NOT ALL THE GRASS IS BLUE IN KENTUCKY'S HOLLOWS

Seized Pot Worth More Than Area's Legal Cash Crops

Lexington, Ky. -- Winter is easing in the rolling hills and hamlet hollows,
and all the prespring indications are that marijuana will have another
bumper year and remain this state's No. 1 cash crop, just as it continues
prime in West Virginia and Tennessee.

"Bigger than tobacco," noted Roy E. Sturgill, the director of the
Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), the only one of
the nation's 31 federal anti-drug regions focused on marijuana.

The prodigious, high-octane marijuana crop is a startling fact of modern
life to outsiders passing through the 65 Appalachian counties in the target
area, a rugged, fruitful swath of some beautiful parts of Kentucky, West
Virginia and Tennessee. Pot is ubiquitous, growing well-tended in
deep-woods patches and casually disguised, too, in the expanse of a
farmer's cornfield and a resident's basement.

The annual crop comes in at an estimated $4 billion-plus yield of
high-grade marijuana that flows illicitly to markets of the Northeast
willing to pay some of the nation's highest street prices. (This yield is
beyond the $1.4 billion worth tracked and eradicated by authorities last
year, a haul that, even when broken down in the three states, still tops
any of their legal cash crops.)

"It's kind of like the old moonshine days with neighbors making a living at
it," said Sgt. Ronnie Ray, a marijuana suppression officer with the
Kentucky State Police here at Bluegrass Station. "And we're kind of like
the new revenuers."

Ray, his commander, Lt. Donald J. Gill, and Detective Mark Moore, their
specialist in the increasingly popular art of indoor marijuana growing,
discussed the agronomics of green lightning with gentle drawls and savvy
experience.

"I'd say we're more or less holding the line right now," Gill warily
estimated, pleased his unit recently succeeded in a drug bust of more than
1, 000 plants being grown indoors, the toughest turf of all to track the
growers.

"Still," Ray concedes, "we're probably taking very little of all that's out
there."

Moore, working a beat in which the growers have new anti-detection wrinkles
every season, said of the marijuana, "Pound for pound, it's the big one."

With all the rote anticipation of the Farmer's Almanac, the 105 full-time
anti-pot officers of the Appalachia target area are preparing for the
spring planting. They will be joined by 595 seasonal officers from federal,
state and local forces charged with tracking the "holler dopers." For the
most part, these are ordinary denizens who often, but not always, are from
the more impoverished old mining hamlets.

"Everybody seems to know somebody who grows it, sells it, smokes it," says
Ray. "It's the dirty little secret of Kentucky."

Spotters will go out by helicopter in the spring to map hundreds of
suspected crops in mountain pastures. Anti-pot harvesters will descend by
rappelling into the most remote farms hidden in wild places like the Daniel
Boone National Forest. More than 200,000 pot plants, worth about $1,000
each, are seized every year in the sprawling beauty of the Boone forest.

Moore, meanwhile, finds all too few of the citizen complaints he relies
upon in tracking the indoor planters year-round. They use hydroponics,
growing lamps and scientific pruning techniques to produce a crop every 89
days in basements, silos, closets and even underground bunkers, replete
with booby traps and remote video monitoring.

Despite police crackdowns, the growers will soon be hiking or heading by
all-terrain vehicles for the choice sun-drenched, remote patches of
Appalachia, where the rich soil and good farming weather grow pot plants 18
feet high. Confiscation has increased five-fold over the last decade, but
the region still produces an estimated two-fifths of the nation's pot crop.

In busier hollows, criminal organizations have formed from loose
confederations of family units, according to HIDTA intelligence.
Corruption, in turn, has compromised at least a half dozen county sheriff
operations since marijuana took root as big business in the 1980s.

"There are people afraid to go out in the fall on their own land," Ray
noted, explaining that there are brazen interlopers who try to foil
property confiscation laws by surreptitiously using tracts of other
people's land. "There's a lot of good people in this state dead set against
marijuana," the sergeant emphasizes, while noting that the old backwoods
peer pressure of the moonshining days can mitigate against citizen complaints.