APPALACHIAN MARIJUANA REPLACES MOONSHINE

HINDMAN, Ky. -- Call it green lightning, the seedling crop of countless
hidden marijuana patches now stippling the spring time "hollers" 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 two-fifths of America's
supply.

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

The federal help means that 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 tough work of cutting and burning.

The sheriff and state troopers are regional leaders in arresting
marijuana growers and destroying their crops, and are 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 deputies have burned more than $180 million 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.