AUTHORITIES BATTLE POT HARVEST IN KENTUCKY

BARBOURVILLE, Ky -- Deep in the Appalachian woods, Kentucky State
Police Trooper Dewayne Holden's Humvee struggled up what once was an
old logging trail.

As his three-truck convoy stopped at a clearing atop a 3,000-foot
ridge, Holden grabbed a machete and joined eight other armed troopers
and National Guardsmen, hiking toward a hill under some power lines.

But the pot growers had beaten them to the prize: Gone were the 40 to
50 marijuana plants worth as much as $100,000 that Holden spotted
from a helicopter more than a week earlier. Only six spindly plants
and some fresh ATV tracks were left.

Welcome to the battle that police and marijuana growers wage each
fall in Kentucky's remote Appalachian counties, where 75 percent of
the state's top cash crop is grown. Kentucky produces more marijuana
than any other state except California, making it home to one of the
nation's more intensive eradication efforts - a yearly game of
harvest-time cat and mouse in national forests, abandoned farms,
shady hollows, backyards and mountainsides.

More than 100 state police, guardsmen, Drug Enforcement
Administration agents, U.S. Forest Service spotters and others are
part of a strike force that works dawn to dark, sometimes roping into
remote patches from Blackhawk helicopters. With a budget of $1.5
million and help from a $6 million federal anti-drug effort in the
region, last year the state seized 557,628 marijuana plants worth an
estimated $1.3 billion.

Authorities say their eradication effort keeps drugs off the streets
and illicit profits out of criminal hands. But critics call it a
waste of time and money that has failed to curb availability or demand.

C. Frank Rapier, director of the federal Appalachia High Intensity
Drug Trafficking Area, said the eradication has been a success. He
said since efforts started in the 1990s, the national forests are a
little safer for visitors; there's less marijuana, which he believes
is a gateway to harder drugs; the Mexican drug gangs that control
much of the marijuana growing in California have stayed away.

Others have a different view.

"Trying to eradicate marijuana is like taking a teaspoon and saying
you're going to empty the Atlantic Ocean," said Gary Potter, an
Eastern Kentucky University professor of criminal justice who has
researched the issue for decades.

Allen St. Pierre, director of the Washington-based National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), said efforts
in all 50 states haven't prevented marijuana production from
increasing 10-fold in the past 25 years to an estimated 22 million
pounds in 2006.

A typical day for the Appalachian eradication team will involve
hitting 15 to 20 marijuana plots - most spotted by Holden or another
pilot in a helicopter. They have learned to spy the telltale earthen
trails and bluish-green of pot patches. They mark the GPS
coordinates, then guide in ground forces to cut and burn the crop.

The booby traps they might face include pipe bombs with trip wires,
fishing hooks strung face-high across trails, sharpened bamboo
sticks, ankle-crushing bear traps; and boards pounded through with
three-inch nails that are laid on the ground and covered with leaves.

The traps are meant mainly for thieves. Most growers found on the
sites, even armed ones, flee when police arrive. But a few years ago,
three growers blew themselves up rigging a pipe bomb.

The 68 counties in Eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee and western
West Virginia that make up the Appalachia High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area have less than 1 percent of the country's
population, but were home to roughly 10 percent of the marijuana
eradicated nationwide in 2006.

Many small Eastern Kentucky towns, steeped in a tradition of
bootlegging moonshine, also have high rates of unemployment, poverty
and in some cases, public corruption, according to federal drug
officials. People can make as much as $2,000 from a single plant, an
often-irresistible draw when good-paying jobs are scarce.

The estimated worth of seized plants alone far outstrips Kentucky's
other crops. Federal statistics for 2005 show state receipts for
tobacco were $342 million and corn were $336 million, compared with
close to $1 billion of pot eradicated that year.

Authorities complain that in some counties, it is difficult to get a
jury to indict, much less convict, a marijuana grower.

Holden said that unless a patch he cuts down is huge or contains
traceable evidence, he rarely goes knocking at nearby homes in hopes
of ferreting out the grower. Everyone knows who it is, he said, but
no one tells.

"It's very ingrained in the culture," he said.