POT ERADICATION UP THIS YEAR

Spotters Spent More Time in Air

Extra time in the air by spotters helped authorities destroy more
marijuana growing outdoors in Kentucky this year than in more than a decade.

Police cut and burned 557,276 plants this year, up nearly 50,000 from
2005 and the most since 1995. Arrests also were up: 475 in 2006
compared with 452 in 2005.

If each destroyed plant had produced one pound of pot with an
estimated worth of $2,000, that would mean $1 billion was prevented
from entering the illegal drug market.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration brought in several
helicopters and an airplane for six weeks during the summer, creating
more opportunity for spotters to find pot patches, said Lt. Ed
Shemelya, head of the marijuana-eradication program for Kentucky State Police.

"Anybody in this business will tell you the more eyes you get in the
sky, the more dope you'll find," Shemelya said.

It's been 20 years since state police and the Kentucky National Guard
carried out their first coordinated effort to destroy cultivated
marijuana. The story since has been what Shemelya calls a
"cat-and-mouse game" in which each side has gotten more sophisticated
and changed tactics.

The initial effort in 1986 was a one-day sweep, essentially a media
event to publicize eradication efforts.

Now Kentucky's eradication -- cited as one of the top efforts in the
nation -- runs year round with a task force that involves more
police, troops and agencies, including local officers, state police,
the National Guard, the DEA and the U.S. Forest Service.

The technology also has improved. At one time when a spotter saw a
marijuana patch from the air, police would calculate the location by
hand; now National Guard helicopters used for spotting have computers
that plot the location of pot patches with the click of a cursor,
Shemelya said.

Growers responded to increased scrutiny through the years by
improving techniques and doing more to hide their crops, including
reducing the size of their plots and spreading them out among the
woods and hills.

Twenty years ago, police sometimes found hundreds of plants together,
but in the past few years, the average number of plants in a plot has
been in the 60s or below.

One anomaly this year was that the average number of plants per plot
jumped to 83.

Growers may have put out larger patches because they thought the
National Guard wouldn't be as active in hunting for pot as a result
of deployments to the war in Iraq, Shemelya said.

That wasn't the case, Shemelya said. The number of Guard personnel
involved in the marijuana-cutting program was about the same as always.

The guard has adequate troops to support law enforcement or respond
to disasters at home even with troops overseas, said spokesman Col.
Phil Miller.

Police also found far more booby traps at pot patches this year than
they had for several years. In 2005 there were two, but police found
20 this year.

In one case, a grower had driven dozens of nails through a piece of
wood and put it in a pit with the nails sticking up. An officer was
hurt when he stepped into the hidden pit, Shemelya said.

At another plot, police found inert pipe bombs that didn't contain
any explosives to scare people away. It isn't clear sometimes whether
booby traps are directed at police or people trying to steal marijuana.

Kentucky long has ranked as one of the top outdoor pot producers in
the nation for a number of reasons, including its conducive climate,
lots of places to hide patches and experienced growers.

In 2005, the state ranked second behind California in the number of
plants eradicated, according to the DEA.