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Lexington Police all over Kentucky were able to spend more time surveying outdoor marijuana growing operations from the air, leading to the state's most successful year for pot plant eradication in more than a decade.
Police cut and burned 557,276 plants this year, up nearly 50,000 from the 2005 total and the most since 1995. Arrests also were up: 475 in 2006 compared with 452 in 2005. And if each plant they destroyed would have produced one pound of pot with an estimated worth of $2,000, that would mean $1 billion was prevented from entering the illegal drug market.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration brought in several helicopters and an airplane for six weeks during the summer, creating more opportunity for airborne spotters to find pot patches, Lt. Ed Shemelya, head of the marijuana-eradication program for the Kentucky State Police, told the Lexington Herald-Leader.
"Anybody in this business will tell you the more eyes you get in the sky, the more dope you'll find," Shemelya said. It's been 20 years since state police and Kentucky National Guard carried out their first coordinated effort to destroy cultivated marijuana in 1986. The story since has been what Shemelya calls a "cat and mouse game" in which each side has gotten more sophisticated and changed tactics.
That effort by state police and the guard in 1986 was a one-day sweep, essentially a media event to publicize eradication efforts.
Now Kentucky's eradication, cited as one of the top efforts in the nation, runs year round and uses a task force that involves many more police, troops and agencies, including the local officers, state police, National Guard, the DEA, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force.
The technology also has improved. At one time, when a spotter saw a marijuana patch from the air, police would calculate the location by hand; now the National Guard helicopters used for spotting have computers to generate maps that plot the location of pot patches with the click of a cursor, Shemelya said.
Growers responded to increased scrutiny through the years by improving techniques and doing more to hide their crops, including reducing the size of their plots and spreading them out among the woods and hills.
Police sometimes found hundreds of plants together 20 years ago, but the average number of plants in a plot the last few years has been in the 60s or below.
One anomaly this year was that the average number of plants per plot jumped to 83.
Growers may have put out larger patches because they thought the National Guard wouldn't be as active in hunting for pot as a result of deployments to the war in Iraq, Shemelya said.
That wasn't the case, Shemelya said; the number of Guard personnel involved in the marijuana-cutting program was about the same as always.
"They were unfortunately fooled badly," Shemelya said of growers.
The guard has adequate troops to support law enforcement or respond to disasters at home even with troops overseas, said spokesman Col. Phil Miller.
Police also found far more booby traps at pot patches this year than they had for several years. In 2005, for instance, there were two, but police found 20 this year.
In one case, a grower had driven dozens of nails through a piece of wood and put it in a pit with the nails sticking up. An officer was hurt when he stepped into the hidden pit, Shemelya said.
At another plot, police found inert pipe bombs that didn't have any explosives in them, set up to scare people away. It isn't clear sometimes whether booby traps are directed at police or people trying to steal marijuana crops.
Kentucky has long ranked as one of the top outdoor pot producers in the nation for a number of reasons, including that it has a conducive climate, lots of places to hide patches and experienced growers.
In 2005, the state ranked second behind California in the number of plants eradicated, according to the DEA.
Another way to look at the area's pot production: The 68 counties in eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee and West Virginia that make up the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) have only .87 percent of the nation's population, but accounted for 25 percent of the plants eradicated nationwide in 2003, according to the most recent annual report from the task force.
Pot production began taking root in the 1970s and spread in the 1980s, often in poorer areas of the state. Over time, some places and people began to tolerate or even accept marijuana-growing as a way to make money in areas without a lot of other opportunities, police said.
"They don't like the state police coming in messing with their economy," said Danny Webb, who is now Letcher County sheriff but earlier was captain of the state-police post in Hazard, which covers a five-county area in eastern Kentucky.
If police are finding that much marijuana, Shemelya said, it means there is a lot more they aren't finding. Even with additional flight time, he said, police can't cover all the primary pot-growing area of southern and eastern Kentucky and probably don't find more than half the crop.
Newshawk: BluntKilla - 420Magazine.com
Source: Lexington Herald-Leader
Pubdate: November 25, 2006
Copyright: 2006 WorldNow and WLEX-TV
Contact: lex18news@wlextv.com
Website: LEX18 - Lexington, KY - News, Weather, Sports - LEX 18 Home
Police cut and burned 557,276 plants this year, up nearly 50,000 from the 2005 total and the most since 1995. Arrests also were up: 475 in 2006 compared with 452 in 2005. And if each plant they destroyed would have produced one pound of pot with an estimated worth of $2,000, that would mean $1 billion was prevented from entering the illegal drug market.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration brought in several helicopters and an airplane for six weeks during the summer, creating more opportunity for airborne spotters to find pot patches, Lt. Ed Shemelya, head of the marijuana-eradication program for the Kentucky State Police, told the Lexington Herald-Leader.
"Anybody in this business will tell you the more eyes you get in the sky, the more dope you'll find," Shemelya said. It's been 20 years since state police and Kentucky National Guard carried out their first coordinated effort to destroy cultivated marijuana in 1986. The story since has been what Shemelya calls a "cat and mouse game" in which each side has gotten more sophisticated and changed tactics.
That effort by state police and the guard in 1986 was a one-day sweep, essentially a media event to publicize eradication efforts.
Now Kentucky's eradication, cited as one of the top efforts in the nation, runs year round and uses a task force that involves many more police, troops and agencies, including the local officers, state police, National Guard, the DEA, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force.
The technology also has improved. At one time, when a spotter saw a marijuana patch from the air, police would calculate the location by hand; now the National Guard helicopters used for spotting have computers to generate maps that plot the location of pot patches with the click of a cursor, Shemelya said.
Growers responded to increased scrutiny through the years by improving techniques and doing more to hide their crops, including reducing the size of their plots and spreading them out among the woods and hills.
Police sometimes found hundreds of plants together 20 years ago, but the average number of plants in a plot the last few years has been in the 60s or below.
One anomaly this year was that the average number of plants per plot jumped to 83.
Growers may have put out larger patches because they thought the National Guard wouldn't be as active in hunting for pot as a result of deployments to the war in Iraq, Shemelya said.
That wasn't the case, Shemelya said; the number of Guard personnel involved in the marijuana-cutting program was about the same as always.
"They were unfortunately fooled badly," Shemelya said of growers.
The guard has adequate troops to support law enforcement or respond to disasters at home even with troops overseas, said spokesman Col. Phil Miller.
Police also found far more booby traps at pot patches this year than they had for several years. In 2005, for instance, there were two, but police found 20 this year.
In one case, a grower had driven dozens of nails through a piece of wood and put it in a pit with the nails sticking up. An officer was hurt when he stepped into the hidden pit, Shemelya said.
At another plot, police found inert pipe bombs that didn't have any explosives in them, set up to scare people away. It isn't clear sometimes whether booby traps are directed at police or people trying to steal marijuana crops.
Kentucky has long ranked as one of the top outdoor pot producers in the nation for a number of reasons, including that it has a conducive climate, lots of places to hide patches and experienced growers.
In 2005, the state ranked second behind California in the number of plants eradicated, according to the DEA.
Another way to look at the area's pot production: The 68 counties in eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee and West Virginia that make up the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) have only .87 percent of the nation's population, but accounted for 25 percent of the plants eradicated nationwide in 2003, according to the most recent annual report from the task force.
Pot production began taking root in the 1970s and spread in the 1980s, often in poorer areas of the state. Over time, some places and people began to tolerate or even accept marijuana-growing as a way to make money in areas without a lot of other opportunities, police said.
"They don't like the state police coming in messing with their economy," said Danny Webb, who is now Letcher County sheriff but earlier was captain of the state-police post in Hazard, which covers a five-county area in eastern Kentucky.
If police are finding that much marijuana, Shemelya said, it means there is a lot more they aren't finding. Even with additional flight time, he said, police can't cover all the primary pot-growing area of southern and eastern Kentucky and probably don't find more than half the crop.
Newshawk: BluntKilla - 420Magazine.com
Source: Lexington Herald-Leader
Pubdate: November 25, 2006
Copyright: 2006 WorldNow and WLEX-TV
Contact: lex18news@wlextv.com
Website: LEX18 - Lexington, KY - News, Weather, Sports - LEX 18 Home
