MORE PUBLIC LAND GOING TO POT

With the U.S.-Mexico border being tightened, law enforcement is
seeing more locally grown marijuana - often with dope farmers using
public land such as parks and forest preserves.

Cook County Forest Preserve District Police Chief Richard Waszak says
there has been an increase in marijuana farming within the district's
64,000 acres in recent years.

Last month, forest preserve district police burned about 3,000 plants
at Pioneer Woods near Palos Hills, gathered from a half-dozen spots
in the southern suburbs.

And earlier this year, two men each were sentenced to two years in
prison in connection with tens of thousands of marijuana plants grown
"in straight rows like corn" in a forest preserve near Barrington.

Mexican nationals Jose Verra and Bernardo Rangel, both 23, told
investigators they were farmers paid to grow the crop. A college-age
conservation intern found the "plantation" and told authorities.

Verra and Rangel tended to some 20,000 marijuana plants valued at $4
million, some growing as high as 8 feet tall, inside the Crabtree
Nature Preserve. During the bust, a tent was discovered along with
food supplies, fertilizer bags and a cooking and showering area.
Nearby, the farmers had built a reinforced underground bunker, lined
with 4-inch logs and covered with dirt.

Waszak said he suspects marijuana growers are using public land to
avoid having their private property seized if their crop is discovered.

In August, police destroyed about 1,800 marijuana plants being
cultivated on land owned by the McHenry County Conservation District
- - one of the largest drug operations authorities there can recall
finding on public land.

"It doesn't belong to anybody, like a farmer's field does," McHenry
County Sheriff Keith Nygren said of public property. "A lot of it has
to do with the land being set aside and remote. We still have a lot
of rural land in our county, and it's ideal for growers."

Big Operations

Large-scale marijuana farming, with a late-September to mid-October
harvest, isn't for your average Cheech and Chong or Harold and Kumar.

"It's very labor intensive. You have to clear the land, build berms
to keep the deer out and fertilize," one law enforcement official
said. "You have to know what you're doing."

Often, the pot is watched by armed guards to protect against "patch
pilots" - other dope dealers who steal crops. And if "you've got a
family hiking along and stumbling into this, that's not good," the
official said.

John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy,
says 75 to 80 percent of marijuana grown outdoors in the United
States is on state or federal land. The Drug Enforcement
Administration says there were more than 4.8 million marijuana-plant
seizures at outdoor sites in 2006.

Tighter border controls make it harder to smuggle marijuana into the
United States, so more Mexican drug networks are growing crops here,
Walters said.

Drug organizations use the Chicago area as a base for distributing
marijuana across the Midwest, DEA special agent Joanna Zoltay said.
But the problem is being seen across the country.

For example, the number of marijuana plants confiscated on public
land in California grew from 40 percent of total seizures in the
state in 2001 to 75 percent in 2007.

A site operated by a Mexican organization with 16,742 marijuana
plants was raided last month in North Cascades National Park in
Washington state, park Supt. Chip Jenkins said. People living at the
site downed trees, dammed creeks and left 1,000 pounds of trash, he said.

Officers sometimes have to get on their hands and knees and crawl
through thickly wooded areas to get to the groves.

"They don't make it so anyone can see it," Waszak said, adding that
sometimes growers bring in electric generators.

It's Natural, Too

Marijuana sometimes grows naturally - so-called "ditch weed."
Visitors to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore were warned this
summer that thousands of plants had sprouted there.

But Waszak said the weed in the Cook County preserves isn't growing wild.

"I'll tell you this, fertilizer bags and milk jugs don't grow in the
forest preserve," he said. "We concentrate on finding cartels or
people growing excess plants that certainly are not for personal consumption."

Forest preserve district police team with the DEA to investigate
major growing operations. Their probes typically start during the
spring planting season, and when a crop is found, they keep watch on
it and make a bust before the plants are harvested.

When a crop is found, police take samples that are tested to measure
its potency.

"Some of it is strong hybrids of marijuana," Waszak said.

With marijuana the most commonly used illicit drug in America,
marijuana growers feed a hungry market.

The recently released "2007 National Survey of Drug Use and Health,"
published by the Department of Health and Human Services, says 40
percent of Americans, or about 100 million people age 12 or older,
say they have smoked pot sometime in their lives. About 25 million
say they have used marijuana in the past year, and an estimated 14.4
million have smoked pot in the past month.

For teens, 12 to 17, about 6.7 percent smoked pot in the past 30 days
- - down from 8.2 percent in 2002, according to the survey. It found
that 16 percent of young adults ages 18 to 25 used marijuana in the
past month, and 4 percent of adults older than 26 smoked pot in the
past 30 days.

In 2007, some 2.1 million people used marijuana for the first time -
about 6,000 per day, with the mean age for first trying pot about 17,
the survey said.