Inside the high-flying pot industry - by Gordon Witkin Nostalgic baby-boomers who remember hazy college highs on "Colombian gold" at $40 an ounce would not recognize the power or price of today's domestically grown weed--strains with nicknames like "Skunk Number 1" and "Salmon River Quiver." Breeding, cloning, seed selection, hydroponics and growing techniques that isolate the especially potent, unpollinated female plant, called sinsemilla, have produced a homegrown product with off-the-chart concentrations of pot's psycho-active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. And the potent new product has helped catapult the marijuana business over the past decade into an imposing, muscular industry belived to generate more than $16 billion in annual sales. "I hate to sound laudatory," says W. Michael Aldridge of the Drug Enforcement Administration, "but the work they've done on this plant is incredible." THC content for sinsemilla averaged 8 percent in 1988, and concentrations of 14 to 16 percent aren't unusual. By contrast, Colombian and Mexican marijuana has a THC content of only 3 to 6 percent. "It's like the difference between buying a filet mignon and a hamburger," says Jack Beecham, commander of California's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. Sinsemilla prices can run up to $300 an ounce, and the average plant yields a pound of dope. Export boom. At least 25 percent of the pot consumed in the U.S. is now homegrown, up from 12 percent as recently as 1984. The expansion has been so swift that the U.S. stands on the verge of becoming an exporter nation. The Americans have also received a healthy push from the Netherlands, where several companies peddling top-quality seeds to the U.S. (see box, page 30) have "really changed the face of domestic marijuana as we know it today," says Aldridge. Health experts believe the potency of the new marijuana drastically multiplies its health risks, and there is heightened concern about marijuana's being a "gateway" drug that leads users to harder, more lethal narcotics. Many of those assertions are disputed by pot's defenders, who are bracing themselves for a new law-enforcement crackdown that has been signaled by a series of busts culminating in a huge nationwide roundup last week. Drug czar William Bennett's National Drug Control Strategy, released in September, terms the domestic-pot situation "intolerable" and calls for an increase in federal funding to wipe it out, from $8 million in 1989 to $16 million in 1990, with further requests likely for 1991 and 1992. The strategy argues that success against pot "should become a bench mark of national antidrug resolve," adding that "we cannot expect foreign countries to undertake vigorous antidrug efforts inside their borders if we fail to do likewise." Authorities are most worried by the increasingly organized nature of the trade and the staggering amounts of money to be made. While some pot growers harvest only for themselves and a few friends, officials say organized, criminal marijuana rings are on the rise. Kentucky authorities are finishing up investigation of a group centered in rural Marion County that they say grew marijuana on 25 farms in nine Midwestern states, with distribution tentacles reaching as far as Maine. More than 75 members of the group, which called itself the "Cornbread Mafia," have now been prosecuted and 182 tons of sinsemilla seized. Marijuana growers no longer match the Cheech and Chong stereotypes. Illinois State University criminologist Ralph Weisheit found that most growers were active, productive members of their communities, such as real-estate agents and engineers. California busts have turned up teachers and a county supervisor. And, of course, it has become a salvation enterprise for many farmers who were devastated by the past decade's agricultural crises. "Looking back, I wouldn't do it, but at the time it seemed like the only way out," says Dick Kurth, 59, a Fort Benton, Mont., cattle rancher, who just finished serving 15 months at the state prison for running a marijuana operation worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. "The family needed money for food on the table. It appeared we could solve our financial situation within a two-year period, wipe out our debts and keep the family together like we had been for five generations. I figured people who produce alcohol and tobacco sleep at night, and we should be able to live with this." A tit-for-tat chess match. The sorry truth, though, is that vigorous enforcement efforts will not necessarily solve the pot puzzle. Federal marijuana policies have been perhaps the best example of how drug enforcement resembles a balloon. When illicit-drug operations are squeezed in one place, they bulge out into another. "Every time [the government] comes up with a policy that seems like a good idea, it leads to some result we haven't thought of," says criminologist Weisheit. The action-counteraction sequence began in the late 1970s, when the government intensified efforts to eradicate and interdict foreign marijuana. The harder it became to bring pot into the country from afar, the more intent growers became in producing a domestic variety. "The major result of increased marijuana enforcement has been to substitute more-potent and dangerous domestic marijuana for less-potent imported marijuana," says Harvard lecturer Mark Kleiman, a former Justice Department analyst who recently wrote a book on the subject. As the domestic industry grew, drug agents and growers engaged in an elaborate chess match. The feds' aggressive policy of seizing growers' property, for instance, caused them to react by moving onto public lands--that is, to areas that could not be seized as a drug grower's asset. Once on government land, growers guarded their plots with what one observer termed a "Marquis de Sade torture chamber of devices": Concealed steel-jaw traps, land mines, hidden fish-hooks hung at eye level and camouflaged, Vietnam-style pits with sharpened sticks. The situation was so dangerous that in 1987, the public was advised to avoid 773,000 acres of national-forest land across the country, from the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Northern California to the Daniel Boone National Forest in Eastern Kentucky. Stepped-up enforcement by the Forest Service helped reduce the total to 384,000 acres last year, but some forests remain perilous. Two Forest Service officers were recently shot at and their vehicle was rammed by suspected cultivators in Oregon's Rogue River National Forest. The vigorous outdoor eradication efforts undertaken in the mid-1980s have now prompted growers to take their latest countermeasure. They have moved to fancy indoor growing operations with high-intensity lamps, conveyors, timers, fans, sprinklers and automatic fertilizing systems. The added advantage of the move to this high-tech arena is that precisely regulated growing conditions--especially light availability--can yield three harvests a year, compared with just one outdoors. Growing indoors hides the crop from thieves, animals (deer love pot) and, most important, the law. "The cops brag they aren't finding pot in the hills of Northern California any more," says Tom Alexander, publisher of Sinsemilla Tips magazine. "What they don't say is that the growers are actually in a warehouse in San Francisco." The pot bible. The move indoors has now changed law enforcers' tactics, too. Last week, the DEA announced that 231 indoor "grows" nationwide had been busted, while some 36 stores peddling growing equipment were served either search warrants or subpoenas for records. In addition, 303 people were arrested in the continuing conspiracy investigation. The case was born in late 1987 when veteran DEA agent Jim Seward was struck as he thumbed through a copy of High Times magazine by how it had become a one-stop shop of ads for seed catalogs and growing equipment. High Times, the bible of the marijuana industry, "just seemed to be a middleman in a dope deal," says an exasperated Seward. Yet drug agents were struggling to police the indoor operations one by one with cumbersome traditional law-enforcement methods like informants. Seward decided to try something different. Undercover agents were sent to some 80 equipment dealers nationwide, saying only that they were interested in growing pot. "The response ranged from 'Would you like to buy my business?' to selling us plants to 'I don't know what you're talking about,' but very few turned us down flat," says Seward. Armed with the legally necessary "reasonable belief," DEA then subpoenaed United Parcel Service this summer for 90 days' worth of shipping records from 29 of the equipment firms, a strategy that kicked out an incredible 21,000 leads. "The problem is growing faster than we can target resources," says Seward. Indeed, in 1984, 649 indoor growing operations were seized in 22 states; by 1988, the totals were 1,240 indoor "grows" in 41 states. And the profit potential is staggering. Convicted former grower Paul Stanford of Portland says he rented a house, invested $1,600 in equipment--six lamps, a timer and a few fans were the big expenses--and took in $25,000 from his first harvest. "It seems too easy to be true," adds Brian, a former Virginia grower, who insisted his last name not be used. "But if you can grow good tomatoes, you can grow good pot." Meanwhile, the stores selling indoor equipment are now "a big, booming industry," says High Times Editor-in-chief Steven Hager. In late 1985, say DEA agents, only nine such companies were advertising in High Times. By mid-1989, 81 firms were running equipment ads in High Times. Store owners and advertisers feel they are getting a bum rap when authorities claim they are part of the conspiracy to produce pot. "We sell a product where we can. We don't check people out," says Dan Murphy, who owns a gardening-equipment distributorship in Seattle that was seized by the feds last week. "You advertise where you feel you have a market." DEA agents, however, feel their investigation puts them on solid ground in charging many of the merchants selling indoor-growing gear with aiding and abetting in the distribution and manufacture of controlled substances. Apple-pie pot. Above this storm, High Times itself is doing quite nicely. Advertising manager Ellen Spencer states that the gardening industry "has really found a market here" and says the growth in ad pages has been "monstrous" in recent years, though she declines to quote exact figures. Average sales per issue are 80,000-85,000, up from about 72,000 just three years ago, in part, says editor Hager, because the magazine has returned to its counterculture roots. "Pot smokers are the most persecuted minority group in America. At some point, they'll turn around and fight for their rights," he says. "This plant is not anti-American. It's part of the fabric of American society." But like it or not, pot is still illegal. In fact, it is becoming more so. Oregon, a leader in the 1970s decriminalization movement, just hiked its maximum fine for possessing less than an ounce of pot from $100 to $1,000, and last fall's federal drug bill provided for five-year minimum mandatory prison sentences for cultivation of 100 plants or more. Drug agents feel that has given them the green light for using innovative but surely controversial methods to go after the growers. "Until the law changes," says Terrence Burke, DEA's acting deputy administrator, "we're going to enforce it." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- X-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-X Another file downloaded from: NIRVANAnet(tm) & the Temple of the Screaming Electron Jeff Hunter 510-935-5845 Rat Head Ratsnatcher 510-524-3649 Burn This Flag Zardoz 408-363-9766 realitycheck Poindexter Fortran 415-567-7043 Lies Unlimited Mick Freen 415-583-4102 Specializing in conversations, obscure information, high explosives, arcane knowledge, political extremism, diversive sexuality, insane speculation, and wild rumours. ALL-TEXT BBS SYSTEMS. Full access for first-time callers. We don't want to know who you are, where you live, or what your phone number is. We are not Big Brother. 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