SMELL OF MONEY MAKES POT A BIG INDOOR CROP

It's one of Washington state's biggest cash crops, but towns don't celebrate
the harvest with parades down Main Street. Brochures don't trumpet U-pick
farms. In fact, most of the fragrant fields remain out of eyesight - and
even sunlight.

It's cannabis indica - marijuana - and chances are it's a neighbor, no
matter where you live around Puget Sound.

More people than ever in Western Washington grow cannabis indoors, narcotics
investigators say, thanks to soaring marijuana prices, which have made the
drug literally worth its weight in gold.

Growers have benefited from an unintended form of protectionism: As the
federal government has bolstered efforts to eradicate crops overseas and
catch shipments at the borders, domestic marijuana growers have filled the
demand.

Washington ranks among the top five states for indoor marijuana production,
according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Exact information is
impossible to find because of the nature of the drug trade. But interviews
with a dozen police officials, prosecutors and former growers painted the
same picture.

"This is like the weed-growing capital of the nation," says John Adcock, a
Snohomish County deputy prosecutor who works with a county drug task force.
"Sometimes I think everybody in the county is growing marijuana."

Although cultivating marijuana is a felony, the industry thrives, and not
only in the unpeopled corners of the area. Police regularly bust "grows" in
and around Seattle, from warehouses in Ballard to an office park in
Mountlake Terrace.

Marijuana's cheerleaders say that ubiquity, along with the recent victory of
the medical-marijuana initiative in the state, reflects Americans' desire to
see the drug decriminalized.

Exasperated authorities say the prevalence of the drug can be traced to a
society that is ambivalent about it, and to a judicial system that,
accordingly, often treats cannabis growers like jaywalkers.

That ambivalence is misguided, authorities say. Today's made-in-Washington
marijuana - at least 10 times more powerful than the stuff smoked at
Woodstock - is more addictive and is a more dangerous "gateway drug" that
encourages use of harder drugs, they say.

Critics claim that big profits have led to more violence in the marijuana
trade, and they argue that society's attitudes and penalties for growers
need to reflect those dangers.

But that hasn't happened. Instead, the growers have changed and thrived,
just like their crop.

Pot is popular among the young

More people use marijuana in the United States than any other illegal drug.
About 5.1 percent of people ages 12 and older - close to 11 million people -
said they had smoked marijuana in the past month, according to the 1997
National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, which was commissioned by the
federal government. After years of decline, that number has remained
doggedly constant for much of the 1990s, thanks in part to pot's resurgent
popularity among the young.

More than one in four 10th- and 12th-graders in Washington said they
recently used marijuana, up about 8 percentage points from six years ago,
according to a survey of 14,000 high-school students released last month.

More of the pot they smoke now comes from the nation's back yards and
basements. Domestic marijuana growers have increased their production from
about 25 percent to closer to 50 percent of the nation's supply in recent
years, estimates Chuck Hosier of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The exact size of the cannabis crop is impossible to determine, but one
national group pushing for the drug's decriminalization claims it is
Washington's fifth-largest agricultural crop in dollar value. The report,
issued last month by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws (NORML), places marijuana ahead of sweet cherries, grapes and pears.

Nationally, marijuana ranks as the nation's fourth-largest cash crop, ahead
of tobacco, wheat and cotton, based on the "wholesale" price the growers
receive, NORML says.

The DEA no longer estimates the size of marijuana crops. Department
statistics from 1996, however, ranked Washington as one of the nation's top
five producers of indoor-cultivated marijuana, along with California,
Florida, Oregon and Kentucky. At least 80 percent of the marijuana seized in
the Seattle area is grown indoors, according to the agency's statistics in a
1996 National Institute on Drug Abuse report.

The deluge overwhelms authorities.

"If we're getting 1 percent we're lucky," says Pat Gregory, a former DEA
agent who has worked the West Coast from Seattle to Mexico.

"It's laughable."

NW grows potent cannabis

Quantity isn't this area's only claim to fame among marijuana aficionados.
The Pacific Northwest grows the most potent cannabis in the nation, say
growers and authorities alike.

Marijuana gets most of its kick from THC - delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol. Not
so long ago, smokers dried, crumbled and smoked the plant's leaves to get
high. Growers today toss entire garbage bags of leaves in city dumps. They
instead prize sinsemilla, the THC-packed buds of unpollinated female plants.
Sinsemilla is Spanish for "without seed."

Twenty-five years ago, the THC content of street marijuana averaged less
than 1 percent, according to the DEA. Cannabis grown in Western Washington
today has THC levels up to 25 percent.

Potency drives up price. The profit to be made by growers beggars the
imagination.

"A benchmark that we go by is that if a guy really knows what he's doing -
and that's critical here - he can get anywhere from 14 to 17 pounds (of
sinsemilla) from a 100-plant grow, and he can do it three or four times a
year," says Adcock, the deputy prosecutor assigned to the Snohomish Regional
Narcotics Task Force.

With Northwest "bud" selling for $3,500 a pound (wholesale), that grower
could realize up to $240,000 annually, tax-free. And when sold in quantities
of an ounce or less on the street, marijuana becomes as dear as gold -
nearly $300 an ounce, more in California.

The ease of growing marijuana has made the business even more attractive. A
modest 100-plant grow could fit easily into half of the average home's
basement. Authorities routinely raid homes containing 200 plants or more.
Experienced growers may have to work only two hours each day - and invest
just $1,000 in equipment.

How growers hide marijuana

The only thing that seems to keep pace with the price of marijuana is the
ingenuity of growers trying to develop a better - and better hidden - crop.

A man near Granite Falls a few years ago grew plants in an old Air Force
school bus he had ripped the seats out of, then buried. He reached the bus
via a ladder that descended from a toilet in a fake outhouse.

Yet most of the growing takes place in average-looking houses, on suburban
streets, authorities say. "Any place you can hide it - any outbuilding, any
shed, any garage - just about any place you've got power, you'll get grows,"
says Sgt. Mike Mitchell, a member of the South Snohomish County Narcotics
Task Force.

Walking around the recent bust of a 372-plant grow in the Mountlake Terrace
office park, Mitchell explained the basic elements of an indoor farm:

The grower had carved two smaller rooms, each about 8x11 feet, from the
rented space. The first room housed the younger crop: About 100 foot-high
plants were clustered in their pots, straining toward the false sun of two
high-pressure sodium lamps. The lamps hummed and washed the room with orange
light, despite the broad metal shades that deflected the glow toward the
crop. In a corner, about 100 cuttings grew under a low light - the starter
plants for the next generation.

In the second room about 150 more plants, many waist-high, were crowded
beneath three sodium lights set on timers. Garbage cans filled with
fertilizer-rich water sat outside the rooms. Mitchell wasn't impressed. "He
doesn't have enough chemicals to know what he's doing - no bat guano and
other stuff."

Not that the grower was a complete novice. In the latter room, fans gently
swayed the plants, forcing them to grow stronger stalks that will support
the weight of large buds. The largest plants were carefully staked, like
tomatoes.

Some high-tech growers don't bother with soil at all, but use hydroponics -
cultivating plants in nutrient-rich solutions. They frequently coat the
walls of the rooms with reflective Mylar sheeting, or paint them bright
white to reflect more light onto the plants. "Lots of times they'll have
propane tanks burning" to pump in carbon dioxide and increase growth,
Mitchell said.

As the buds grow larger, the farmers will stress the plants for days with
enormous quantities of light, tricking them into growing still larger buds,
before cutting and drying them.

Some growers get caught because of marijuana's distinctive smell. Others are
betrayed when they steal electricity to keep their power bills
inconspicuous. But police, who are swamped, usually rely on an age-old
system: tips from disgruntled associates or family members.

Scent of big money lures growers

The scent of big money has lured a wider population to the ranks of
marijuana growers and smashed the old stereotype of the hippie farmer.
Growers can be young or old, white-collar or blue-collar, rural or urban.

"I see a lot of working-class men and women who, most of them, have no prior
convictions. Most of them are employed, have families, they're productive
citizens, good neighbors - and for one reason or another they prefer
cannabis over booze," says Jeff Steinborn, a Seattle attorney who has
represented accused marijuana growers for two decades.

Police and narcotics investigators blame what they say is a soft justice
system in part for attracting so many people into the business.

First-time offenders face sentences of one to three months in jail. But if
they plead guilty, many walk away with little or no jail time - 240 hours of
community service and a $500 fine that's rarely paid, says Steve Merrival, a
deputy prosecuting attorney in Pierce County.

Last year, 95 percent of those convicted for the first time of manufacturing
or delivering marijuana spent an average of just under 45 days in jail,
according to the state's Sentencing Guidelines Commission.

"They get minimal jail time - and they're growing while they're in jail,"
says a frustrated Roger Lake, president of the Washington State Narcotics
Investigators Association.

A second conviction boosts jail time to nine to 12 months, but prosecutors
often will scrap the more serious cultivation charge if the grower pleads
guilty to a lesser charge, like felony drug possession, Merrival says.

Gregory, the former Drug Enforcement Agency agent, says, "We can't expend
our manpower on something that's not going to be taken seriously by the
courts."

The influx of other drugs deemed more dangerous also has reduced the amount
of time police spend pursuing growers.

"The methamphetamine problem is so epidemic in (Pierce) County that we
haven't worked a marijuana grow in over a year," Lake said last spring.

When possible, local narcotics agents like to turn over their cases to the
federal government, which can lead to more severe penalties for growers -
five years or more for a grow of 100 plants or more, for example.

But federal authorities in Western Washington usually don't take interest in
a case unless a grow is closer to 500 plants, sources say - a bar that has
risen in recent years. Some growers remain below that bar by creating
"sharecropping" arrangements, in which several people get paid to tend crops
of 100 or 200 plants each.

Authorities say new trouble has moved into the marijuana-growing industry in
recent years.

In Oregon and Idaho, organized, violent groups now control many large
marijuana farms. They have not extended their reach to Washington, but
violence here is on the rise, too, narcotics investigators say.

"Some of the most heavily armed people we have ever served search warrants
on are the marijuana growers," Lake says.

- -- In July, a Tacoma man was sentenced to 49 years for shooting a sheriff's
deputy and wounding another deputy during a 1995 raid of the man's home, in
which he ran a small marijuana operation.

- -- In June, a 22-year-old Kent man went to prison for 23 years for trying to
kill a former high-school classmate after a deal involving $99,000 worth of
marijuana.

- -- In January, a teenager killed and robbed a father and son who grew
marijuana at their home near Granite Falls. He was sentenced in July to life
in prison.

Steinborn and former growers disagree strongly with the portrait of a trade
that has become bloody.

"There's been no violence in any of my cases, and there's violence only when
the police have bullied and abused my clients," Steinborn said.

Those who favor marijuana's decriminalization argue that authorities and the
government are overzealous when it comes to arresting and prosecuting
growers - particularly on the federal level.

"There's not a week that goes by that a nice person doesn't come into my
office and cry, because of what the government's doing to them," Steinborn
said.

Though he favors the legalization of marijuana, Steinborn worries about the
price the drug now commands: People are lured by the promise of easy money,
he says, without realizing the consequences.

The debate isn't likely to end anytime soon, or become any less passionate.
Meanwhile, in the back rooms and basements, a thriving business purrs on.

Checked-by: Rolf Ernst