OUT-OF-WHACK WEED

Marijuana Again Expected To Be Top Crash Crop In California

FRESNO, Calif. -- The annual harvest season has arrived again in
California, the nation's top agricultural state, and by all accounts this
year will produce another bumper yield of what is believed to be its most
valuable cash crop: marijuana.

The Golden State, believed to be the nation's leading marijuana producer
and by far the nation's leader in eradicating the plants, is in the midst
of its intensive summer and fall campaign to beat the marijuana growers to
the harvest.

This is why helicopters hover over remote areas of the state, searching the
landscape for the emerald, almost fluorescent green color that
distinguishes marijuana from practically every other plant that grows in a
garden, farm or forest.

Once the plants are found, agents rappel from the helicopters to cull the
plants -- more than 900,000 a year in the last two years. The states that
traditionally vie for second and third place are Hawaii and Kentucky, which
each bring in about half that number.

Law-enforcement officials say marijuana cultivation once was largely a
mom-and-pop operation conducted in the coastal mountain ranges of remote
Northern California, where the dense redwood groves are broken up by
outposts of what the rest of the country would regard as hippies.

But now, they say, the dynamics have changed. Marijuana cultivation is
increasingly dominated by huge, sophisticated operations producing
marijuana that is said to be 20 times more potent than the pot smoked in
the 1960s and '70s.

"It's a corporate approach to growing marijuana," said Michael Van Winkle,
spokesman for the California Department of Justice, the spearhead of the
Campaign Against Marijuana Planting task force.

Mexican drug cartels have begun planting large marijuana farms in
California's Central Valley, the same region where the majority of the
nation's fruits and vegetables are cultivated, he said.

There, obscured by the dense brush that covers the foothills of the Sierra
Madre on the Central Valley's flank, growers set up operations with tens of
thousands of plants. They recruit farm workers tending legal crops by
promising higher wages.

The workers tend to the spring-fed irrigation systems, uproot male plants
that can reduce or ruin the quality of the marijuana buds of the female
plants, and guard the operation, generally with guns and automatic weapons,
from hikers who happen onto the site or interlopers who might confiscate
the plants.

Five years ago, Van Winkle said, the biggest fields seized contained about
5,000 plants. But in July, officials discovered a field with more than
102,000 plants on Palomar Mountain, a peak in a San Diego County national
forest that is topped by a space research observatory.

The potential for payback is enormous, with dried marijuana selling for
$4,000 a pound, nearly the price of a pound of gold, Van Winkle observed.

In 1998 when the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
analyzed the market value of the California crop, it concluded that the
value of the marijuana exceeded $3.8 billion, more than the production
value of the state's grapes and almonds combined.

The increase in marijuana growing, as well as the crackdown on growers,
comes amid a five-year legal and political battle that suggests
Californians are somewhat ambivalent about the illegality of pot.

Proposition 215, a 1996 voter initiative, made the state one of the first
of nine states to allow patients to possess and use the drug with a
doctor's approval. Last year, Mendocino County in Northern California
passed Measure G, a symbolic prohibition on arresting anyone growing 25 or
fewer marijuana plants.

State officials still are deciding how to address a May ruling by the U.S.
Supreme Court that did not overturn Proposition 215 but said federal laws
prohibiting the manufacture and distribution of marijuana superseded a
patient's medical need for the drug.

Some of the so-called cannabis clubs that emerged to distribute marijuana
to ill people are now concentrating on teaching patients how to grow their
own marijuana.

But there is no ambivalence on the subject among law enforcement.

Last week in Fresno, sheriff's deputies walked for hours amid acres of
bitter melon, a gourd used in Asian cooking, before stumbling upon more
than 300 marijuana plants growing on the same trellis with the melon vines.

The marijuana plants were carefully pruned, laced to the trellis, and
covered by the vines to protect them from the hottest sun and law
enforcement's aerial detection.

The operation is typical of another trend in marijuana cultivation--growing
the plant among other crops that make detection practically impossible.

In another field, a grower had planted marijuana amid lemon grass,
sprinkling lemon grass cuttings on top of the marijuana to avoid aerial
detection.

"These growers are getting very smart," said Rich Coningsby, a detective
assigned to marijuana suppression in the Fresno County Sheriff's Office.
"It's all very clandestine. You would smell the plants before you would see
them."

And though production in Northern California has been eclipsed by the
Central Valley, officials there also are uncovering increasingly
sophisticated operations.

Rusty Noe, who heads the Mendocino County Sheriff's marijuana eradication
team, said a two-year investigation led to the eradication in March of
29,000 marijuana plants, all grown indoors in an operation that had
disguised itself as a ranch.

"There were 15 buildings, all built to look like houses," Noe said. "They
were all marijuana grow sites."