KY. POT GROWERS LACING VA. LANDS

Crackdown Scoots Drug Over State Line

Kentucky marijuana growers, whose billion-dollar business is under intense
assault by the U.S. government, are pushing east into Virginia to avoid
federal detection, sowing abandoned strip mines and national forest land
with pot, according to drug authorities in Southwest Virginia.

Since 1998, the state line between Kentucky and Virginia has become a
crisscross of trails created by all-terrain vehicles used by growers to get
to their marijuana plots and back to Kentucky, said Kevin Yates, a
Dickenson County deputy. Dickenson borders Pike County, Ky.

"We've seen a lot of four-wheeler trails going across Pine Mountain, which
separates Dickenson from Pike, and informants have even seen transactions
on the trails," said Yates. "Right now, there's not much we can do. For the
time being, the issue is manpower."

Kentucky growers began planting more marijuana in Virginia two years ago
after the federal government declared eastern Kentucky the center of the
Appalachian "marijuana belt," said Richard Stallard, coordinator of a drug
task force that operates in Dickenson, Wise, Scott and Lee - Virginia's
four westernmost counties. The increased federal attention led to a
crackdown on the Bluegrass State's illegal marijuana industry.

"I understand what the growers are thinking," Stallard said. "If I'm
putting a lot of pressure on somebody here, they're going to go somewhere
else where they think they can do it."

The ATV trails running across Black Mountain between Virginia and Kentucky
are now too many to count, Stallard said. A field of almost 4,000 marijuana
plants found in Wise last month - the biggest find there in years - was
probably a joint operation of Kentucky and Virginia growers, he said. The
field was near the Kentucky state line.

Virginia's marijuana industry, concentrated in the southwest corner of the
state, has been a long-standing problem for authorities, and pot is
believed to be the state's largest cash crop, surpassing even tobacco. The
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, using federal
statistics, estimates that the annual wholesale value of Virginia marijuana
is nearly $200 million. Virginia agriculture officials reported that
wholesale tobacco sales in 1999 topped $160 million.

But Virginia's marijuana crop pales in comparison with what's grown in
eastern Kentucky, where high unemployment and mountainous isolation make
growing pot attractive. Officials estimate Kentucky growers make about
$1.37 billion a year. Some put the crop value at $3.9 billion. (The wild
divergence in estimates is partly due to the differing yield of a single
plant. Some plants yield $1,000 worth of pot, some yield $2,000 or more.)

The amount of marijuana grown in Appalachia has caught the attention of the
federal government, which in April 1998 designated 65 counties in West
Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
The designation allowed the government to pump $6 million a year into
eradication efforts. The result: nearly 2,000 arrests and the destruction
of more than 486,000 pot plants in 5,703 plots in 1998 and 1999, according
to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

"They work the eradication efforts really, really hard in Kentucky,"
Stallard said. "They use advance tactics and Blackhawk helicopters. They
rappel into an area, cut down the plants, then haul them up on a hoist line."

Those kinds of tactics make Kentucky growers' eastern migration
understandable, said Stan Kennedy, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent
based in Roanoke. "They're looking for different areas where they don't
think the Virginia authorities are looking."

Stallard and Yates said it's difficult to catch growers in the mountains of
Virginia. When authorities find a marijuana patch, they like to stake it
out for a few days to see if the growers show up. But limited manpower
makes lengthy stakeouts impractical.

Stallard said he hopes to involve local game commissions in future
eradication programs in Virginia. Yates, meanwhile, said Dickenson soon
will have four more deputies available to help stop the influx of Kentucky
growers.

"Next year," Yates said, "we'll be swinging a bigger bat."