TAMPA BAY IS A LEADER IN MARIJUANA GROWING

Urban, indoor growers increasingly are making up for crop losses from
interdiction and drought, authorities say.

Over the past two decades, Florida authorities have uprooted a million
marijuana plants, even as more pot growers moved inside to avoid prying eyes
and erratic weather.

Statewide, police found only half as many pot plants as usual last year
because a drought put a dent in the marijuana crop. But Pinellas and
Hillsborough counties saw a rise in the number of plants seized and growers
arrested.

Florida, and Tampa Bay in particular, remain hotbeds of indoor marijuana
production. In 1999, for the second year in a row, Pinellas County was
second only to Miami-Dade County in this particular field. Hillsborough was
fourth in the state.

"I think the statistics speak for themselves," said Capt. Gary Billing, head
of the Pinellas sheriff's narcotics squad.

Last year, police found cultivated marijuana at nearly 600 sites, indoor and
outdoor, in 61 of 67 Florida counties, according to the Florida Department
of Law Enforcement. They arrested 466 people. They encountered no booby
traps and no violence, although they did confiscate 89 guns.

The final tally -- nearly 57,000 pot plants seized -- was hardly a bumper
crop for Florida. That's slightly more than police found the previous year,
in 1998. But Florida authorities typically find more than 100,000 marijuana
plants a year.

Authorities say there's no lack of effort; they've searched harder than
ever, especially with aerial spotters in National Guard helicopters.

"We've been training spotters in the state for the past 10 years," said FDLE
Agent Dave Broadway.

Nasty weather was behind the decline in pot production, Broadway said. The
drought that hurt Florida's corn, hay and watermelon crops did the same to
marijuana.

Rural North Florida woodlands, especially in the Panhandle, have the most
marijuana plants each year. But urban indoor growers are harvesting more and
more of Florida's homegrown cannabis.

Statewide, police raided 211 indoor sites last year. Dozens were in the
Tampa Bay area.

Overall, Pinellas authorities found 1,448 pot plants in 1999, more than half
at indoor sites. That's an increase from 922 the previous year. They
arrested 45 people, a jump from 34 in 1998.

Hillsborough investigators found 23 marijuana plots and arrested 24 growers
last year, nearly double the amounts from 1998.

Broadway says Pinellas County's high numbers don't necessarily mean more pot
is grown here compared with other urban areas. Instead, aggressive police
may be catching more growers.

Federal studies show that most marijuana in this country is imported here
via Mexico.

But the sophisticated indoor setups that are prevalent in Florida produce
higher-grade cannabis, according to the FDLE's annual report on marijuana
eradication. The FDLE calls homegrown Florida marijuana as "a superior
product."

"The grade of domestically produced marijuana in Florida far exceeds the
quality of marijuana of foreign origin," the report says.

It's not a sales pitch -- it's a warning. The marijuana that teenagers might
experiment with today isn't quite the same drug that parents may remember
from their own youth.

Marijuana's active ingredient is THC. In 1980, THC levels in
commercial-grade marijuana averaged 1.8 percent. Today it's 3.2 percent, the
FDLE says.

One cultivation technique produces a potent, rare and pricey kind of pot
called sinsemilla. Ten years ago, THC levels in sinsemilla averaged 6
percent. Now they commonly exceed 12 percent.

Last year, a sinsemilla sample taken from an indoor growing operation in
Sunrise had a THC level of 26.8 percent, the highest ever recorded in
Florida.

"You're not talking about the same thing the folks were smoking at
Woodstock," said FDLE spokesman Al Dennis. "The purity level is so much
higher than ever before. This is powerful stuff."