths shut.

"I tried not to let too many people know," said Don Feucht, a construction
worker busted in 1998 after officers came to his home to take a report about
kids who broke in.

Drug officers say they almost never catch the smart growers and rarely catch
someone a second time.

Officers joke about the abundance of growers. They acknowledge they are
catching only a fraction of them. But there's no question which side they
are on in the drug war. They view marijuana as a gateway drug that leads to
harder drugs like cocaine and heroin. It makes people lazy and neglectful of
their kids. It causes brain damage.

"Why do you think they call it dope?" says trooper Sgt. Tim Bleicher, a
gray-haired 42-year-old who heads the unit.

He talks of homes without furniture with moldy walls and overflowing
toilets, where all the rooms are being used to grow pot and the kids are
walking around in dirty diapers. If people saw those places, they would know
the proposed initiative to legalize marijuana is a bad idea, he said.

If pot were legalized, Alaska would become a magnet for drug dealers, he
added.

And so the fight goes on.

Adams said he doesn't judge his success by whether he's catching all or even
most of the growers. "If you start worrying about that, how are you going to
get up and go to work?"

He compares his work to catching speeders or drunken drivers.

"You don't have police on every corner looking for drunk drivers," he said.
"But that little bit of deterrent value makes people that are skirting the
line stay on the right side."

As for growers, they don't seem likely to stop soon, at least not while the
money is good. One convicted grower, who asked that his name not be used for
fear of losing his North Slope job, said he was done with growing pot. But
when he was asked if he could have done something different to avoid getting
caught, a gleam came into his eye.

"Oh, yeah, I know what I'd do next time."