MARIJUANA FARMING GOING HIGH-TECH

When police entered the basement in a home on Clay Street in Woodstock last
month, what they found was not a pool table, exercise equipment or even a
washer and dryer.

Instead, they found a dirtless marijuana garden. The hydroponic garden
included irrigation timers and 1,000-watt lights over tanks that contained
a liquid nutrient in which the plants were growing. The equipment was
estimated to have cost between $7,000 and $10,000.

"There were three areas where the cannabis was growing," said McHenry
County Sheriff's police Sgt. Tony Cundiff. "Each area had about 150 plants."

About half of the marijuana-farming cases investigated by the Sheriff's
Department involve hydroponics, while the rest involve plants found growing
in fields or yards, Cundiff said.

The hydroponic labs are expensive and difficult to operate, but they have
one distinct advantage over outdoor cultivation--law enforcement agencies
have great difficulty finding marijuana growing inside a home.

The Woodstock case is a good example. The lab wasn't discovered until
Woodstock police were asked to make a well-being check on one of the home's
residents. Once inside, officers were given consent to search the home and
found the marijuana in the basement, said Cundiff, who heads the Sheriff's
Department's narcotics division.

The residents, Howard N. Silver, 36, and Lou Ann Owens, 32, of 520 Clay St.
were indicted June 25 on charges of unlawful production of cannabis,
unlawful possession of cannabis, unlawful possession with the intent to
deliver cannabis and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Along with the plants in the hydroponic tanks, police said they seized 60
grams of processed marijuana with a street value of $500 to $700.

Marijuana growers tend to favor hydroponic equipment, which is legal,
because they have more control over the growth of the plants and can
provide them with constant nutrients and light.

"With hydroponics you can accelerate the process," said McHenry County
Sheriff Keith Nygren. "You can get in more crops in a year than if you were
growing it in the ground."

Although use of hydroponics is easier to hide from police, the method can
be labor-intensive and require some knowledge of plant nutrition, light
cycles and the best times to prune.

"It's not something that just anybody can pick up and start doing," said
Franz Hirzy, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Chicago.
"It's not like growing house plants."

Some industrious marijuana growers have been able to obtain sizable
results, however. In 1994, federal authorities found a massive use of
hydroponics. They discovered the then-largest indoor marijuana operation
ever uncovered in Illinois: 3,000 marijuana plants being grown in an
elaborate greenhouse-like operation in a $500,000 colonial-style home in
Inverness.

Police officials agree that a main reason marijuana growers use hydroponics
is to increase the content of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is the
component of the plant that makes the user high.

"THC is a hallucinogen," Nygren said. "It just that it comes to us in a
diluted form in the typical marijuana plant."

The plants seized from the Woodstock basement were about 3 feet tall,
although plants that are grown with hydroponics can reach up to 15 feet,
Cundiff said.

While growing marijuana in soil is easier, the risk of detection is
greater, said Hirzy.

"They will plant it inside of fields of other crops, such as corn, which is
tall," Hirzy said. "In other places, they will have an isolated patch."

During the summer months, the Sheriff's Department will spend a lot time
eradicating marijuana fields.

"We were dealing last summer with a number of fields of marijuana," Nygren
said. "There was a group of people who travel throughout the country that
will plant 15 to 20 sites in an area, knowing that half will be found by
law enforcement and eradicated."

Checked-by: Richard Lake