REAPING MARIJUANA IN HILLS EMPTIED OF STILLS

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

"Moonshine's a lost art around here," said Sheriff Jacobs, driving up
a back road near Yellow Mountain, a remote place he has watched
blossom as a local cornucopia of marijuana. "Moonshine went out in the
late 70's, 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 the last two years here in Knott
County alone.

The back-road yield of illegal marijuana has so compounded that
federal officials, alarmed at a $4 billion cash crop surpassing legal
tobacco in some areas, have designated 65 Appalachian counties here
and in West Virginia and Tennessee as a special High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area.

It is one of 31 such regions in the nation, and the only one with
marijuana as the single targeted drug, an indication of this region's
prodigious rise as a source of high-grade marijuana, an estimated
two-fifths of the nation's supply, much of it for the Northeast.

"It's almost replaced the moonshining of years gone by as something
embedded in the culture and as a way of making an antigovernment
statement," said Joseph C. Peters, assistant deputy director of the
White House Drug Control Policy Office, which singled out Appalachia
for the crackdown two years ago.

Since then, more than 1,900 arrests have been made and 5,000 patches
of marijuana have been uprooted. Yet Sheriff Jacobs has found a fresh
seasonal force of agri-dopers already tilling the land, cyclical as
Ecclesiastes in working a crop that sells for up to $3,500 a pound.

Marijuana, a variety of the same species that produces hemp, was an
outgrowth of the local rope industry, which filled a vital defense
need in World War II, the sheriff said. While moonshining continues to
thrive in spots like the Virginia-North Carolina border, law
enforcement officials in this part of Appalachia are far more
concerned with cannabis.

The federal help means that National Guard helicopters have already
swept through on their spring reconnaissance of the most remote
marijuana patches, gathering photo intelligence for harvest time. It
means that Sheriff 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.

"We're in planting time right now; the marijuana's only a foot high,"
said the sheriff, gently summoning over a young man who had been
warily watching the law pull up to his trailer home. "So this is
watching time for me. Destroy it now and they'll have enough time to
plant a fresh crop."

In the folksiest of exchanges, the young man casually mentioned the
return from prison of a local marijuana grower, a bit of intelligence
the sheriff already knew.

"I just like to talk to these boys," Sheriff Jacobs said as he drove
on, then discreetly pointed out a path snaking off like a raw scar
toward a lush hollow up beyond the trailer.

"Well, I think we got us a patch up there," he said, stowing his
suspicion for when the marijuana grows high, up to 18 feet. At that
point growers reap their crops, and the sheriff reaps some growers.

The sheriff and state troopers are regional leaders in arrests and
crop destruction, a fact greatly appreciated in this coal mining
county of 18,000, said Charlotte Hicks Caudill, a reporter for The
Troublesome Creek Times. The paper occasionally reports a marijuana
raid in sleepy hamlets like Mousie, but a feature on the exploits of
Wilbur Conley, an intrepid beekeeper, seems the more preferred news.

"I wonder if people are becoming kind of tolerant of marijuana," Ms.
Caudill said. "They better not."

Appalachian growers were brazen at first, planting 10,000 or more
plants in a single marijuana patch, each plant worth about $1,000 in
retail produce, the sheriff said. The first great object lesson that
pot does not pay occurred 10 years ago when Donna Hall, a local
schoolteacher, her husband and their son were sentenced to prison and
their homestead was confiscated after they were convicted of growing a
formidable 14,000 plants.

"A patch of 250 plants is considered big these days," said State
Trooper Dean Craft who, across 13 years of patrols, has watched the
growers become more devious, particularly in using remote acreage of
innocent owners or fruitful glades of the Daniel Boone National Forest.

Most use machetes and all-terrain vehicles to chew their way to the
sunny sanctuaries they need deep in the forest. But some boldly use
the edges of cemeteries to quietly grow their crops. The police watch
for telltale paraphernalia like a woodsman packing a sawed-off hoe or
hauling a large supply of garden fertilizer, potting soil, water and
deer fencing into the forest depths.

"Deer and groundhogs are our friends," Sheriff Jacobs said. "They love
pot."

A smart grower nowadays tills three patches. "One for us to find, one
for his livelihood and the third for his competitors to steal," the
sheriff said. He described a cutthroat competition among growers who
booby-trap their patches with skunks, snakes, air horns, explosives
and fish hooks.

The sheriff's deputy, Chris Collins, said few tasks were more fun than
tracking growers like some modern species of woodland varmint. "It's
work but I love it," the deputy said. "On an early morning with the
dew out there, you can even smell a pot patch."

Modern highways make smuggling easy, with the cannabis stashed in
false gas tanks and other niches. And it is easy to sell to visitors
at the Gingerbread Festival, an annual harvest gala where delectable
fruits of the land change hands and a small sack of pot eludes most
notice.

But Sheriff Jacobs, who admits that his father did a little
moonshining in the old days, finds that residents will not tolerate
growers the way they did moonshiners.

"There's public support for eradicating it, busting the dopers," the
sheriff said. His men 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.

"Some people complain I'm cutting down the livelihood of poor,
starving people around here," said the sheriff, prowling the greenery.
"I say this money doesn't change their lifestyle. All the dopers want
is a new TV, a dish antenna, another A.T.V. to drive up to their patch."