AFTER 20 YEARS, WAR ON MARIJUANA CHANGES

Police destroyed more marijuana growing outdoors in Kentucky this
year than they had in more than a decade, according to numbers
compiled by state police.

One factor in the increase was that the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration brought in several helicopters and an airplane for six
weeks during the summer, creating more opportunity for airborne
spotters to find pot patches, said Lt. Ed Shemelya, head of the
marijuana-eradication program for the 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.

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

It's been 20 years since the state police and Kentucky National Guard
carried out their first coordinated effort to destroy cultivated
marijuana in 1986. The story since has been what Shemelya calls a
"cat and mouse game" in which each side has gotten more sophisticated
and changed tactics.

That first joint effort by state police and the Guard 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 and uses a task force that involves many
more police, troops and agencies, including the state police and
National Guard, the DEA, the U.S. Forest Service, the Appalachia High
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force and local officers.

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 the National Guard helicopters used for spotting have
computers to generate maps that plot the location of pot patches with
the click of a cursor, Shemelya said.

Booby Traps

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.

Police sometimes found hundreds of plants together 20 years ago, but
the average number of plants in a plot the last few years 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.

"They were unfortunately fooled badly," Shemelya said of growers.

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, for instance, 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 have any
explosives in them, set up to scare people away. It isn't clear
sometimes whether booby traps are directed at police or people trying
to steal marijuana crops.

One thing that hasn't changed from 20 years ago is that after someone
in the air sees a pot patch, police on the ground still have the
sweaty job of hiking in to cut the plants.

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

Pot production began taking root in the 1970s and spread in the
1980s, often in poorer areas of the state. Over time, some places and
people began to tolerate or even accept marijuana-growing as a way to
make money in areas without a lot of other opportunities, police said.

"They don't like the state police coming in messing with their
economy," said Danny Webb, who is now Letcher County sheriff but
earlier was captain of the state-police post in Hazard, which covers
a five-county area in Eastern Kentucky.

However, most people in Letcher County and others do not support
marijuana growing, Webb said.

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

Another way to describe the area's pot production: The 68 counties in
Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee and West Virginia that make up the
Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) have only .87
percent of the nation's population, but accounted for 25 percent of
the plants eradicated nationwide in 2003, according to the most
recent annual report from the task force.

$1 Billion Worth of Pot

If police are finding that much marijuana, Shemelya said, it means
there is a lot more they aren't finding. Even with additional flight
time, police can't cover all the primary pot-growing area of Southern
and Eastern Kentucky and probably don't find more than half the crop, he said.

Kentucky pot growers have upgraded the potency of their product over
the last two decades, making it a prized drug outside the state.

In the 1970s, the amount of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the main
hallucinogen) in marijuana was between 1 percent and 6 percent, but
tests of marijuana eradicated in Eastern Kentucky in 2005 showed an
average THC content of 15 percent, according to the 2005 annual
report from the Appalachia HIDTA.

Police say much of the high-quality marijuana grown outdoors in
Kentucky goes to markets out of state, moved out in private vehicles
a few pounds at a time. A pound can command $3,000 or more, Shemelya said.

Police use a standard estimate that each plant they destroy would
have produced one pound of pot worth $2,000. At that estimate, the
plants destroyed this year would have been worth more than $1 billion.

Critics of the war on drugs say that figure is inflated -- a way to
justify continued funding for the eradication effort -- because some
plants would have been worth little or nothing and many do not
produce a pound of pot.

Police defend the $2,000 figure as valid, however, because many
plants would produce more than that amount.

Groups that advocate legalizing marijuana use for adults, such as the
Drug Policy Alliance and the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws (NORML) argue that eradication programs such as
Kentucky's are a waste of money, doing little to cut the supply of
pot while helping keep prices artificially high on the black market.

"They've accomplished a price support in an unintended way," said
Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML.

But police say every plant they cut keeps marijuana off the street.

It's vital to do that because marijuana is a much more powerful drug
than it once was, because it's the most-used illegal substance in the
country and because it's the drug that many abusers of harder drugs
start with, according to the DEA and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

"If we can keep them off marijuana, we've got a chance to keep them
off drugs," C. Frank Rapier, director of the Appalachia HIDTA, said
of young people.

And if police hadn't eradicated more than 500,000 pot plants in
Kentucky this year, there would be more cash in the hands of people
who could use it -- and have at times -- to corrupt police, courts
and local officials, Rapier said.

No one expects growers to give up, even with increased enforcement.
The Appalachia HIDTA forecast in its 2007 "threat assessment" that
pot cultivation will continue at "historical levels."

"Individuals involved in this activity are resilient and do not give
up despite repeated losses of crops to eradication," the report said.