REWARDS REAP TIPS ABOUT POT GROWERS

It's high season for New Jersey's pot growers, and a marijuana tip line run
by the state police is ringing off the hook.

A daughter turns in her mother. A suspicious neighbor tattles on the guy
next door. One grower rats out another.

In the war against drugs, money has become a powerful weapon in New Jersey
- - reward money, that is. In newspaper ads and on billboards, the state
police have made an offer that's hard to resist: up to $1,000 for anyone
who turns in a pot grower.

Last year, the state police seized and destroyed 1,013 plants and made
1,695 arrests, a banner year. So far this year, they have confiscated about
2,000 plants, and tips to the hot line last week averaged 15 a day, said
Detective Sgt. Joe DeBiase.

"We've had young juveniles growing stuff, and we arrested one guy who was
78 or 80 who had 70 plants outside his house," DeBiase said. The action
stems from the federally funded Domestic Cannabis Eradication and
Suppression Program, which began in New Jersey in 1991. The federal
initiative, launched in the mid-1980s, targets indoor and outdoor marijuana
growers. Last year, it netted 3,304,760 plants nationwide. Although New
Jersey is not a hotbed of marijuana farming - agricultural states such as
California, Hawaii, and Tennessee are - growers in the counties of
Gloucester, Burlington, and Hunterdon have kept the pot chasers hopping. In
those three counties, police made 60 percent of their seizures last year -
611 plants in all.

Each plant yields about a pound of pot, which sells for $2,000 to $5,000.
Often, it all starts with a phone call to 1-888-798-WEED (9333). One
tipster pointed police to an Ocean County resident who was growing plants
in a retirement community. Police found that the man had built an aluminum
box and was pruning 50 plants in a closet. They seized the house as a
manufacturing facility.

Others arrested and charged have included botanists, academics with Ph.D.s,
and flower-power hippies.

"I have no problem with people giving up other people," DeBiase said,
noting that the retirement-community tipster had a grudge against the
grower. "I want to do whatever I can to get rid of it so that my kids and
your kids don't get this stuff."

Predictably, the ads and reward money are met with criticism within the
marijuana legalization movement. Fred DiMaria, a lawyer and chairman of the
New Jersey chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws, said the tip line could nab people who were growing for medicinal or
personal use and not for distribution.

"These aren't people we need to lock up," DiMaria said. "The program is too
over-broad. It doesn't focus on people growing for selling purposes.
Instead, it goes after non-violent people."

In one instance, a call to the hot line led police to a small-scale
operation run by a Cape May woman. After getting a tip from her daughter,
they raided the 60-year-old woman's home to find six raggedy marijuana
plants. The woman said she was growing them to help curb her addiction to
two bottles of whiskey a day, DeBiase said. In the last five years that the
advertisements for snitches have run, police said, they have doled out
around $6,000 in reward money. The bounties are based on the value of the
tip. The mother in Cape May County, for instance, hadn't produced many
plants, so her daughter's reward was relatively small, DeBiase said.

It proves only that some people will do anything for a buck, and that's
just fine with the herb chasers.

"It's just human nature. People will squeal on somebody if they're going to
get $1,000," said Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor at the John Jay College
of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. It's even truer of
criminals.

The state police say they get a lot of growers turning in other growers -
sometimes for the reward money and sometimes in an attempt to thin the
competition. In Gloucester County, a grower in dire straits took police to
a home where another grower was caring for his crop. Three weeks later, the
grower called police again with another tip. "There was never honor among
thieves," Schlesinger said. "Criminals would sell out their grandmother for
2 cents.