FEDERAL AGENCIES HONOR SHERIFF PARKER

After spending much of the last marijuana season camouflaged and in
the midst marijuana fields, Tehama County Sheriff Clay Parker has
been recognized with the second annual Excellence in Law Enforcement
award for 2000 for not only his work destroying drug-laden fields,
but for locking grass gardeners behind bars.

"Clay wanted to place the message that Tehama County was not the
place to grow marijuana," said Special Agent-in-charge Jerry Moore of
the United States Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region. "This is a
small way of recognizing that effort."

Based on a nomination by Moore for the "record marijuana eradication
efforts of the sheriff's department on federal lands during 2000,"
Parker was presented the award by the Federal Law Enforcement
Administrators of the Bay Area, a group comprised of 17 agencies
including the Secret Service, U.S. Coast Guard, and Department of
Defense.

"The sheriff, along with his entire office, did a truly outstanding
effort eradicating and going after marijuana cultivation," Moore
said, explaining it takes a "really dedicated staff to take the time
and energy to do so."

Calling Parker's efforts "labor intensive" and the country in which
he worked "rugged," Moore said Parker not only took pains to find and
demolish drug gardens, but "went the extra mile" to arrest those
involved.

Over the course of the 2000 marijuana season, Parker's agency
confiscated a record 42,000 pot plants inside Tehama County
boundaries worth an estimated $210 million, netting the
second-largest plant count in the state.

Along with those numbers, the sheriff and his deputies arrested 28
people, many of them armed Mexican Nationals.

Parker has no desire to stop what he's begun and has stepped strongly
into the 2001 season, raiding three plantations to date, grabbing two
more gun-toting field hands, recovering three weapons, and wresting
another 11,685 plants from the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, the
Battle Creek area and from near Mt. Lassen.

Parker said one of his main priorities when he took office in 1999
was to send the message "if you grow in Tehama County, we're going to
make the arrests." The sheriff, who didn't expect to find quite so
much, said it "shows it has been rampant in the county for years,"
but was overlooked or neglected.

"It was time to do something about it," Parker said.

"It may take a couple of years, but after this year I believe the
message will be out there," Parker told the Daily News, saying the
department is not stopping at the arrests of field hands, but is
actively working up the chain of command to those bringing labor in
- -- to what is "no doubt" Mexican drug cartels.

Parker doesn't expect the numbers to change much this season, and
said his department knows of at least 10 more gardens they will begin
purging. When he can, Parker will continue to work alongside his men,
either dangling from the helicopter, or knee-deep in demolished dope.

"The award came unexpectedly," Parker said. "But I'm very pleased ...
a large part of this award is the hard work the employees of this
department put in during the marijuana season."