SHERIFF: ANTI-POT SQUAD IS ESSENTIAL

Santa Cruz: Supervisors to hear Tracy's appeal for state grant and use of
choppers.

Contending that ``marijuana production is a major illicit industry in Santa
Cruz County,'' Sheriff Mark Tracy is seeking to assure doubters on the
board of supervisors that his officers have learned to differentiate
between a ``personal-use cultivation'' crop for medicinal purposes and
``one grown for monetary profit.''

Tracy will ask county supervisors on Tuesday to approve his acceptance of a
$217,850 state grant to fund his Marijuana Enforcement Team's activities
for the upcoming fiscal year. The sheriff's annual requests for board
approval generally draw protests from pot-smokers opposed to the grant as
well as from neighbors who feel helicopter surveillance techniques are
noisy, bothersome and unnecessary.

In a report county supervisors will consider Tuesday, the sheriff said that
only eight of the 84 pot-growing cases the team investigated in 1997 turned
out to be instances where the weed was being grown for medicinal purposes.

``We've even had a couple of instances in the past year when we've walked
away from what were obviously small crops grown by someone with a medical
necessity,'' Tracy said Tuesday.

But contending that ``an estimated 100,000 Americans turn to drug
rehabilitation centers each year for help in overcoming marijuana habits,''
the sheriff insists that growing and using marijuana constitute ``a serious
community problem in Santa Cruz County.''

The use of helicopters, Tracy said in his report to the board of
supervisors, ``is essential to the marijuana-enforcement program.''
Choppers can reach remote pot patches deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains, he
said, and can quickly and cheaply ferry out large loads of confiscated
marijuana from those hard-to-reach pot farms.

Tracy said the drug agents over the past year have used helicopters
provided by the California Air National Guard for 60 hours, down from 140
hours the previous year. Tracy said the reduction in hours has dramatically
cut the number of complaints from neighbors upset at noisy overflights.

His officers will not fly below 1,000 feet in urbanized parts of the county
nor below 500 feet in rural areas, he said in his report.

During 1997, sheriff's officers seized almost 15,000 illegal marijuana
plants, about two-thirds of them grown outdoors and 4,515 taken from
indoor-growing facilities. Those plants were seized, Tracy said, at 70
different locations.

Checked-by: jwjohnson@netmagic.net (Joel W. Johnson)