HUGE POT BUST IN ONSLOW COUNTY

Law enforcement officers slog through waist deep water, slashing through
underbrush with machetes. Eventually they stumble on what they've been
searching for: a field of thousands of marijuana plants, the home of
someone's intricate drug production operation.

But this isn't South America. It's Onslow County.

On Thursday, county law enforcement officials cut down about 11,000
marijuana plants that were growing in a field in the Back Swamp area near
the Duplin County border. Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown said his
department has never before captured so much weed at once.

"This is the most we've ever found in Onslow County," Brown said. "This is
going to be a major disruption to whoever is selling this."

A North Carolina Highway Patrol helicopter from Kinston spotted the fields
off Futrell Loop Road at about noon Thursday. That agency contacted the
State Bureau of Investigation and the Sheriff's Department.

But reaching the crops proved difficult. Heavy rains had flooded the swampy
area, so officers needed all-terrain vehicles to get to the plots. When
they did arrive, Brown said they found an extensive operation.

The plants were clustered in disorganized groups so that they would be
harder to spot from air. There was a tent there, with a work area and
sleeping mats. Someone dug an outhouse hole. There were farming supplies,
water and fertilizer.

"It was a major operation," Brown said. "This was not a nonchalant plant a
seed and go back and get it. This was a business."

While they did not find anyone at the field, some clothing was left at the
scene and some other items that Brown believes may help law enforcement
apprehend whoever managed the field. No arrests have been made so far.

"It's going to take a little digging," he said.

Law enforcement officials estimate the marijuana would have eventually been
worth about $27 million if it would have been harvested and sold on the
street. The captured cache had an estimated worth of anywhere from $500,000
to $1 million.

It took officers about five hours to cut down the marijuana with machetes,
bush axes and weedeaters and then load it into an old military dump truck.

"It took 20 head of us five hours with weedeaters and machetes to get it
cut down and hauled out," Brown said. "It would have been a good movie scene."

On Friday, officers spent the afternoon sending the plants through a
chipper and bundling them in burlap sacks to be burned.