AN AERIAL WAR ON POT GROWERS

Drugs:it's harvest time,and the helicopters are flying in Humboldt County,
state hub of marijuana growing.

Garberville, Humboldt County-Tom Samuels,a short,wiry 47-year-old pot
grower with squinting eyes and a grizzled beard,was not completely at ease
as he left his isolated two story cabin parcel to show his letter to the
sheriff's deputies.

A little earlier, a spotter aboard a JetRanger helicopter leased by the
county Sheriff's Department's Marijuana Eradication Team had spied a couple
of Samuels' lime-colored plants peeking out of the undergrowth in the
ravine below his house.

Now half a dozen officers dressed in camouflage and flak vests had cut the
lock on his gate and were in his garden sizing up his summer's effort.
Mutely, Samuels handed over a folded letter.

"It's another 215," said sheriff's Sgt. Wayne Hansen to his boss, Lt. Steve
Cobine. The letter was from Samuels' doctor, and - citing the recent
passage of Proposition 215, the Medical Marijuana Initiative - it
prescribed the use of up to 3 pounds of pot per year for his chronic neck
and back pain caused by spinal arthritis.

Samuels told the deputies he had 30 pot plants growing in the ravine
(deputies found a total of 81 on his property). But since they were growing
in the shade, he said, they'd probably produce only a couple of ounces
each, instead of the 2 pounds per plant from pot grown in the sun.

"OK,"said the sergeant, shrugging, "we won't arrest you, and we'll leave
you 10 plants for your arthritis." "Right," said the lieutenant, "but this
isn't going to be like picking the Christmas tree. You get the first 10 in
the row, and we cut the rest."

Samuels, looking pretty glum but moving with greater dexterity than some of
the middle-aged deputies, led the way down the steep slope to his concealed
plants, all of them rooted in 5-gallon black buckets, protected by chicken
wire and strung along the ravine like a trap line. "This 215 thing is
evolving," said Cobine. "Right now the district attorney's policy is that
if they got the 215 letter, we let them keep 10."

It's late summer, and it's the pot-raiding season in Humboldt County, an
endeavor fueled for the past dozen years by the state's CAMP (Campaign
Against Marijuana Planting) grants. This year the county received $250,000
to pay for a dozen officers and two helicopters for eight weeks.

"We don't want to go back to the early '80s when people out here were
growing it like corn," Cobine said. These days, Samuels' garden is pretty
typical of the outdoor grows the deputies are finding.

Viewed from the helicopter, every ridge, every ravine, every meadow, has a
cabin, trailer or owner-built home, all off the grid, with electricity
supplied by generator, most with outdoor plumbing and water from a spring.

"At night, with all the generators humming, it sounds like a giant insect,"
Hansen says. Although the hills have been heavily logged, there's still
enough forest left to conceal plenty of pot. The bigger grows(sic) of
several hundred plants feature fancy drip-irrigation systems, with electric
water pumps and timers.

A dew days before the raid on Samuels' place, deputies had discovered a
hanging garden, plants in pots suspended in the trees. Other cautious
growers, when they hear the whop-whop of a helicopter in the neighborhood,
load the 5-gallon buckets containing the plants onto flatbed trucks and
drive them to safer locations deeper in the forest.

But most grows are like Samuels', the water coming to the garden through
gravity-fed pipe, the plants wrapped in wire to keep the deer out, and a
half-empty fertilizer bag under a nearby tree. "So you could see the plants
from the air," says the chagrined Samuels.

Howard Lewis is one of the helicopter pilots and pot spotters. "Between 11
and 2, with the sun high, the pot really stands out," Lewis says. A Los
Angeles firefighter and National Guard Reservist on two-week active duty,
Lewis was coordinating the ground teams, while contract pilot Mark Gunsaul
handled the tricky business of lowering two officers dangling from cables
onto the almost inaccessible hillsides.

STABO (short-term airborne operations) is a new wrinkle. In years past,
helicopters have been limited to lowering nets into remote gardens to hoist
up plants. This year, operating from an "LZ," which means any flat ground
in the vicinity, the JetRanger lifts two officers at the ends of 100-foot
steel cables, flies them to the suspected pot patch at 80 mph, then lowers
them onto the hillside.

"It's a lot more pressure," says Gunsaul. "The guys on the cable have no
control. If anything happens, it's my fault."

Turbulence, downdrafts and tricky winds in the canyons don't make it any
easier, he says.

The head of the Marijuana Eradication Team is Sgt. Steve Knight, a lanky
veteran deputy who grew up in Orange before attending Humboldt State
University in Arcata. "The raids have driven a lot of the pot growers
indoors," Knight says.

On June 23, Knight's team, acting on a tip, made the biggest indoor pot
bust in state history, knocking over a grow room containing 12,000 plants.
The previous record for an indoor grow was 8,000

"The two owners (warrants are out for their arrest) were pretty ingenious,"
Knight says. The grow room looked like a regular two-store house. It even
had children's toys, a swing set and trampoline in the front yard, and
flower pots in the window (although the flowers turned out to be plastic).

Behind the chintz curtains, however, were plywood panels, and the interior
had been gutted to make room for rows of growing trays under 250 grow lights.

The county Board of Supervisors is not unanimous in supporting the pot
raids. Two of the five supervisors voted against accepting the CAMP grant.

Supervisor Roger Rondoni , 58, a rancher and lifelong county resident who
represents southern Humbodt County, says he is "not at all thrilled by a
Rambo-like paramilitary creeping into yards without warrants or probable
cause."

Rondoni says that while he carries no brief for pot growers, the raids have
been a failure and a waste of money. Because of budget constraints, there
is no basic law enforcement in much of the county, no 911 service, no
resident deputies, Rondoni says. "Instead we have these guys dressed like
John Wayne running roughshod over local residents." And, he adds, if
anything goes wrong with the team's helicopter operations, the county would
be held liable. "It's a nosebleed waiting to happen."

Up on Duty Ridge, the deputies have finished piling the cut pot stalks from
Samuels' garden into the back of a pickup, and the pungent weed perfumes
the afternoon air.

Cobine says that after 15 years of smiting pot he's perfectly aware that
eradication is a hopeful rather an accurate description. "If it was up to
me, I'd let anyone grow two plants," he says. "Because this isn't really
any kind of war on marijuana. We're just trying to keep the lid on it."

Checked-by: Pat Dolan