War On Drugs Is Driving Pot Growers Underground

GIG HARBOR, Pierce County - Surrounded by scrubby woods outside, cluttered with junk inside, the old shed hardly looked like the hub of a big marijuana-growing operation. Police Chief Dennis Richards started wondering if his informant had led him astray.

Then someone noticed the trapdoor.

Richards lifted it up to find a wooden ladder, worn smooth from use, leading to a crawl space beneath the shed. A heavy steel door stood at one end; behind it was another door made of plywood. Richards pushed that door open and stared in amazement at what lay beyond.

"It was like looking into a big dance hall," he said.

He'd discovered a huge underground greenhouse, a 20-by-70-foot Quonset hut reinforced with 10-inch beams to support tons of soil piled overhead. Filling the chamber were irrigation hoses, fans, soil pots and enough high-intensity grow lamps to light up a football stadium.

Welcome to the indoor grow, the latest front in the government's war against marijuana.

A crackdown on growers of the nation's most widely used illegal drug has reduced the size and number of outdoor pot patches in the nation's biggest marijuana-producing areas: Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest, Kentucky and Tennessee. Officials say aerial surveillance, herbicide spraying and commando-style "whack-and-stack" raids have taken their toll.

MANY GROWERS MOVED INDOORS

But rather than abandon their lucrative crop, many growers have simply moved indoors or underground, cultivating an increasingly potent drug in high-tech, high-profit greenhouse operations.

Authorities last year raided 2,848 indoor grows of marijuana nationwide. That's twice the number raided in 1989, "and we're still increasing by leaps and bounds," said Larry Hahn, head of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration's campaign against indoor marijuana.

Growing high-quality pot outdoors requires a warm, sunny climate, but prime indoor marijuana can originate anywhere - even chilly Alaska, which now produces some of the nation's most potent weed.

"The cradle of the indoor grow problem was Northern California to the Seattle area," Hahn said. "Since then, it has spread like a disease throughout the country."

Forget about Maui Wowie or Acapulco Gold, high-grade varieties of decades past. Now the hottest stuff has street names like Purple Haze, Garlic Bud or Christmas-Tree Skunk.

Known collectively as "sinsemilla," it comes from cloned and carefully cultivated plants whose resinous buds contain up to 10 times more psychoactive THC than the old outdoor-grown varieties, Hahn said.

Marijuana's new potency, along with the supply-reducing raids, has driven up prices dramatically. Twenty years ago, marijuana sold for $30 an ounce. Today, sinsemilla sells for an average $200 an ounce. In some cities, it costs $500 an ounce, more than the price of gold.

Growers take amazing measures to hide their precious plants:

-- A Hawaiian grower raided in January was farming in a volcanic lava tube deep underground. Authorities seized 5,000 plants worth an estimated $1 million from the cave, equipped with lights, intercoms and its own generator.

-- Authorities last January seized 3,400 plants from a grow in northern Idaho. The pot farmers had dug a tunnel into a hillside, entering through a false wall in a barn, said Dan Charboneau, deputy chief of the Idaho Bureau of Narcotics.

-- The nation's biggest indoor grow yet seized involved four houses built solely to conceal marijuana gardens. The houses - two in Bullhead City, Ariz., and two in Southern California's Antelope Valley - featured generators, surveillance cameras and automated irrigation systems. Raided in October and November 1990, the houses yielded 23,000 plants worth an estimated $77 million.

As indoor growers become more evasive, law-enforcement officials become more adept at finding them. They patrol with heat-sensing devices to find hot spots created by diesel generators or banks of grow lamps. They scan utility-company records to spot houses running up high electric bills.

Another effective tactic: Officials open their own hydroponics supply store and wait for growers to walk in.

In April, Indiana officials staged the largest bust of marijuana growers in state history, arresting about 400 people identified as indoor growers after they bought supplies from a police-run hydroponics store in Zionsville. Authorities estimate at least 90 percent of the store's customers were growing marijuana - including one who handed them a dollar bill with the words "I grow hemp" coming out of George Washington's mouth.

Most growers are far more discreet. Those who go underground do so to evade drug agents' heat-sensing devices. Others bypass electric meters, tapping utility lines to get free power and avoid detection.

INVESTIGATORS RUN GANTLET

Investigators run a gantlet of home-grown security devices: guns, grenades, guard dogs, even a cougar seized in May during a raid north of Detroit.

"As the money involved goes up, these people will go to extremes to protect their investment," Hahn said. Growers also are moving into areas where local law-enforcement officials may not be on the lookout for sophisticated drug operations.

In Gig Harbor, the May 20 raid of the buried Quonset hut was the third major indoor grow seized in a month. "This is a lot more than we're used to," Police Chief Richards said. "You don't think about it going on here."