OFFICERS WORK TO WIPE OUT POT PLANT EXPLOSION

A bumper crop of wild and cultivated marijuana has prompted law enforcement
officers in Waukesha County to destroy 20,000 plants so far this growing
season -- more than 10 times last year's amount, officials said Tuesday.
August 5, 1998

"I don't know what to blame it on," Sheriff's Capt. Terry Martorano,
commander of the 15-member Waukesha County Metro Drug Enforcement Unit,
said of the record harvest. "Maybe it's the marijuana gods. Someone has
certainly looked over the crops this year because marijuana is growing
rampant."

Apparently, Waukesha County is not alone. James Haney, a state Department
of Justice spokesman, said Tuesday this year's growing season has been a
very good one.

"When the corn crop is doing well, the marijuana crop does well," he said.

During August, Waukesha County's metro unit is stepping up its efforts,
collecting and burning wild plants but saving cultivated ones as evidence.

Chris Boerboom, a weed scientist for the University of Wisconsin Extension
at Madison, attributed a bumper marijuana crop to ideal growing conditions
early in the season.

"I don't know if we had any specific environmental conditions that would
have caused a greater number to germinate this spring, but we did have high
temperatures and plentiful moisture through June and early July, which
would have led to good plant growth," he said.

Boerboom said that a lot of marijuana in the state is growing wild,
remnants of crops grown in the 1940s for rope fiber production.

Despite law enforcement eradication efforts, Boerboom said wild marijuana
probably will be back next year because new seeds are in the soil.

"Every year we target the entire county," Martorano said. "We have some
areas that we know that grow every year. We go out and handpick everything.
We don't cut it with weed cutters. We pull it out at the roots, so it
doesn't come out."

Haney said sheriff's departments handle marijuana eradication efforts and
report the number of marijuana plants destroyed to the Department of
Justice. The numbers for July have not been collected yet, he said.

However, for the first six months of this year, 6,017 non-cultivated
marijuana plants and 326 cultivated plants growing in fields have been
destroyed statewide, Haney said. That compares with 61,029 non-cultivated
marijuana plants destroyed and 200 cultivated plants destroyed in the first
six months of 1997.

The numbers for this year still could change dramatically, Haney said,
because the most active months of the growing season are July through
September.

For all of 1997, about 8 million non-cultivated marijuana plants and 5,289
cultivated plants were destroyed in fields statewide, he said.

Cultivated marijuana plants generally have higher tetrahydrocannabinol
levels and are more potent than non-cultivated plants, Haney said. THC is
the hallucinatory chemical most active in marijuana.

The percentage of THC is 0.5% to 1% in a non-cultivated plant compared to
3% to 6% in the commercially grown product, law enforcement officials said.
In Dane County, the Narcotics and Gang Task Force, based in Madison, pulled
up about 21,000 wild marijuana plants on July 19, according to Sgt. Mark
Twombly, the unit's commander.

"With the growing season, what we've found this year is the plants are much
larger than they have been in prior years for this early in the season,"
Twombly said.

The department has plans to eradicate a couple of large fields,
anticipating they will find about 250,000 plants, he said.

Without the eradication of the plants, the marijuana could wind up in the
hands of juveniles. Also, dealers will mix it with cultivated marijuana to
yield a higher drug profit, Twombly said.

Please see POT page 4From page 1

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)