WAR ON MARIJUANA HAS UNLIKELY LEADER

The 37-year-old daughter of a former migrant worker directs the battle
against California's sophisticated, increasingly violent growers

SANTA BARBARA -- The pot farmer's worst nightmare is the diminutive,
37-year-old daughter of a migrant farm worker whose troops call her Supreme
Commander.

Sonya Barna hardly looks the part of the Patton of Pot. She is short, wears
her fingernails and her brown hair long and cuts a striking enough figure in
her fatigues that a visiting Ukrainian general recently asked if all
American women were so beautiful.

But as head of California's marijuana eradication task force, called CAMP
for Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, she is on pace to break all records
for the number of pot plants chopped out of California's renegade marijuana
farms. This summer, her squadron of helicopters has dived into remote
corners of the state, from the steep gorges of the Santa Ynez Mountains to
the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, carrying crews of eradicators with
machetes.

Barna's commitment to the war on pot is matched only by the increasing
sophistication of the growers who have been converting California's wild
lands into corporate-style pot farms. In recent years, California's
marijuana industry has undergone a radical change from the time when North
Coast hippies tended their backyard gardens in Frye boots and drove their VW
vans down to San Francisco to unload their stash. Today, the pot gardens
have moved south and tend to be larger than ever.

Last year, a farm in San Benito County yielded 53,000 plants. At $4,000 a
plant, the formula the state uses to measure the stuff, that was worth $212
million.

Another major change is that many of the biggest farms are being operated by
Mexican drug gangs who set up camp deep in remote corners of national forest
land. These huge operations, complete with 12-foot-tall watchtowers, are
tended by farm workers paid around $500 a month to guard the plants.
Sometimes they are taken in blindfolded, so they don't know where they are
and can't leave.

The increasingly high stakes involved were demonstrated with deadly results
on Aug. 24, when a Mexican citizen was shot and killed while defending a pot
farm in Madera County. Jesus Erasmo Figueroa-Valencia was shot when he
allegedly pulled a .45-caliber handgun on sheriff's deputies raiding a
7,000-plant farm, deputies said.

Some people may debate the usefulness of the drug war. Barna is not one of
those.

"I don't think we should ever give up," she said over dinner in Solvang on a
recent Sunday. Outside, her crew was making ready for the next morning's
assault in the Santa Ynez range. "The more you hit the supply, the harder it
is to get."

They call themselves the "Shroom Platoon."

Partly, it's because the men and women of CAMP have nicknames for
everything. One man is called "Red Line" because he is so heavy, according
to the joke, that the helicopter engine redlines when it tries to carry him.
"Broker" is always out of money. Barna is "Supreme Commander," for obvious
reasons.

As for the 'Shroom Platoon, that's a sardonic reference to the way mushrooms
are grown: kept in the dark and fed manure until the light goes on. Then
they come alive.

"Come on, Sonya," her team says when she gets impatient with bureaucratic
delays that ground her helicopters. "Just 'shroom out."

That's not easy for Barna, a mother of three whose gift of chat conceals a
fierce drive, which she comes by naturally. Her mother worked her way out of
the agricultural fields to teach social welfare at Fresno State, in the
meantime communicating to her daughter an intense work ethic. While Sonya
was a cheerleader at Clovis High outside Fresno, her interest was in law
enforcement, and she began her career with a splash. At 21, she went
undercover as a high school student in the San Joaquin Valley town of Sanger
to bust students selling heroin on campus.

After a stint with the San Jose Police Department, she joined the state's
Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which runs the CAMP program. Since 1983,
CAMP has teamed up with a variety of federal and state agencies, including
the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and sheriff's
departments from 56 counties, to eradicate pot gardens in rural areas.

Originally, there were six teams operating on a budget of $2.5 million. But
over time, the budget was cut to its current level of $600,000. That
supports three teams of 13 people.

Historically, two eradication teams were stationed full time in Mendocino
and Humboldt counties, the traditional home for pot plantations. In
recognition of the changing face of the pot industry, Barna scrapped that
approach this year and put all three teams on the road.

Last year, Barna commanded the third mobile team, and her success led
directly to her appointment as commander of the entire CAMP effort, Michael
Van Winkle, press officer for the Department of Justice, said.

"She's very gung-ho," said Van Winkle. "That's the kind of person you need
as CAMP commander."

With this year's season only half over, Barna's teams had already plucked
139,000 plants.

All this raises some questions: Just how much pot is out there? And how much
of it is even a pot warrior like Barna taking off the market? Was the
shooting in Madera County evidence that the growers are feeling the pinch
and deciding to stand and fight rather than cut and run when the state
helicopters fly in? Or are the efforts of CAMP barely scratching the
surface?

On the one hand, it's a big state. When you fly over, you see vast
landscapes of greenery. Picking a marijuana garden out of this patchwork
would seem impossible. But the M-spotters, as marijuana spotters are known,
have a couple of things on their side. One is that pot needs direct sunlight
for a few hours a day. That means the pot garden, no matter how remote, is
visible from the air. The other is that marijuana's color is different from
that of any other plant.

Experienced eradicators describe it as an almost neon green, as if the
psychoactive ingredient -- THC -- that flows through the plant turns it
luminescent.

CAMP's efforts have drawn the attention of outsiders. Ukraine, facing its
own marijuana problem, sent a team to consult Barna. CAMP also sends pot
samples to the University of Mississippi, where they are analyzed for THC
content. Some samples in recent years have come back at 27 percent, compared
with 2 percent in the 1960s and '70s, a fact that only reinforces Barna's
attitude about the drug.

"Pot is not a gateway drug," she scoffed. "It is a drug."

The staging area the next morning was a park just north of Lake Cachuma in
the flammable Santa Barbara County back country.

Two helicopters landed, kicking up clouds of white dust as team leaders
leaned over the hood of a truck and plotted their attacks on three different
gardens spotted by the locals.

The local operations chief was nicknamed Turtle. He warns everyone to be
careful: Busting marijuana farms doesn't carry the same threat as
street-level undercover drug work. Most farmers have fled by the time the
eradicators arrive. The Madera shooting, however, put the team on alert.

"There will be two STABOs and one walk-in," Turtle said.

STABO has had as great an impact on the war on pot as the machine gun did on
ground warfare. Just as the machine gun greatly increased the killing power
of a single man, STABO turned an eradicator into a plant-killing machine.

STABO stands for Short Term Airborne Operation, which in plain English means
helicoptering two people into remote forests at the end of a 150-foot-long
line. Instead of hiking for hours through dense brush, a STABO team can be
inserted miles from the nearest trail or road in a matter of minutes.

After STABO was initiated three years ago, the plant counts exploded, from
less than 100,000 to 132,000 in 1997, to 135,000 in 1998, to 241,000 in
1999.

The only way to see the CAMP pot-fighters in action is to put on a pair of
boots and tramp along with them through the thorny chaparral blanketing the
trackless emptiness that still covers so much of California. Because
reporters are not allowed to STABO, I went in with a hiking team going after
a garden deep in a gorge that the helicopter couldn't reach.

Two hours later, we were airlifted out with 33 measly plants. My clothes
were torn and my knees and hands were bleeding from fighting my way up the
steepest pitch I'd hiked in years.

The effectiveness of STABOing was proved that day. While we inched our way
up and down the mountain for an armload of pot, the STABO teams collected
314 plants from five other gardens dotting the hillside. A stakebed truck
was loaded up and roared off to a special site where the pot would be
buried; they no longer burn it.

Even though, by their math, the value of the pot wrenched from the
mountains' grasp that day was $1.4 million, it was still a pretty paltry
score. Barna was not disappointed.

Like a fisherman with faith in the generosity of the sea, she knew there
would be other days.