Fighting Appalachia's Top Cash Crop, Marijuana

By Francis X. Clines
Source: New York Times

Winter is easing in the rolling hills and hamlet hollows, and all the prespring indications are that marijuana will have another bumper year and remain this state's No. 1 cash crop, just as it continues prime in West Virginia and Tennessee.
"Bigger than tobacco," noted Roy E. Sturgill, the director of the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, the only one of the nation's 31 federal antidrug regions focused on marijuana.

The prodigious, high-octane marijuana crop is a startling fact of modern life to outsiders passing through the 65 Appalachian counties in the target area, a rugged, fruitful swath of some beautiful parts of Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. Marijuana is ubiquitous, growing well- tended in deep-woods patches and casually disguised, too, in the expanse of a farmer's cornfield and a resident's basement.

The annual crop comes in at an estimated $4-billion-plus yield of high- grade produce that flows illicitly to markets of the Northeast willing to pay some of the nation's highest street prices. (This yield is beyond the $1.4 billion worth tracked and eradicated by authorities last year, a haul that, even when broken down in the three states, still tops any of their legal cash crops.)

"It's kind of like the old moonshine days with neighbors making a living at it," said Sgt. Ronnie Ray, a marijuana suppression officer with the Kentucky State Police here at Bluegrass Station. "And we're kind of like the new revenuers."

Sergeant Ray, his commander, Lt. Donald J. Gill, and Detective Mark Moore, their specialist in the increasingly popular art of indoor marijuana growing, discussed the agronomics of green lightning with gentle drawls and savvy experience.

"I'd say we're more or less holding the line right now," Lieutenant Gill warily estimated, pleased that his unit recently succeeded in a drug raid of more than 1,000 plants being grown indoors, the toughest turf of all to track the growers.

"Still," Sergeant Ray concedes, "we're probably taking very little of all that's out there."

Detective Moore, working a beat in which the growers have new antidetection wrinkles every season, said of the marijuana, "Pound for pound, it's the big one."

With all the rote anticipation of the Farmer's Almanac, the 105 full-time antimarijuana officers of the Appalachia target area are preparing for the spring planting. They will be joined by 595 seasonal officers from federal, state and local forces charged with tracking the "holler dopers." For the most part, these are ordinary denizens who often, but not always, are from the more impoverished old mining hamlets.

"Everybody seems to know somebody who grows it, sells it, smokes it," says Sergeant Ray. "It's the dirty little secret of Kentucky."

Spotters will go out by helicopter in the spring to map hundreds of suspected crops in mountain leas. Antimarijuana harvesters will descend by rappelling ropes to the most remote farms hidden in wild places like the Daniel Boone National Forest. More than 200,000 marijuana plants, each worth about $1,000 in retail produce, are seized each year in the sprawling beauty of the Boone forest.

Detective Moore, meanwhile, finds all too few of the citizen complaints he relies upon in tracking the indoor planters year-round. They use hydroponics, growing lamps and scientific pruning techniques to produce a crop every 89 days in basements, silos, closets and even underground bunkers, replete with booby traps and remote video monitoring.

Despite police crackdowns, the growers, cyclical as Ecclesiastes, will soon be hiking or heading by all- terrain vehicles for the choice sun- drenched remote patches of Appalachia, where the rich soil and good farming weather grow marijuana plants 18 feet high. Confiscation has increased fivefold over the last decade but the region still produces an estimated two-fifths of the nation's marijuana crop.

In busier hollows, criminal organizations have formed from loose confederations of family units, according to federal trackers. Corruption, in turn, has compromised at least a half-dozen county sheriff operations since marijuana took root as big business in the 1980's.

"There are people afraid to go out in the fall on their own land," Sergeant Ray noted, explaining that there are brazen interlopers who try to foil property confiscation laws by surreptitiously using tracts of other people's land. "There's a lot of good people in this state dead set against marijuana," the sergeant emphasized, while noting that the old backwoods peer pressure of the moonshining days can mitigate against citizen complaints.

"Some counties are pretty close- knit and there seems to be an acceptance," Mr. Sturgill agrees. More manpower is needed, he emphasized, if the Appalachia problem is to be uprooted. More technology, too, like thermal imaging detectors that can help find indoor marijuana but are under constitutional challenge as illegal search devices.

Detective Moore advises the police to be fearless even in their own communities. "I took down a guy where I live who was growing 400 plants in his garage," he related, still angry at his neighbor's cheekiness. "Local pressure got pretty tough, with folks thinking like this guy was family."

But the police stress that the problem clearly exists well beyond Kentucky in neighboring states and is prompted by prime growing conditions and market demand up north more than by the local tolerance.

"Heck, I remember being in high school in 1969 and witnessing the school's first pot arrest for possession," Sergeant Ray recalls. That was before modern highways made distant markets accessible to the potent produce of Appalachia. "Back then, we thought that pot arrest was the end of the world," he said, smiling as the marijuana suppression unit prepares for another spring planting.

Complete Title: Kentucky Journal: Fighting Appalachia's Top Cash Crop, Marijuana

Source: New York Times (NY)
Author: Francis X. Clines
Published: February 28, 2001
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
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