TASK FORCE SCORE TONS OF POT FOR $85,000

PALOMAR MOUNTAIN ---- It's harvest season, and the sheriff's deputies in
the Marijuana Eradication Task Force are busy.

Starting early in the morning, they go out and find hidden pot patches and
tear out the plants, as many as their $85,000 a year budget will allow.

"They get pretty good bang for their buck," said Lt. Doyle Krouskop, of the
county Sheriff's Department. "Everybody provides a little help and the
funding goes for overtime and equipment."

Last week, county supervisors approved an agreement between the Drug
Enforcement Agency and the Sheriff's Department that gives the department
$85,000 to offset its costs for weeding weed.

The departments, including Oceanside and San Diego police, provide the
officers and their usual salaries.

According to statistics submitted by the task force, they scored a lot more
pot from a lot fewer places last year. After hitting 255 sites, down 30
percent from 2000's 363 sites, the deputies came up with nearly 321,000
plants, more than twice 2000's haul of 147,400.

"The numbers look skewed because we had one site on Palomar Mountain where
we got over 200,000 plants," Krouskop said.

That bust, where deputies and agents went back several times and ended up
pulling 80,000 plants off the north face and 120,000 plants off the south
face of the mountain, set a statewide record in July 2001.

Most pot patches are smaller than those, about 200 to 500 plants on
average. Most --- and the numbers are increasing --- were outside, in
canyons, on mountainsides, on private ranch land and in the national
forests. They find a few indoors, but fewer each year.

"It's easier to find the inside ones because they use so much more water
and electricity than normal homes, they draw the attention of the utility
companies," Krouskop said. "Besides, with the great weather, the amount of
available land and the fact that you can walk away from an outdoor crop
where you're probably tied to the indoor one, it just makes sense.

"You're not going to plant them on your land because you'll get caught," he
added.

Searching for Pot Patches

The task force isn't looking for a couple of plants, Krouskop said.

"We're looking for people who are growing a cash crop, and a good- sized
patch can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars," he added.

Deputy Steve Reed leads the team that goes out, finds the plants and yanks
them. He's hiked miles in near darkness, climbed mountain sides and leaned
out of helicopters to find marijuana plants.

"I spend a lot of my time on my hands and knees, crawling under a canopy of
Manzanita and brush," said Reed, a 14-year veteran of the task force. "The
plants don't need straight sun, so they hide them where they get filtered
sunlight."

Pot growers, like most farmers, need sun, water, seed and soil to grow
their crop, which can be worth as much as $4,000 per plant at harvest. But
they also need concealment, either by location, like in a forest where
trees block the view from helicopters overhead, or manmade, like the people
who tied silk flowers to their plants in what seemed to be an attempt to
pass the plants off as gardenias.

But most plants are in remote places, deep in forests or on the wilderness
edge of a ranch. Deputies say they find pot patches at the same places
again and again, the same way you find fishermen fishing the same spot.

"They go back because they've had good luck there before," Reed said.

Needs, Risks

To start a patch, growers have to find water and rig a way to get it to the
plants. Sometimes, Reed said, that means they just tap into the irrigation
system of a nearby ranch and run plastic pipes to the patch. Then, when the
system is watering the fields, it's also providing water to the pot patch.

"That's what makes Valley Center, Rainbow and Fallbrook so popular, because
there are orchards and water there, and the plants will be watered
automatically," Reed said. "Otherwise, they have to go to a whole lot of
extra work, and they do, believe me, to dam up a spring or divert a stream
and then irrigate from there."

How the irrigation is rigged tells Reed that he is sometimes dealing with
the same organization in a different location, he said.

"You can't narrow it down to a single guy, but you know by the drip system
and battery timers that they've bought the same equipment and hooked it up
the same way before, in other patches we've found," he said. "Otherwise,
they need to go in and water a couple of times a week, and that makes it
more likely they'll get caught."

Growers plan to lose some of their plants, Reed said. Some to discovery by
the law, and they'll lose some to "patch pirates."

"Patch pirates will follow the growers and then go back later," he said.
"They wait until the crop is ready to harvest, and the growers show up on
the big day and everything is gone," he explained.

Deputies do make arrests, but not as many people as patches get bagged.

"We could catch them 100 percent of the time if we sat on the site until
the guys showed up, but you can imagine how much that would cost in
overtime and manpower," he said. "We catch them often enough."

Most growers, he said, are farmworkers and are usually in the county for work.

"They have the know-how to grow things and they know where the water is,"
he said. "They see it as a chance to make some money on the side.

"The longer they stay on a piece of property, get to know the neighbors and
the owners, the more likely they are to lose interest in growing
marijuana," he added.