A FIELD OF SCHEMES

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 onto an old military 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.