EX-S.J. OFFICER IS SCOURGE OF STATE'S POT GROWERS

Barna Brings Expertise, Experience To California Law Enforcement
Officials' Anti-Marijuana Initiative

She has been dubbed the "Patton of Pot," California's street-smart
commander of the state's war against marijuana. A former San Jose
police officer, Sonya Barna works on the front line in the long-
running battle, hovering in helicopters, hiking through forests and
hunkering down in a sparse Sacramento office.

Barna heads California's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, the
state's 18-year effort to shut down the multibillion-dollar industry.
With the pot season over, the state announced last week a near-record
year: CAMP pulled up nearly 314,000 plants worth about $1.25 billion.

Despite that success, Barna is steering her $655,000-a-year program
through treacherous political terrain. Its budget has been
dramatically cut since its early days, forcing CAMP to scale back the
number of anti-drug SWAT teams it can field from seven to three. And
California voters put the operation in an awkward position when they
approved Proposition 215, forcing Barna to balance her mission to
eradicate marijuana production with the state's desire to allow
medical patients to use pot to ease their ailments.

While other drugs, such as crack and heroin, are largely stigmatized
in the media and in society, marijuana remains hip, trendy and cool
for many.

As Barna sees it, a crucial part of her job is to change that, to
help redefine marijuana as a potent drug that can damage your memory,
sap your ambition and push you down a slide into aimless obscurity.
"Someday, I hope that kids will look at marijuana in the same light
that they now look at cocaine," she said.

Barna, a mother of three, is intimately familiar with the personal
challenges facing children and parents.

During one of her regular searches of her oldest son's room four
years ago, Barna discovered a pot pipe in the 17-year-old's room. She
sat her son down for a serious talk and he put drug use behind him,
Barna said.

But Barna is sympathetic to the goals of Proposition 215, the 1996
initiative that gave Californians the right to use pot to combat ills
from AIDS and cancer to arthritis and migraines.

"If someone is dying of cancer and a marijuana cigarette helps them,
one plant that they might have or that their caregiver might have is
one thing," Barna said. "Really, who is that hurting?"

Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who is Barna's boss, has been working
to honor the intent of Proposition 215 and still crack down on people
who grow pot for profit.

The task of deciding what's what falls to Barna.

To Barna, Proposition 215 did more than create a way for people with
AIDS and cancer to use pot to ease their pain; it opened the door for
drug cartels to expand their operations.

Barna has directed her teams to focus on the big scores, not the
small growers who may be tending to a few plants. That she leaves for
local law enforcement.

Dennis Peron, who helped put the initiative on the ballot and has a
farm in Clear Lake where he has grown pot for patients, supports
targeting growers "in it for greed and money."

But he sees Barna as a lonely soldier making a last stand.

"The war is over," Peron said. "Marijuana will be legalized in my lifetime."

Barna, who took over as operations commander of the CAMP operation
last year, has been fighting in California's drug war her whole adult
life. In 1984, Barna, the daughter of a migrant worker, was a summer
recruit waxing vans and doing drudge work for CAMP officers. Soon,
she was working undercover in a Central Valley high school, posing
for eight months as a student drug dealer.

She went on to work the streets of East San Jose and met her main
mentor: Tom Wheatley, who is now an assistant police chief.

Wheatley describes Barna as confident and relaxed, an officer with a
knack for winning the confidences of criminals and reeling them in.
"One of the biggest failings of undercover cops -- and where you lose
them -- is that they start taking themselves way too seriously,"
Wheatley said. "She is so down to earth; I don't think it ever got to
her."

Within a few years, Barna moved over to the state Bureau of Narcotic
Enforcement's San Jose office. There she set up one of her most
audacious busts. While working undercover, she persuaded a suspect to
pack a truck with all the chemicals and equipment needed to set up a
methamphetamine lab and drive it to a meeting point, which was
actually the drug team's office. The guy even brought along a bucket
of nearly-finished speed, she said.

In 1999, Barna returned to CAMP and renewed her focus on marijuana.

Barna's principal role is to assemble the anti-pot teams and lead
raids. CAMP has a skeleton crew and draws officers from across the
state for raids. Since 1983, the teams have destroyed more than 2.6
million plants -- about $9 billion worth. Although it is impossible
to know what kind of a crimp CAMP puts in the illegal economy, even
some growers admit that raids drive up prices.

In the male-dominated profession, Barna is an anomaly. She is a foot
shorter than many of her colleagues, wears bright nail polish in the
field and loves to joke with her staff. Her sparse office features
photos of Barna and her officers on raids with fake Rastafarian caps
and dreadlocks.

Earlier this year, Barna launched the CAMP season in Monterey County
by leading a team across some of Big Sur's more rugged terrain, a
sweltering canyon of manzanita and oak a short crow's flight from the
jagged coast. Dressed in fatigues, armed with machetes and coated in
poison-oak protection, 16 officers trudged, puffed and hacked their
way toward a fledgling pot field in the Los Padres National Forest.

Black tubing from an uphill stream shunted water to the plants. The
land was cluttered with trash -- cigarette packs, old rifle shells,
rat traps meant to scare off deer, soda cans. The team cut down more
than 600 plants. A helicopter hovered overhead as Barna and her crew
clipped a cargo net full of 3-foot-tall marijuana plants to a
dangling rope.

The raids, which often involve helicopters sweeping low in search of
the striking emerald-green plants, have their critics in marijuana-
friendly parts of California.

Many view Barna and the program a lot like the owners of speakeasies
viewed Elliot Ness and his anti-alcohol teams during Prohibition.

"They're terrorizing citizens," said Marie Mills, a lead organizer of
the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, a group in pot-rich Humboldt
County that keeps tabs on CAMP. "I don't see it as a valuable service
and what they do get is not even touching the tip of the iceberg."

While most people think of California's North Coast as the epicenter
for the pot war, CAMP has been turning its attention to other parts
of the state. In recent years, state agents have been pulling far
more plants from Fresno and Kern counties than Humboldt and Mendocino.

The state has seen a rise in the number of pot farms overseen by
Asian families in the Central Valley. The illegal plants are often
tucked amid the bok choy, corn and bitter melon.

Pot plots take a toll on the state's forests. Growers use more than
fertilizer to raise their crops. They use potent chemicals that
pollute nearby streams and rivers.

"I bet the people who are tending these gardens don't even smoke it,"
Barna said. "They know what pesticides they're putting on there."

Barna also frets about the growing violence. Last year in the
foothills near Sacramento, a father and his 8-year-old son were deer-
hunting on their property and were shot and seriously wounded when
they stumbled upon a pot garden. "Should you really have to worry
about getting your head shot off because you suddenly stumbled on a
trail where they're guarding it?" she asked.