Grass Was Never Greener

By Anastasia Toufexis

In an economy of lows, many profit from others' highs

San Fernando Ed, 35, paced in the balmy California night air and totted up the rewards of being a successful farmer. They included two Porsches, a Datsun, three four-wheel-drive pickup trucks, a redwood home perched on a hilltop in Northern California, a three-bedroom house with an outdoor Jacuzzi near the beach in Los Angeles and a custom-built vacation hideaway in Hawaii. Then he opened up a plastic bag and pinched out a sample of the crop that has made his fortune of nearly $1 million: marijuana.

San Fernando Ed, it seems, is no isolated case. Today illegally grown pot is the nation's fourth largest cash crop. Law-enforcement officials insist that it ranks just behind corn, soybeans and wheat in market value. Last year's marijuana harvest had an estimated street value of $8.5 billion; in each of more than 30 states, law-defying entrepreneurs produced crops worth at least $100 million at retail. California's harvest, worth an almost unbelievable but reasonably documented $1.5 billion at retail, led the list. Hawaii was second; its $750 million crop rivaled the sugar-cane and pineapple harvest in value. In Oklahoma, the $350 million harvest ranked just behind wheat. In Kentucky and Tennessee, each with a $200 million yield, dope growing has replaced moonshine as the favorite illicit enterprise. Harvesting of this year's crop begins in August and September, and experts predict a bumper yield. Says Bill Keester of the Oklahoma state police: "We've had a lot of rain, and we're blessed with good crops of everything. Unfortunately that means a lot of marijuana as well as wheat."

Pot patches have been spotted everywhere by overworked law-enforcement officials: between rows of corn on Iowa farms, in narrow strips along streambeds in the Ozarks, in cleared plots on timberland owned by giant companies, even on public lands. Says Ernie Anderson, the Forest Service's director of law enforcement: "We've had reports of marijuana cultivation on practically every one of the 154 national forests and grasslands."

The profit of growing pot has lured not only the leftover hippies of the 1960s but even well-educated professionals, including lawyers and stockbrokers, as well as many laid-off workers or financially squeezed farmers. Few, though, are trying-to-make-ends-meet amateurs in the underground trade. Says a Kansas police official: "Most growers around here have a lot of pride, know-how and a college degree in agriculture." Not many demonstrate excessive guilt about their lawbreaking. Says an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration: "People don't perceive growing marijuana as being really wrong, even though it's illegal."

The business bloomed in the late 1970s after the Nixon Administration pressured Mexico to spray its grass crop with paraquat, a potent weed killer. U.S. smokers, frightened of potential lung damage from tainted Mexican grass, turned to growing their own. That reliance on the domestic weed was further heightened when the DEA cracked down on the smuggling of Colombian marijuana into the U.S. Today, though many growers cultivate small quantities of pot strictly for their own or friends' use, 100,000 or so, according to NORML, the pro-pot lobby group, are commercial growers. They supply about 20% of the grass consumed annually by the nation's 25.5 million smokers.

The preferred crop today is sinsemilla (a seedless marijuana produced through intensive cultivation of only the female plant) that has a very high concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, marijuana's psychoactive ingredient. Sinsemilla produces a heady euphoria and sells for around $2,000 per lb. This is roughly the yield from a single plant. The sinsemilla produced by U.S. growers is so prized that seeds have been smuggled into Mexico and Colombia to enrich crops there.

But for U.S. authorities this improved "American" has produced only headaches. Local police are often loath to arrest growers, especially when communities are dependent on pot income. Some even tip off planters to impending law-enforcement raids. In many states, the penalties meted out for growing grass often amount to little more than a wrist slap anyway. Even with stiffer sentencing, enforcement would remain difficult. Growers have become adept at hiding pot patches from airborne police. One farmer in Kentucky is growing plants on flatbeds that he can wheel into the barn at the first buzz of a light plane. Other growers protect their crops with armed guards, attack dogs, pit traps studded with sharpened sticks and trip wires attached to crossbows. Farmers say the measures are taken to foil rustlers more than the police. Still, they present a menace to both. A deputy sheriff in Oklahoma was shot to death last fall by a guard who had mistaken him for a thief.

Officials admit that they are managing to seize only 5% to 10% of the domestic crop at best. The DEA contends that enforcement could become more efficient if the newly discovered marijuana fields were to be sprayed with paraquat. The state of Florida, in apparent agreement, has announced that it will spray some fields with the herb killer. The Florida plan has prompted critical editorials in local newspapers as well as a lawsuit from NORML. In addition, the Chevron Chemical Co., a distributor of paraquat, has fired off a warning letter to the U.S. Department of Justice and the DEA: "The product label bears the word poison and the skull-and-crossbones insignia, but terrifying people in order to modify behavior is not a registered use." Still, Florida officials remain committed to paraquat, in part out of support for the Reagan Administration's policy. Washington has urged Colombia to spray the herbicide on its marijuana crop, but the country refuses to do so until the U.S. does the same to its own. Even if the U.S. begins using paraquat, many Government experts fear that domestic marijuana production has gone too far to be undercut at this late date. Says one discouraged DEA official: "Sometimes I feel like we are trying to enforce Prohibition." --ByAnastasia Toufexis. Reported by Jonathan Beaty/Washington and Lee Griggs/Chicago

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty, Lee Griggs

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