APPALACHIA'S MOONSHINE BUSINESS HAS GONE TO POT

Marijuana Plots Replace Stills As Major Cash Crop

HINDMAN, Ky. -- Call it green lightning, the seedling crop of countless
hidden marijuana patches now stippling the springtime valleys of Appalachia
the way moonshine stills used to when Sheriff Wheeler Jacobs was a boy.

"Moonshine's a lost art around here," said Jacobs, driving up a back road
near Yellow Mountain, a remote area he has watched blossom as a cornucopia
of marijuana. "Moonshine went out in the late '70s, just when marijuana
started big around here."

As the sheriff wheeled about his domain recently, he could think of only
two tired old moonshiners left in these hills, in contrast to the 54
youthful "holler dopers" arrested during the last two years here in Knott
County alone.

The back-road yield of illegal marijuana has proliferated so much that
federal officials have designated 65 Appalachian counties here and in West
Virginia and Tennessee as a "high-intensity drug trafficking area."

This region is estimated to supply 40 per cent of the nation's supply.

Since the region has been the target of drug enforcement measures, more
than 1,900 arrests have been made and 5,000 patches of marijuana have been
uprooted.

The federal help means National Guard helicopters have already swept
through on their spring reconnaissance of the most remote marijuana patches.

It means Jacobs has the overtime money to put his four deputies out on the
hillsides alongside state troopers this summer for the rugged work of
cutting and burning.

The sheriff and state troopers are regional leaders in arresting marijuana
growers and destroying their crops.

As such, they are greatly appreciated in this coal mining county of 18,000,
said Charlotte Hicks Caudill, a reporter for The Troublesome Creek Times.

A smart grower nowadays tills three patches, said the sheriff.

"One for us to find, one for his livelihood and the third for his
competitors to steal."

Jacobs and his sheriff's deputies have burned more than $180 million (U.S.)
worth of plants in the last two years, much of it found, he said, after
quiet tips from people who fear city-style corruption if it is tolerated.