MARIJUANA CRACKDOWN YIELDS TROUBLED HARVEST

The war began on the Big Island as a clandestine police operation called
Green Harvest. In the years since, battles have spread throughout the
Islands and shaped both politics and police work.

To be sure, Operation Green Harvest succeeded in driving some big operators
out of business and reversing a perception of lawlessness, especially on the
Big Island. But acres of land once filled with marijuana plants the size of
Christmas trees merely gave way to countless plots of tiny plants, tended by
small-time dealers who learned the hard way how to evade drug enforcement
helicopters.

Growers lost homes, went to jail, died in drug disputes. Police officers
arrested friends and family and were targeted by crude booby traps. Caught
in the middle were angry noncombatants, people in remote places such as the
Puna District who grew weary of police helicopters ruining their peace.

Even as police hacked and buried millions of plants, marijuana wove itself
into the fabric of life in the Islands. Pakalolo continues to fuel an
underground economy where it is the currency for everything from car repairs
to baby-sitting.

“The problem here is the ideal growing conditions and the sheer vastness of
the growing area of the Big Island, the lush wilderness and fertile
valleys,” said Big Island Police Chief Wayne Carvalho. “Pakalolo grows
wherever you’ll find the green, green grass of Hawaii.”

No one knows how much the war on marijuana has cost, the manpower consumed,
the volume of plants seized or the number of dealers put out of business.

Some Hawaii law enforcement officials said they probably have the
information but don’t have the personnel to compile it. Others said it would
be impossible to comply with The Advertiser’s request for an overall
estimate of the costs because agencies keep records differently.

The data that various agencies can provide hint at the enormous size of the
marijuana industry.

In 1998, Hawaii’s marijuana campaign seized 772,401 plants, more than any
other state’s marijuana program. In 1997, the National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws estimated that Hawaii’s pakalolo industry produced
250,000 pounds, ranking it fifth in the country, behind California,
Tennessee, Kentucky and Florida.

Tom Kelly, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement
Administration’s Honolulu district office, said it’s impossible to estimate
the size of Hawaii’s marijuana industry. He won’t guess how much comes in
and how much is shipped out each year by plane, boat and mail.

“There’s no way for me to know out of 100,000-plus plants that are
eradicated, how many more weren’t eradicated, and how many went to Guam or
the Philippines or California,” Kelly said. “If we knew where they were
going there, we’d have stopped them.”

Is Hawaii better off for having declared war on marijuana?

A review by the DEA’s audit division concluded in 1995 that: “Presently,
analysis of the effectiveness of marijuana eradication efforts in Hawaii
County — or any other jurisdiction — is hindered by a lack of reliable data
about the extent of illicit cultivation.”

The alternative — putting an end to the marijuana campaign — is unthinkable
to Carvalho and other law enforcement officials.

Allowing marijuana growers to operate unchecked would send the Big Island
back to the dark days of the 1970s, he said, when hunters and hikers were
confronted by growers carrying shotguns and rifles. Drug dealers killed one
another. And utility company linemen were shot at — just because they had a
view of marijuana fields.

“People say marijuana is a victimless crime,” Carvalho said. “We had
homicides. A lot of people forget about that. Once we let up or slow down,
it’s just a question of time when we’ll have a major problem again.”

Even today, a Big Island bulldozer operator who clears the old sugar cane
fields tries to accommodate marijuana growers when he comes across their
plants. He methodically grooms the area while leaving the marijuana alone.
It’s his way of letting the growers know that someone is in the area without
hurting their business.

Still, he can’t avoid trouble. Eight of his bulldozer engines have been
destroyed when people poured sand into the engines.

“You fire it up and aloha, it’s gone,” he said.

“I don’t want to get involved,” said the operator, who did not want his name
used out of fear of retaliation from growers. “Guaranteed, I don’t want
problems. I don’t know why they do this.”

Judith Mura’s problem isn’t with the growers. It’s with the campaign to stop
them.

The eradication helicopters have flown so low over Mura’s house in Puna
Palisades that they rattle the roof and walls, she said. The noise sometimes
gives Mura’s 5-year-old daughter, Jordan, nightmares.

“They call it a war on drugs,” Mura said, as Jordan bounced on a trampoline
in their front yard. “This is a war on our own people. How can the United
States of America declare war on its own citizens?”

SECRET CRACKDOWN

Operation Green Harvest began on the Big Island in 1976 with as many as 75
federal, state and local narcotics officers backed by police and National
Guard helicopters. It was so secret that officials didn’t acknowledge it
publicly for another two years.

“No one really knew what was going on and they were afraid that if word got
out there would be armed confrontations with the police,” said Dale
Fergerstrom. He was part of the original operation as a foot patrolman and
now is a Big Island police captain.

“At the last minute, they would say, ‘You, you, and you — report to a
certain area for marijuana eradication.’ They dragged me through the bushes,
hiking for miles following a helicopter.”

As millions of dollars in federal drug enforcement money began to flow into
Hawaii, the war on marijuana spread to Kauai, Maui and Oahu. Eventually it
included helicopters from private companies, police, the DEA and National
Guard. Personnel came from four island police departments, the DEA, the
state Department of Land and Natural Resources, Army, Coast Guard, Postal
Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and
the Internal Revenue Service.

Operation Green Harvest became Operation Wipeout. Today, it is officially
the Counter Cannabis Field Operation, a local version of the federal
Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program.

But the name Green Harvest stuck.

Its peak came in the 1980s when authorities routinely pulled more than 1
million plants out of the Big Island each year.

In a study released in 1989, Attorney General Warren Price worried that
victories over the pakalolo industry would create a vacuum that harder drugs
could fill. He said there was evidence that Mainland gangs had moved into
Hawaii’s drug industry. And he was bothered by how the war on marijuana was
progressing.

“The only problem with the eradication effort in Hawaii is that it is
costing over $1 million per year, and it is not apparently reducing, much
less eliminating, the marijuana industry in Hawaii, nor is there any
evidence to suggest it is reducing local consumption,” Price wrote. “Despite
the years of eradication efforts, the industry has flourished and grown, and
widespread consumption continues.”

Today, Hawaii’s war on marijuana is fought with a fifth of the manpower of
the early days, and plant seizures are down to about 300,000 each year.

From 1993 through 1997, the four Island police departments and the state
Department of Land and Natural Resources received a total of $2.58 million
for marijuana eradication from the DEA. Annual allocations ranged from
$400,000 to $600,000.

But law enforcement officials don’t want the true costs to be known because
fighting marijuana generates federal grants, said Donald M. Topping. He’s
the former director of the Social Science Research Institute at the
University of Hawaii and president of the Drug Policy Forum of Hawaii, which
questions the wisdom of American drug policies.

Without an overall accounting, Topping said, the people of Hawaii cannot
have an informed debate on whether to continue Green Harvest.

“Only a fool would say our current policies are having an effect,” Topping
said. “Yet we continue to pursue them in the face of overwhelming evidence
that they do not work.”

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) has
collected audits of anti-marijuana programs around the country for years.
None of them makes a comprehensive, year-by-year assessment of whether the
programs work, said Allen St. Pierre, NORML’s executive director.

In 1997, the DEA stopped publishing annual reports on its anti-marijuana
campaign, St. Pierre said. NORML continues to file Freedom of Information
Act requests for the data and now receives figures that are nearly
unintelligible, he said.

“A lot of the information that was publicly disseminated ended,” he said.
“It’s not easy to get data anymore.”

The Hawaii Army National Guard was one of the few agencies to provide The
Advertiser with detailed information about its involvement in the Counter
Cannabis Field Operation. The guard flew its Huey helicopters during the
first Green Harvest missions and later used its Bell Kiowa OH-58s during the
1990s, according to spokesman Capt. Chuck Anthony.

According to its records, though, the Guard began flying missions only in
fiscal year 1989, Anthony said.

“I know that can’t be right,” Anthony said. “I know we were in on the
original Green Harvest.”

The picture becomes even cloudier because the National Guard does not
separately account for marijuana eradication missions. The cost is somewhere
in the $3.6 million the Guard spent in 1999 on drug seizure operations.

James White, now a researcher at the UH globalization research center, tried
to add up the price of Hawaii’s marijuana war in 1995 for the statewide
Substance Abuse Task Force. He filed unsuccessful Freedom of Information Act
requests with the Justice Department and had no better luck with state and
local authorities.

“There were several problems,” White said. “We were lied to quite a lot. The
Neighbor Island police forces don’t necessarily cooperate. Even if they did
cooperate, there was no consistency in how people broke the figures down. I
was amazed that they had different fiscal years. So you were constantly
comparing apples and oranges.

“I didn’t feel there was a great conspiracy going on,” White said. “I felt
it was more incompetence and some minor deceptiveness. On the other hand,
fairly substantial funds are being spent, and it’s unknown whether it’s
being audited properly at all.”

A CERTAIN MYSTIQUE

“Puna Butter. Stoney mother. There is no other.” — Chant describing
Puna-grown marijuana.

The Maui Wowee, Kona Gold and Puna Butter smuggled out of the Islands has
always been accorded a certain mystique in marijuana lore.

“The perception is that Hawaii continues to produce some of the most
legendary, quality pot in the country,” said Steven Wishnia, senior editor
at High Times Magazine, a 200,000-circulation magazine devoted to the
marijuana culture.

No one disputes that Green Harvest cut into the industry. But it also drove
up the price of pakalolo, from $25 an ounce in the 1970s to $400 today, and
as much as $600 if it’s smuggled from the Big Island to Maui, Kauai or Oahu.

So an ounce of high-grade, Big Island-grown marijuana can be worth twice the
price of gold. Under the shade of a banyan tree in Puna, a 27-year-old
marijuana grower unscrewed the lid of a blue water jug, opened the brown
paper bag inside and unleashed the smell of high-grade, Puna-grown pakalolo.

Even in the shadows, it was impossible not to see the look of
self-satisfaction that spread across his gaunt, unlined face. The grower
leaned back in his chair and admired the ounce of cannabis sativa laid out
before him.

It was the result of cross-breeding small, quick-growing plants in pots he
can move quickly to avoid detection. His guerrilla style represents the
modern era in Hawaii’s war on marijuana.

“Today,” the grower said, “it’s duck-and-cover.”

The next day, nearly 20 miles away in Puna’s Hawaiian Paradise Park, Big
Island vice detectives Burt Shimabukuro and Benton Bolos rappelled out of a
Hughes 500 helicopter and into a grove of ohia trees to ruin some other
grower’s day. In less than five minutes, Shimabukuro and Bolos had slid out
of the helicopter, cut 110 2-foot pakalolo plants with their machetes, and
flown off in search of more clandestine patches.

“In and out, just like that,” said Big Island vice Lt. Henry Tavares, who is
in charge of marijuana eradication for the eastern half of Hawaii County.

As growers have spread smaller plants over miles of other peoples’ land,
police have responded by traveling in three helicopters: one that spots
marijuana and two that carry five officers each who remove the plants.
Traveling lighter means they can move quicker and cover miles of terrain.

“We taught the growers our methods,” Tavares said. “Now we’re adapting,
too.”

NOT GOING AWAY

Twenty-four years of eradication may have altered the marijuana industry on
the Big Island, but it’s hardly going away.

“The only thing I’ve seen eradication change is the price of marijuana, not
the availability,” said Phil Geraci, a counselor at Hilo High School. “It’s
been my experience that most people here don’t pay for it. It’s either
traded or they grow their own or they rip it off from somebody.”

A 15-year-old sophomore from Hilo High School listed the beaches and
hangouts where he sees marijuana every day — Four Mile Beach, Lanes,
Containers.

But he said marijuana and other drugs have virtually disappeared from Hilo
High because of a zero-tolerance policy that levies an automatic transfer to
an alternative school for anyone caught with drugs or alcohol. That has left
Hilo High an island of sobriety in a community where marijuana is rampant,
Geraci said.

“Here in Hilo, there is a serious marijuana problem,” he said. “It has hurt
families. It pulls people apart. It makes anyone who abuses it less of a
person, and that affects every part of them, not only their families but
their productivity with society.”

The Big Island Substance Abuse Council treated 464 clients from 1997 to
1998, 330 of them from the eastern side of the Big Island. Clients had
various drug and alcohol problems, but marijuana was a consistent issue for
90 percent of them, said Wes Margheim, the organization’s coordinator of
adult services.

Even when marijuana is the only drug present, it creates problems by killing
motivation and ambition, Margheim said. The $400-an-ounce price on the Big
Island also drains family incomes.

“It affects men and women both,” Margheim said. “There are arguments,
neglect of children, lack of responsibility.”

Elyse Douglas was a 21-year-old Hilo Community College student and a
marijuana smoker who was stoned most of the time. She still managed to own a
modest house and was otherwise doing fine, said her father, Lorn Douglas, a
custom chopstick maker from Kehena.

Elyse Douglas remembers when an ounce of pot went from $275 to $300. “If you
wanted really good quality, I paid $600 one time,” she said.

There is considerable debate about whether the crackdown on marijuana
created an opening for harder, cheaper and more dangerous drugs such as
crystal methamphetamine, or “ice.”

Elyse Douglas believes her addictive personality would have led her to crack
eventually. Her father maintains the price of pakalolo drove her to it.

“She just couldn’t afford pot anymore,” Lorn Douglas said. “So a friend
said, ‘Try this.’ From that day, she went from a regular kid into a crack
addict and an outlaw.”

The difference in drugs was as dramatic as it was dangerous, Elyse Douglas
said.

“With marijuana, I was stoned all of the time, but with crack I was
stealing, would hurt anyone, do anything to get my drugs,” she said. “My dad
is my only parent, and I stole from him. I was hanging out with heavy,
big-time drug dealers in very precarious, dangerous situations, stealing.”

One night, Douglas tracked his daughter to the home of a drug dealer, forced
her into the car and drove her to the Hilo police station, where officers
said they had been looking for her. Elyse Douglas went through drug
treatment on the Big Island, spent 18 months in a California half-way house
and now works as a traffic court clerk in Santa Barbara, Calif.

This year, at 28, she celebrates five years of sobriety.

Looking back at what his daughter went through, Douglas said: “I’m very
proud of my daughter, and yes, I’d prefer she had stayed on marijuana. It’s
a crime that marijuana’s against the law.”

LEGALIZATION EFFORTS

The politics of pot in Hawaii play a role from the State Capitol — where the
House and Senate approved bills this session to legalize marijuana for
medical purposes — to the Hilo government center, where hemp and
legalization advocates failed last year to recall the mayor and six council
members.

Jonathan Adler is pushing the legalization of medical marijuana in his
campaign for Big Island mayor. He grows marijuana around his home in Puna’s
Hawaiian Paradise Park and was indicted last year on felony drug charges.

Adler says he has a prescription to smoke marijuana for his chronic asthma.
He dreams of the day when he can offer pakalolo openly to ease patients’
suffering. He can’t wait to go to trial so he can argue his right to smoke
and grow marijuana.

Each year on the Big Island, the County Council considers whether to accept
federal marijuana eradication money. Each year, a parade of hemp advocates,
medical marijuana practitioners and legalization proponents fills the
council chamber.

Three of the nine council members now are questioning the wisdom of
continuing the Counter Cannabis Field Operation.

Dissident council members are led by Curtis Tyler, a Republican, small
businessman and former Navy lieutenant who has become an unlikely hero to
the pro-marijuana forces. Tyler doesn’t support legalizing marijuana. He’s
simply against what he calls misguided government policies.

A Big Island audit last year reviewed the $353,294 the county received in
federal money for marijuana eradication in 1997-98. The money helped pay for
100 arrests for marijuana cultivation and the seizure of 331,109 plants.

But the audit didn’t answer Tyler’s more fundamental questions.

“Why are we doing this, and what are we accomplishing?” Tyler asked. “My
assessment is we’re winning a lot of battles, but we’re not winning the war.
My bigger question is: ‘What is the war we’re fighting?’ ”

If the goal is to win a war against marijuana, Tyler said, perhaps more
money needs to go to prevention and treatment.

Otherwise, a law enforcement eradication program is “like putting a Band-Aid
on a cancerous mole. This is indicative of so much of what government does.
We address the symptoms and not the cure.”

Paula Helfrich, president of the Hawaii Island Economic Development Board,
knows that marijuana continues to pump money into the Big Island economy.
During the 1980s, it paid for new cars and trucks, founded businesses and
bought everyday things, such as groceries.

But she doesn’t want to hear that marijuana is good for the Big Island. Its
reputation as ground zero of a marijuana war hurts the island’s hopes of
attracting new agriculture to replace the dead sugar industry, Helfrich
said.

“Having the majority of the marijuana crop here has been the single biggest
detriment to ... viable, legal, agricultural alternatives,” she said.

Coffee, papaya and forestry representatives have looked at investing in the
Big Island, she said, but they don’t like the “perception that we’re the pot
capital.”

“They’re either put off by the perception or the reality,” she said. “And
the reality is that marijuana growers still sneak onto other peoples’
property and grow illegally.”