Marijuana is sprouting up in places in eastern Kentucky as more people look for ways to make money.
On this hill in hind man, a team is in the process of destroying several dozen marijuana plants.
We talked to the trooper in charge of the eradication team and he says he is not surprised people are growing and selling marijuana to make an extra buck.
Detective John Griffith says marijuana is not a smart way to earn cash.
“I mean, the economy is bad so people will do what they can do to make their living,” Griffith says.
Figures from the drug enforcement administration show California eclipsing the other states in confiscated marijuana plants with more than five million in 2008. Kentucky comes in fourth, with more than 350-thousand.
Trooper Eric Gibson says there's another way to make money in a down economy.
“The state police does their best to get as much marijuana out of the mountains, out of the hands of the rest of the people growing it as best as we can,” Gibson says.
“Yes there is,” Griffith says. “It is illegal and as long as it is illegal, we'll have to cut it.”
Griffith say often times pot ends up in the hands of teenagers.
“We're trying to keep it from reaching the streets where our young kids will get a hold of it,” Griffith says. “Marijuana is typically a starter drug and if we can keep the young kids from getting it then hopefully they won't get on drugs.”
Griffith hopes growers will focus their energy on making money the legal way.
“It’s not easy money, its hard work but if they get by with it, it's a lot of money,” Griffith says.
Climbing this hill is no easy task, but people climbing out of this down economy can be much harder behind bars.
Between June and September, eradication teams are out almost everyday in eastern Kentucky, cutting and destroying marijuana plants.
In Tennessee, officials say they've destroyed a record amount of marijuana near the Kentucky border.
A helicopter on a routine scouting mission, spotted the plants north of Knoxville.
Authorities dug up the plants and burned them Thursday.
Officials say the patch was very sophisticated, with an irrigation system and campsite.
Cannabis leaf. Photograph: Mykel Nicolaou / Rex Features
======
Americans grow cannabis to beat the recession
Some people cancel holidays abroad, others stage yard sales or start shopping at low-cost supermarkets. To that list must now be added a new way to get through economic hard times: grow cannabis.
Law enforcers on the west coast of the US and in the middle states straddled by the foothills of the Appalachian mountains are reporting a common trend. It is boom time for marijuana cultivation, and much of the incentive they say is to beat the recession.
So far this year, police in parts of the country where cannabis is traditionally grown have chopped down plants with a street value of $12bn. The core growing area is in California, Washington and Oregon to the west, but the Appalachian states of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are also witnessing an explosion.
More than 600,000 cannabis plants have been cut and burned in those states this summer, reversing a previous decline in production brought about by stringent law enforcement. It is not only the quantity of crop that is on the rise, the nature of the growers is also changing.
Ed Shemelya, who leads the marijuana eradication programme in the Appalachia region, says a new type of grower is emerging wholly different to the family cartels that have cultivated the drug for generations. "We are seeing a lot more individuals who wouldn't normally be growing marijuana. They are not your professionals."
Shemelya puts it down to the dire economy in this part of America. The region is almost entirely dependant for jobs on coal mining, which has suffered severely from the recession.
"People are growing marijuana to supplement their income or support themselves in poor economic times. This is about economic necessity," he said.
The newcomers to the business are typically restricting their practices to fields of around 80 plants - that's tiny compared to the mega cultivation seen in California where 5.3m plants were destroyed last year up from 4.9m in 2007. But at around $2,000 a plant, that still provides a good living in Appalachia.
Growers tend to locate their crops as close to their homes as possible, on the edge or just inside the forest that carpets much of the foothills. They clear foliage from the trees to allow in light, then grow the plants between the trunks to hide them from aerial detection by the drug authorities.
On top of the economic incentive, the clampdown on marijuana traffic across the border from Mexico has also provided a reason for new participants to enter the market. Dave Keller, a drug enforcement officer in Appalachia, told the Associated Press that both small and large growers were trying to fill the void.
The booming business is proving challenging not only for law enforcement. A devastating forest fire in the mountains of Los Padres National Forest in California last month was found to have been started by a Mexican drug cartel that had been cooking marijuana on a camp fire. Some 30,000 plants were seized from the farm hidden away in the forest.
Marijuana farming rebounds in economic hard times
By ROGER ALFORD (AP) – 2 days ago
BARBOURVILLE, Ky. — Machete-wielding police officers have hacked their way through billions of dollars worth of marijuana in the country's top pot-growing states to stave off a bumper crop sprouting in the tough economy.
The amount only got bigger Thursday when helicopter spotters in Tennessee discovered a five-acre pot field near the Kentucky border and cut down more than 151,000 mature marijuana plants.
The number of plants seized has jumped this year in California, the nation's top marijuana-growing state, while seizures continue to rise in Washington after nearly doubling the previous year. Growers in a three-state region of central Appalachia also appear to have reversed a decline in pot cultivation over the last two years.
Officers in those areas, the nation's biggest hotbeds for marijuana production, have chopped down plants with a combined street value of around $12 billion in the first eight months of this year. While national numbers aren't yet available this year, officers around the country increased their haul from 7 million plants in 2007 to 8 million in 2008.
"A lot of that, we theorize, is the economy," said Ed Shemelya, head of marijuana eradication for the Office of Drug Control Policy's Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. "Places in east Tennessee, eastern Kentucky and West Virginia are probably feeling the recession a lot more severely than the rest of the country and have probably been in that condition a lot longer than the rest of the country."
Growers in Appalachia are often hard-luck entrepreneurs supplementing their income by growing marijuana, authorities say. Troopers thrashing through the thick mountain brush there typically find plots that could easily be tended by a single grower, while officers in the two western states have focused on larger fields run by Mexican cartels with immigrant labor.
Officers assigned to the Tennessee Governor's Task Force on Marijuana Eradication were working Thursday to destroy an expansive marijuana field near Jellico, Tenn. Authorities initially said the field might be the biggest ever found in the state, eclipsing a discovery last year of 350,000 plants in the Appalachian foothills. They later said fewer plants were found Thursday but they were more mature — some as tall as 6 feet — than the ones discovered last year.
The marijuana was being airlifted to a Tennessee state park to be burned. No one had been arrested.
The demand for domestically grown marijuana is at a record high, in part because stricter border control has made it more difficult to import pot from Mexico, said Dave Keller, deputy director of the Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. Keller said growers large and small across the country are trying to fill the void.
The ailing economy isn't stopping users from spending money on pot. In fact, Shemelya said the demand appears to be rising with the unemployment rate.
"I've never seen any decline in demand for marijuana in bad economic times," he said. "If anything, it's the opposite. People always seem to find money somewhere to buy drugs."
The number of plants destroyed in California has increased over the last three years, said the assistant chief of the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, Kent Shaw. The total increased from 4.9 million plants in 2007 to 5.3 million in 2008. Already this year, Shaw said, California authorities have exceeded last year's total.
To the north, authorities in Washington have seen the numbers jump from 295,000 plants seized in 2007 to 580,000 in 2008. Lt. Rich Wiley, commander of the Washington State Patrol's narcotics unit, said his officers have confiscated 540,000 so far this year and he expects to meet or exceed last year's numbers.
In the heart of Appalachia, ground forces have cut more than 600,000 marijuana plants this summer in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, and they should end the year with a significantly higher total, Shemelya said. The plants' street value of about $2,000 each creates an often irresistible draw in communities where long-standing poverty has been fed over the years by the shuttering of factories and coal mines.
In Appalachia and the two western states, authorities said the amount of resources put into eradication efforts has been constant over the past several years.
Judge Kelsey Friend, whose jurisdiction includes some of the most isolated mountain communities in Kentucky, said he believes a huge chunk of the Appalachian marijuana is grown by people so hard-pressed that they're willing to risk freedom to improve their standard of living. The ill-gotten gains, Friend said, show up in the form of new pickup trucks, boats and even homes.
However, only an estimated 20 to 40 percent of the growers in the region manage to harvest and collect their payoff without being detected by modern day G-men assisted by spotters in helicopters.
Last month, Trooper Mac McDonald descended a mountainside near Barbourville with a load of freshly cut marijuana bundled on his shoulder, sweat dripping from his brow. McDonald and his co-workers had trudged up mountains as steep as they were remote to search dense Chinese silvergrass and expansive patches of thorny blackberry briars to find the typically small, scattered plots.
A crackdown begun six years ago had convinced many growers to give up, rather than contend with the helicopters constantly crisscrossing the region in the summer months, authorities said. But the number of growers appears to have picked up since the economy turned sour.
The amount of marijuana confiscated in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia fell from more than 1.2 million plants in 2003 to just more than 700,000 in 2007. But in 2008, with the economy faltering, narcotics officers witnessed another marijuana boom in the mountains, and they again confiscated more than 1 million plants in the three states.
"The economy or lack of economy has always driven the marijuana trade," Shemelya said. "It still is the cash cow as far as illicit drugs. It offers the greatest return on investment."
On this hill in hind man, a team is in the process of destroying several dozen marijuana plants.
We talked to the trooper in charge of the eradication team and he says he is not surprised people are growing and selling marijuana to make an extra buck.
Detective John Griffith says marijuana is not a smart way to earn cash.
“I mean, the economy is bad so people will do what they can do to make their living,” Griffith says.
Figures from the drug enforcement administration show California eclipsing the other states in confiscated marijuana plants with more than five million in 2008. Kentucky comes in fourth, with more than 350-thousand.
Trooper Eric Gibson says there's another way to make money in a down economy.
“The state police does their best to get as much marijuana out of the mountains, out of the hands of the rest of the people growing it as best as we can,” Gibson says.
“Yes there is,” Griffith says. “It is illegal and as long as it is illegal, we'll have to cut it.”
Griffith say often times pot ends up in the hands of teenagers.
“We're trying to keep it from reaching the streets where our young kids will get a hold of it,” Griffith says. “Marijuana is typically a starter drug and if we can keep the young kids from getting it then hopefully they won't get on drugs.”
Griffith hopes growers will focus their energy on making money the legal way.
“It’s not easy money, its hard work but if they get by with it, it's a lot of money,” Griffith says.
Climbing this hill is no easy task, but people climbing out of this down economy can be much harder behind bars.
Between June and September, eradication teams are out almost everyday in eastern Kentucky, cutting and destroying marijuana plants.
In Tennessee, officials say they've destroyed a record amount of marijuana near the Kentucky border.
A helicopter on a routine scouting mission, spotted the plants north of Knoxville.
Authorities dug up the plants and burned them Thursday.
Officials say the patch was very sophisticated, with an irrigation system and campsite.
Cannabis leaf. Photograph: Mykel Nicolaou / Rex Features
======
Americans grow cannabis to beat the recession
Some people cancel holidays abroad, others stage yard sales or start shopping at low-cost supermarkets. To that list must now be added a new way to get through economic hard times: grow cannabis.
Law enforcers on the west coast of the US and in the middle states straddled by the foothills of the Appalachian mountains are reporting a common trend. It is boom time for marijuana cultivation, and much of the incentive they say is to beat the recession.
So far this year, police in parts of the country where cannabis is traditionally grown have chopped down plants with a street value of $12bn. The core growing area is in California, Washington and Oregon to the west, but the Appalachian states of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are also witnessing an explosion.
More than 600,000 cannabis plants have been cut and burned in those states this summer, reversing a previous decline in production brought about by stringent law enforcement. It is not only the quantity of crop that is on the rise, the nature of the growers is also changing.
Ed Shemelya, who leads the marijuana eradication programme in the Appalachia region, says a new type of grower is emerging wholly different to the family cartels that have cultivated the drug for generations. "We are seeing a lot more individuals who wouldn't normally be growing marijuana. They are not your professionals."
Shemelya puts it down to the dire economy in this part of America. The region is almost entirely dependant for jobs on coal mining, which has suffered severely from the recession.
"People are growing marijuana to supplement their income or support themselves in poor economic times. This is about economic necessity," he said.
The newcomers to the business are typically restricting their practices to fields of around 80 plants - that's tiny compared to the mega cultivation seen in California where 5.3m plants were destroyed last year up from 4.9m in 2007. But at around $2,000 a plant, that still provides a good living in Appalachia.
Growers tend to locate their crops as close to their homes as possible, on the edge or just inside the forest that carpets much of the foothills. They clear foliage from the trees to allow in light, then grow the plants between the trunks to hide them from aerial detection by the drug authorities.
On top of the economic incentive, the clampdown on marijuana traffic across the border from Mexico has also provided a reason for new participants to enter the market. Dave Keller, a drug enforcement officer in Appalachia, told the Associated Press that both small and large growers were trying to fill the void.
The booming business is proving challenging not only for law enforcement. A devastating forest fire in the mountains of Los Padres National Forest in California last month was found to have been started by a Mexican drug cartel that had been cooking marijuana on a camp fire. Some 30,000 plants were seized from the farm hidden away in the forest.
Kentucky State Police find a small plot of marijuana hidden among other vegetation on an Appalachian hillside near Barbourville, Ky., Wed., July 22, 2009. The demand for domestically grown marijuana is at a record high, in part because stricter border control has made it more difficult to import pot from Mexico. (AP Photo/Roger Alford)
By ROGER ALFORD (AP) – 2 days ago
BARBOURVILLE, Ky. — Machete-wielding police officers have hacked their way through billions of dollars worth of marijuana in the country's top pot-growing states to stave off a bumper crop sprouting in the tough economy.
The amount only got bigger Thursday when helicopter spotters in Tennessee discovered a five-acre pot field near the Kentucky border and cut down more than 151,000 mature marijuana plants.
The number of plants seized has jumped this year in California, the nation's top marijuana-growing state, while seizures continue to rise in Washington after nearly doubling the previous year. Growers in a three-state region of central Appalachia also appear to have reversed a decline in pot cultivation over the last two years.
Officers in those areas, the nation's biggest hotbeds for marijuana production, have chopped down plants with a combined street value of around $12 billion in the first eight months of this year. While national numbers aren't yet available this year, officers around the country increased their haul from 7 million plants in 2007 to 8 million in 2008.
"A lot of that, we theorize, is the economy," said Ed Shemelya, head of marijuana eradication for the Office of Drug Control Policy's Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. "Places in east Tennessee, eastern Kentucky and West Virginia are probably feeling the recession a lot more severely than the rest of the country and have probably been in that condition a lot longer than the rest of the country."
Growers in Appalachia are often hard-luck entrepreneurs supplementing their income by growing marijuana, authorities say. Troopers thrashing through the thick mountain brush there typically find plots that could easily be tended by a single grower, while officers in the two western states have focused on larger fields run by Mexican cartels with immigrant labor.
Officers assigned to the Tennessee Governor's Task Force on Marijuana Eradication were working Thursday to destroy an expansive marijuana field near Jellico, Tenn. Authorities initially said the field might be the biggest ever found in the state, eclipsing a discovery last year of 350,000 plants in the Appalachian foothills. They later said fewer plants were found Thursday but they were more mature — some as tall as 6 feet — than the ones discovered last year.
The marijuana was being airlifted to a Tennessee state park to be burned. No one had been arrested.
The demand for domestically grown marijuana is at a record high, in part because stricter border control has made it more difficult to import pot from Mexico, said Dave Keller, deputy director of the Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. Keller said growers large and small across the country are trying to fill the void.
The ailing economy isn't stopping users from spending money on pot. In fact, Shemelya said the demand appears to be rising with the unemployment rate.
"I've never seen any decline in demand for marijuana in bad economic times," he said. "If anything, it's the opposite. People always seem to find money somewhere to buy drugs."
The number of plants destroyed in California has increased over the last three years, said the assistant chief of the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, Kent Shaw. The total increased from 4.9 million plants in 2007 to 5.3 million in 2008. Already this year, Shaw said, California authorities have exceeded last year's total.
To the north, authorities in Washington have seen the numbers jump from 295,000 plants seized in 2007 to 580,000 in 2008. Lt. Rich Wiley, commander of the Washington State Patrol's narcotics unit, said his officers have confiscated 540,000 so far this year and he expects to meet or exceed last year's numbers.
In the heart of Appalachia, ground forces have cut more than 600,000 marijuana plants this summer in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, and they should end the year with a significantly higher total, Shemelya said. The plants' street value of about $2,000 each creates an often irresistible draw in communities where long-standing poverty has been fed over the years by the shuttering of factories and coal mines.
In Appalachia and the two western states, authorities said the amount of resources put into eradication efforts has been constant over the past several years.
Judge Kelsey Friend, whose jurisdiction includes some of the most isolated mountain communities in Kentucky, said he believes a huge chunk of the Appalachian marijuana is grown by people so hard-pressed that they're willing to risk freedom to improve their standard of living. The ill-gotten gains, Friend said, show up in the form of new pickup trucks, boats and even homes.
However, only an estimated 20 to 40 percent of the growers in the region manage to harvest and collect their payoff without being detected by modern day G-men assisted by spotters in helicopters.
Last month, Trooper Mac McDonald descended a mountainside near Barbourville with a load of freshly cut marijuana bundled on his shoulder, sweat dripping from his brow. McDonald and his co-workers had trudged up mountains as steep as they were remote to search dense Chinese silvergrass and expansive patches of thorny blackberry briars to find the typically small, scattered plots.
A crackdown begun six years ago had convinced many growers to give up, rather than contend with the helicopters constantly crisscrossing the region in the summer months, authorities said. But the number of growers appears to have picked up since the economy turned sour.
The amount of marijuana confiscated in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia fell from more than 1.2 million plants in 2003 to just more than 700,000 in 2007. But in 2008, with the economy faltering, narcotics officers witnessed another marijuana boom in the mountains, and they again confiscated more than 1 million plants in the three states.
"The economy or lack of economy has always driven the marijuana trade," Shemelya said. "It still is the cash cow as far as illicit drugs. It offers the greatest return on investment."
