WEEDING OUT POT FARMS FROM ALOFT

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 the state'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 green 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.

On a recent morning, as she drove to a staging area in Southern
California, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed up her team leader
in Porterville. "Don't kill yourself," she said, "but take out 10,000
plants today."

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, wholesale.

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. It was the first
shooting connected with CAMP in memory, said Michael Van Winkle, press
officer for the state Department of Justice.

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."

Supreme Commander of ' 'Shroom Platoon'

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 fields in Brawley to teach social welfare at
Cal State Fresno, 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.

The field enforcement effort lasts about two months, usually in late
summer and early fall, which matches the peak growing and harvesting
seasons.

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, Van
Winkle said.

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

Barna crisscrossed the state last year in her Astro van, making one big
score after another.

When the season was over, her team had snatched 140,000 plants, more
than the entire eradication effort had gathered since 1989. The total
number of plants seized by all three teams was 241,000, which
established a record for CAMP.

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.

"If the sun hits it right, it's like a light came on," said Sgt. Stan
Mathiasen of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department.

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%, compared with 2% 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. A dozen men and two
women in fatigues stood around tossing the football and basically "
'shrooming out."

Finally, 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 gardens spotted by the locals.

"These mountains here don't look like it, but they're straight up and
down," warned Mathiasen.

As he talked, Barna stood off to the side, exercising a loose and easy
style of command.

The local operations chief was nicknamed Turtle. A CHP officer in the
West Valley when not chopping pot, he was filling in for another man
who'd been hospitalized with a bad case of poison oak. 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 fewer than 100,000 to 132,000 in 1997, to 135,000 in 1998, to
241,000 in 1999.

Barna and other STABOers describe the sensation of skimming along the
tops of trees at 35 knots as exhilarating, but they also know the
danger. Above them in the helicopter is a man with a knife whose sole
job is to cut the rope by which they are hanging should the helicopter
get into catastrophic trouble. It's a simple and brutal equation that
every STABOer lives with.

In three years of STABOing, however, there hasn't been one injury.

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
big stake-bed 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.

"That's OK," she said, "We serviced the county."

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

And there were. Two days later, the team moved on to Kern County, where
the forest yielded a bounty--20,000 plants in a single day. The score
was so big that they settled in to fish it out. Barna figured it would
take two or three more days to get everything. Indeed, 24 hours later
they had 38,000 more, making the Kern County bust the largest farm ever
broken up by CAMP and bringing the season's total to 224,000 plants.

"Just looking at it from the air," she said, "it goes on and on and
on."