GROWERS FIND HAVEN ON FEDERAL PROPERTY THAT'S FERTILE, REMOTE

SAN BERNARDINO NATIONAL FOREST -- They were spotted from the air, as
conspicuous as sharks in a school of guppies: Three plots of land,
seemingly stripped of the towering oaks and manzanitas that shroud
this patch of Southern California forest.

The plots were farms -- and entirely illegal.

A week after the August sighting, a helicopter returned with two dozen
=46orest Service agents and sheriff's detectives. They cleared a
landing pad and cut a trail into the site, going first to a makeshift
reservoir. Six hoses, filtering water from a creek, ran in one end;
several more snaked back out the other.

Moving on, the agents reached the first clearing. They'd been
right.

In place of the trees the forest is meant to protect stood a grove of
emerald stalks, 6 to 15 feet tall. They were in full bloom -- robust
and ready for harvest.

On two acres of prime forest land, about a half-hour from the city of
San Bernardino and 1 1/2 hours from Los Angeles, these agents had
discovered the latest battleground in the war on drugs: a 23,000-plant
marijuana plantation.

As money and manpower continue to flow to the Southwest border to stop
illegal drugs coming into this country, traffickers -- many employed
by Mexican drug gangs -- are producing vast quantities of marijuana in
the United States, on land owned by the federal government.

The land is fertile, remote and free. There's no risk of forfeiture,
plantations are difficult to trace, and growers have land agents
outmanned, outspent and outgunned.

``We spend a lot of time and energy stopping stuff from coming into
this country, but we don't really pay much attention to our own back
yard,'' said Dan Bauer, the Forest Service's drug program
coordinator.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that
more than half of the marijuana consumed in the United States is
produced domestically. Much of that -- no one knows how much -- is
grown on public lands, primarily the country's 155 national forests.

Pesticides used by the illegal growers poison wildlife and waterways,
although the crop's danger is not just environmental. Park visitors
run the risk of tripping booby traps or encountering armed gangs.

Seizure Totals

In 1999, 452,330 marijuana plants were removed from national forest
land, mostly in California and Kentucky. With each plant estimated to
produce at least 2.2 pounds of pot, that's 995,126 pounds of
marijuana, with an estimated street value of about $700 million.

By comparison, the U.S. Customs Service seized 989,369 pounds of
marijuana along the Southwest border in fiscal year 1999, while the
Border Patrol confiscated just under 1.2 million pounds.

There are just 588 Forest Service agents and officers assigned to 192
million acres of national forests, a decline from 625 officers in
1996. That's nearly 330,000 acres per officer, and only one of them is
dedicated full time to drug enforcement.

Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug in the United States, with
about 11 million users, including 8.3 percent of teens, according to
government statistics.

``Issues dealing with cocaine and heroin and drugs that people are
dying from tend to have a higher priority as far as enforcement
goes,'' DEA spokesman Terry Parham said.

Public lands have long been targeted by marijuana producers, but
investigators trace a rise in production to the 1980s, when the
government enacted more stringent asset forfeiture laws.

In the late '80s and early '90s, the profile of a typical grower was a
``white, hippie-type'' running 100- to 1,000-plant farms, agents said.
These days the mom-and-pop operations are far outnumbered by major pot
plantations, ranging in size from 1,000 to 10,000 plants or more.

In the Southeast, old moonshiner families now run marijuana farms. But
that's only part of the problem in places like Kentucky's Daniel Boone
National Forest, which consistently ranks first among national forests
in marijuana seizures.

``It's a large unorganized coalition of people that live very close to
national forest lands who are generally very close to the poverty
level and looking for any way to try to make a dollar,'' said Jack
Gregory, special agent in charge of the Forest Service's Southern region.

Low-Cost Operations

In the Southwest, Bauer said, most pot operations are run by Mexican
drug organizations that either ship crews across the border or hire
illegal immigrants to do the work.

``Just the cost of doing business up here makes it great,'' said Mike
Wirz, a narcotics detective with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's
Department who works with the Forest Service to investigate marijuana
groves on federal property. ``They don't pay for the land, they don't
pay for the water and they pay very little for their overhead because
they're using illegal workers.''

Wirz said that by growing their product in the United States, Mexican
cartels eliminate the cost and risk of paying a courier to bring drugs
into the country.

``This is the land of the free. This is the best thing (drug
producers) could ever ask for,'' said Wirz, who believes the federal
government has played down the significance of the problem.