AGENTS BUST POT GROW IN LOS PADRES FOREST

9/12/99 The harvesting of an illegal marijuana crop continued this morning
in an area inside Los Padres National Forest.

The eradication of an estimated 5,000 plants, with a street value of $15
million, began yesterday after a month-long investigation.

The garden, which lines Bear Creek, about a mile off Highway 154 near
Paradise Road was too treacherous to reach by foot, so about 40 anti-drug
officers were transported by helicopter to the garden area, where they cut
the crop with machetes Wednesday and made it into bundles.

The bundles were then airlifted into flatbed trucks parked at the Live Oak
Campgrounds and transported to an undisclosed location to be burned and
destroyed.

The garden was first discovered in late June by aerial observation, with
further investigation leading up to a Tuesday morning raid.

The raid was a cooperative effort with the Department of Justice, Santa
Barbara Police, Santa Maria Police, and the U.S. Forest Service.

Authorities first moved in on the growers' camp at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday and
confronted two men attending to the crop. The two men escaped on foot
through shrubbery and are still at large.

"We actually observed the growers," said Dan Bauer, a Washington D.C. -
based special agent with the Forestry Service of Washington, D.C. "They got
very close to us before we went after them."

The two men left a messy camp area with a tent, stove and provisions for two
to three months. Bauer said the plants were about a month away from full
maturity and would have been most likely been harvested in the next and
pulled out on foot by the growers

Surprisingly, the men were not armed and no weapons have been found thus
far, Bauer said.

"We didn't see any weapons, but that doesn't mean there's none in there,"
Bauer said.

The discovery is the biggest such bust in the Los Padres National Forest
since 1989 when 13,000 plants were discovered near Cuyama, according to Los
Padres spokesperson Kathy Goode.

It is the second big bust in a weeks for the Forest Service, according to
Marion Matthews, special agent with the Forest Service. A 7,000 plant garden
was discovered last weekend in the Sequoia National Forest.

It's not, however, one of the largest the largest crops found on public
lands throughout the country.

"It's a sizable garden for the area, but nationally we're getting 350 metric
tons grown on public land," Bauer said. "It's a good find, but certainly not
the largest."

Bauer said there has been an increase of use of pubic land to harvest
marijuana in part because of property seizure laws and increasingly
tightening Southwest border.

Cultivating marijuana on public land only draws a fine and penalties, but
does not result in the loss of the land.