VIOLENT CRIMES UNDERCUT MARIJUANA'S MELLOW IMAGE

Police officials in New York City, who spent years battling a crack scourge
that sent the murder rate soaring, say they are now seeing increasing
violence among dealers of marijuana, a drug that they say no longer fits
its laid-back image.

The level of violence still pales in comparison to the carnage of the turf
wars between rival crack gangs a decade ago. But officials say they believe
that the number of marijuana-related shootings has gone up in recent years
and that investigators now routinely find guns, including submachine guns,
when they execute search warrants at marijuana stash houses.

In one widely publicized example of violence, a 39-year-old woman, Jennifer
Stahl, was fatally shot, along with two friends, nine days ago in her
apartment above the Carnegie Deli in Manhattan. She was a victim of two men
who, investigators believe, came to rob her of the cash profits from her
high-priced marijuana business.

But many other peddlers, most of them selling cheaper marijuana in poorer
neighborhoods, have been shot over the last few years, police officials
say, although many of those crimes drew little attention, even when the
dealers died.

Two weeks ago, for example, Roberto DeJesus, 20, who had been arrested a
half-dozen times on marijuana-related charges, was fatally shot in the
Bronx after what investigators described as a dispute with a rival dealer
over the rights to sell on a particular stretch of Valentine Avenue.

"Some people may think the drug is benign, but the distribution network
certainly is not," said Deputy Chief Michael Tiffany, commander of the
Bronx Narcotics Division. "For some of our policy makers, people who are
not cops, sometimes their only connection to marijuana was watching the
Grateful Dead at the Fillmore East. Times have changed. None of the dealers
in the Bronx are smoking joints and discussing Nietzsche."

New York City does not keep statistics on marijuana-related violence, so it
is unclear how much the number of violent incidents has grown, or to what
extent marijuana- related violence has become more visible simply because
the gunfire from the crack trade has dissipated. For their part, officials
in the Drug Enforcement Administration said they had not collected
sufficient information to say that marijuana trafficking nationwide is more
violent. But New York officials, both police supervisors and prosecutors,
said the trend was clear.

"The marijuana trade in New York City is controlled and run through the use
of violence," Joseph P. Dunne, the first deputy police commissioner, said
at a City Hall news conference last week. "We have been saying this for
some time. This is not news to us."

Bridget G. Brennan, the city's special narcotics prosecutor, said that
highly organized, well-armed groups that once concentrated on the cross-
continent shipment of cocaine and heroin were now dealing in marijuana as
well. Similarly, Bronx narcotics investigators said that they had
identified eight separate heroin or cocaine trafficking locations in the
borough that had switched over to marijuana sales in the last year.

One impetus for the switch, officials said, is that newer, increasingly
potent strains of marijuana are now selling at prices that are higher than
the price of gold. The demand for crack cocaine has also shrunk, and the
penalties for cocaine trafficking remain far more severe than those for
dealing in marijuana.

For example, under New York law, a person convicted of possessing 10 pounds
of high-grade marijuana, with a potential street value of as much as
$50,000, is liable for the same prison term as a person caught with $120
worth of cocaine.

At the time the laws were drawn up, the street value of 10 pounds of some
kinds of high-grade marijuana was far less than it is today.

Although increased anti-narcotics patrols, largely financed through an
overtime program known as Operation Condor, have produced a flood of
misdemeanor marijuana arrests, investigators said that dealers caught
selling the $5 and $10 bags that are typically sold on the streets were
rarely sent to jail for any length of time. As a result, they said, none of
them are particularly interested in briefing detectives on the intricacies
of their drug gangs.

Although national surveys indicate that marijuana use among the young has
leveled off in recent years, state and city officials and substance abuse
counselors said that demand in New York City remained quite high, as
indicated by the large amount of marijuana circulating in the streets.

The police seized 15,520 pounds last year, or triple the amount seized five
years ago.

In some cases, officials said, the market for marijuana has benefited from
the fact that many young people are loath to repeat the mistakes of their
crack-addicted elders. "They disdain crack use partly because of the
results they see all around them," said Ms. Brennan, the special prosecutor.

The price increases have been least noticeable in the lower grades of
marijuana, many of them smuggled in from Mexico and sold for $100 to $200
an ounce. In many neighborhoods, they are often sold under street names
like Chronic or Chocolate and are smoked, not in rolling papers, but in
hollowed-out cigars known as blunts. Investigators said that one change in
recent years has been in the quantity of marijuana delivered in a so-called
nickel bag that sells for $5.

"It's like the potato chip companies," said Lt. Charles Shevlin of the
Narcotics Division. "They kept the price the same but they made the bag
smaller."

The real escalation in prices drawing dealers into the market has been in
high-grade varieties of marijuana, in which ounces typically sell for $300
to $600, officials said. Unlike years ago, when high-priced marijuana
generally was smuggled in from exotic places, much of the most potent crops
are now grown domestically, not in outdoor fields, but in indoor farms that
use hydroponic technology, in which the marijuana is cultivated in water
and liquid nutrients.

"I know people," said a veteran marijuana smoker from Manhattan, "who when
they go to Jamaica they bring their pot with them because we want better
pot while we are there."

This increase in potency is one reason that high-end strains have become so
expensive. Experts said they had more than triple the potency of regular
marijuana, although activists for the legalization of the drug say that the
strength of run-of- the-mill marijuana has not increased remarkably in
recent years.

Another reason for the price increase, according to Allen F. St. Pierre,
the executive director of Norml, which advocates the legalization of
marijuana, is that some dealers have learned that a product marketed as the
best can often command almost any price. He recalled being at an Upper West
Side apartment several months ago when a dealer, who ran a beeper-based
delivery service, explained why one variety of marijuana was priced at $500
per ounce. "That is for people who need to pay that much for it," he
recalled the dealer saying.

This sort of high-grade marijuana, often sold under names like Hydro or
Bubble Gum, was among the types sold by Ms. Stahl in her apartment on
Seventh Avenue for several years before the gunmen barged in, killing her
and two of her friends. "People who view marijuana peddling as victimless
have not seen the carnage left in the apartment above the Carnegie Deli,"
said Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik.

But Mr. St. Pierre said that the government bore at least partial
responsibility for any increase in violence, because it had made the laws
that created a black market. "It should not be too big of a surprise," he
said, "that when a product is pushed to such a valuable level that we lose
the social controls."