MARIJUANA BECOMES BIG CASH CROP IN APPALACHIA

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."

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 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.

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.

"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."