cannabisnews.com: Weeding Out Pot Farms From Aloft Weeding Out Pot Farms From Aloft Posted by FoM on September 06, 2000 at 08:37:33 PT By John Johnson, Times Staff Writer Source: Los Angeles Times The pot farmer's worst nightmare is the diminutive, 37-year-old daughter of a migrant farm worker whose troops call her Supreme Commander. Sonya Barna hardly looks the part of the Patton of Pot. She is short, wears her fingernails and her brown hair long and cuts a striking enough figure in her fatigues that a visiting Ukrainian general recently asked if all American women were so beautiful. But as head of the state's marijuana eradication task force, called CAMP for Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, she is on pace to break all records for the number of pot plants chopped out of California's renegade marijuana farms. This summer, her squadron of helicopters has dived into remote green corners of the state, from the steep gorges of the Santa Ynez Mountains to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, carrying crews of eradicators with machetes. On a recent morning, as she drove to a staging area in Southern California, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed up her team leader in Porterville. "Don't kill yourself," she said, "but take out 10,000 plants today." Barna's commitment to the war on pot is matched only by the increasing sophistication of the growers who have been converting California's wild lands into corporate-style pot farms. In recent years, California's marijuana industry has undergone a radical change from the time when North Coast hippies tended their backyard gardens in Frye boots and drove their VW vans down to San Francisco to unload their stash. Today, the pot gardens have moved south and tend to be larger than ever. Last year, a farm in San Benito County yielded 53,000 plants. At $4,000 a plant, the formula the state uses to measure the stuff, that was worth $212 million, wholesale. Another major change is that many of the biggest farms are being operated by Mexican drug gangs who set up camp deep in remote corners of national forest land. These huge operations, complete with 12-foot-tall watchtowers, are tended by farm workers paid around $500 a month to guard the plants. Sometimes they are taken in blindfolded, so they don't know where they are and can't leave. The increasingly high stakes involved were demonstrated with deadly results on Aug. 24, when a Mexican citizen was shot and killed while defending a pot farm in Madera County. Jesus Erasmo Figueroa-Valencia was shot when he allegedly pulled a .45-caliber handgun on sheriff's deputies raiding a 7,000-plant farm, deputies said. It was the first shooting connected with CAMP in memory, said Michael Van Winkle, press officer for the state Department of Justice. Some people may debate the usefulness of the drug war. Barna is not one of those. "I don't think we should ever give up," she said over dinner in Solvang on a recent Sunday. Outside, her crew was making ready for the next morning's assault in the Santa Ynez range. "The more you hit the supply, the harder it is to get." Supreme Commander of ' 'Shroom Platoon' They call themselves the " 'Shroom Platoon." Partly, it's because the men and women of CAMP have nicknames for everything. One man is called "Red Line" because he is so heavy, according to the joke, that the helicopter engine redlines when it tries to carry him. "Broker" is always out of money. Barna is "Supreme Commander," for obvious reasons. As for the 'Shroom Platoon, that's a sardonic reference to the way mushrooms are grown: kept in the dark and fed manure until the light goes on. Then they come alive. "Come on, Sonya," her team says when she gets impatient with bureaucratic delays that ground her helicopters. "Just 'shroom out." That's not easy for Barna, a mother of three whose gift of chat conceals a fierce drive, which she comes by naturally. Her mother worked her way out of the fields in Brawley to teach social welfare at Cal State Fresno, in the meantime communicating to her daughter an intense work ethic. While Sonya was a cheerleader at Clovis High outside Fresno, her interest was in law enforcement, and she began her career with a splash. At 21, she went undercover as a high school student in the San Joaquin Valley town of Sanger to bust students selling heroin on campus. After a stint with the San Jose Police Department, she joined the state's Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which runs the CAMP program. Since 1983, CAMP has teamed up with a variety of federal and state agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and sheriff's departments from 56 counties, to eradicate pot gardens in rural areas. The field enforcement effort lasts about two months, usually in late summer and early fall, which matches the peak growing and harvesting seasons. Originally, there were six teams operating on a budget of $2.5 million. But over time, the budget was cut to its current level of $600,000. That supports three teams of 13 people. Historically, two eradication teams were stationed full time in Mendocino and Humboldt counties, the traditional home for pot plantations. (In recognition of the changing face of the pot industry, Barna scrapped that approach this year and put all three teams on the road.) Last year, Barna commanded the third mobile team, and her success led directly to her appointment as commander of the entire CAMP effort, Van Winkle said. "She's very gung-ho," he said. "That's the kind of person you need as CAMP commander." Barna crisscrossed the state last year in her Astro van, making one big score after another. When the season was over, her team had snatched 140,000 plants, more than the entire eradication effort had gathered since 1989. The total number of plants seized by all three teams was 241,000, which established a record for CAMP. With this year's season only half over, Barna's teams had already plucked 139,000 plants. All this raises some questions: Just how much pot is out there? And how much of it is even a pot warrior like Barna taking off the market? Was the shooting in Madera County evidence that the growers are feeling the pinch and deciding to stand and fight rather than cut and run when the state helicopters fly in? Or are the efforts of CAMP barely scratching the surface? On the one hand, it's a big state. When you fly over, you see vast landscapes of greenery. Picking a marijuana garden out of this patchwork would seem impossible. But the M-spotters, as marijuana spotters are known, have a couple of things on their side. One is that pot needs direct sunlight for a few hours a day. That means the pot garden, no matter how remote, is visible from the air. The other is that marijuana's color is different from that of any other plant. Experienced eradicators describe it as an almost neon green, as if the psychoactive ingredient--THC--that flows through the plant turns it luminescent. "If the sun hits it right, it's like a light came on," said Sgt. Stan Mathiasen of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department. CAMP's efforts have drawn the attention of outsiders. Ukraine, facing its own marijuana problem, sent a team to consult Barna. CAMP also sends pot samples to the University of Mississippi, where they are analyzed for THC content. Some samples in recent years have come back at 27%, compared with 2% in the 1960s and '70s, a fact that only reinforces Barna's attitude about the drug. "Pot is not a gateway drug," she scoffed. "It is a drug." The staging area the next morning was a park just north of Lake Cachuma in the flammable Santa Barbara County back country. A dozen men and two women in fatigues stood around tossing the football and basically " 'shrooming out." Finally, two helicopters landed, kicking up clouds of white dust as team leaders leaned over the hood of a truck and plotted their attacks on three gardens spotted by the locals. "These mountains here don't look like it, but they're straight up and down," warned Mathiasen. As he talked, Barna stood off to the side, exercising a loose and easy style of command. The local operations chief was nicknamed Turtle. A CHP officer in the West Valley when not chopping pot, he was filling in for another man who'd been hospitalized with a bad case of poison oak. He warns everyone to be careful: Busting marijuana farms doesn't carry the same threat as street-level undercover drug work. Most farmers have fled by the time the eradicators arrive. The Madera shooting, however, put the team on alert. "There will be two STABOs and one walk-in," Turtle said. STABO has had as great an impact on the war on pot as the machine gun did on ground warfare. Just as the machine gun greatly increased the killing power of a single man, STABO turned an eradicator into a plant-killing machine. STABO stands for Short Term Airborne Operation, which in plain English means helicoptering two people into remote forests at the end of a 150-foot-long line. Instead of hiking for hours through dense brush, a STABO team can be inserted miles from the nearest trail or road in a matter of minutes. After STABO was initiated three years ago, the plant counts exploded, from fewer than 100,000 to 132,000 in 1997, to 135,000 in 1998, to 241,000 in 1999. Barna and other STABOers describe the sensation of skimming along the tops of trees at 35 knots as exhilarating, but they also know the danger. Above them in the helicopter is a man with a knife whose sole job is to cut the rope by which they are hanging should the helicopter get into catastrophic trouble. It's a simple and brutal equation that every STABOer lives with. In three years of STABOing, however, there hasn't been one injury. The only way to see the CAMP pot-fighters in action is to put on a pair of boots and tramp along with them through the thorny chaparral blanketing the trackless emptiness that still covers so much of California. Because reporters are not allowed to STABO, I went in with a hiking team going after a garden deep in a gorge that the helicopter couldn't reach. Two hours later, we were airlifted out with 33 measly plants. My clothes were torn and my knees and hands were bleeding from fighting my way up the steepest pitch I'd hiked in years. The effectiveness of STABOing was proved that day. While we inched our way up and down the mountain for an armload of pot, the STABO teams collected 314 plants from five other gardens dotting the hillside. A big stake-bed truck was loaded up and roared off to a special site where the pot would be buried; they no longer burn it. Even though, by their math, the value of the pot wrenched from the mountains' grasp that day was $1.4 million, it was still a pretty paltry score. Barna was not disappointed. "That's OK," she said, "We serviced the county." Like a fisherman with faith in the generosity of the sea, she knew there would be other days. And there were. Two days later, the team moved on to Kern County, where the forest yielded a bounty--20,000 plants in a single day. The score was so big that they settled in to fish it out. Barna figured it would take two or three more days to get everything. Indeed, 24 hours later they had 38,000 more, making the Kern County bust the largest farm ever broken up by CAMP and bringing the season's total to 224,000 plants. "Just looking at it from the air," she said, "it goes on and on and on." Published: August 6, 2000Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)Copyright: 2000 Los Angeles TimesContact: letters latimes.comAddress: Times Mirror SquareLos Angeles, CA 90053Fax: (213) 237-4712Website: http://www.latimes.com/Related Articles:Copters Help Triple Removal of Pot Plants http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6941.shtmlGreen Harvest Debate Rageshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6936.shtml200 Million in Pot Seized in Huge Kern Bust http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6888.shtmlSheriff's Raid Nets $7.5m in Pot http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6814.shtmlMarijuana Garden Worth $40 Million Destroyedhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6748.shtml END SNIP --> Snipped Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help Comment #6 posted by Mrs. Annette McKenne on September 08, 2000 at 10:08:59 PT: Get a Life. Somebody to suggest to the people that invest all of their time and money in getting rid of a WEED that it would be more useful to invest in recovery programs for addicts. It seems to me that this should already be known, but i guess the ignorance of the marijuana protesters shows well in these kind of situations. [ Post Comment ] Comment #5 posted by JR Bob Dobbs on September 07, 2000 at 09:14:45 PT Manure >>As for the 'Shroom Platoon, that's a sardonic reference to the way mushrooms are grown: kept in the dark and fed manure until the light goes on. Then they come alive. So, the CAMP fighters are kept in the dark and fed manure? Just as we figured!!>> At $4,000 a plant, the formula the state uses to measure the stuff... At $4,000 a plant, the state ought to be GROWING the stuff to eliminate the national debt!! Seriously, though, if we weren't spending all this money AGAINST the plant, do you think it would cost $4,000 to BUY a plant? When's the last time you paid $4,000 for an ear of corn? [ Post Comment ] Comment #4 posted by hempity on September 06, 2000 at 21:37:29 PT lots of servicing going on "That's OK," she said, "We serviced the county." Just like a bull services cows ! [ Post Comment ] Comment #3 posted by Frank S. World on September 06, 2000 at 17:51:48 PT No Clue "I don't think we should ever give up," she said over dinner in Solvang on a recent Sunday. Outside, her crew was making ready for the next morning's assault in the Santa Ynez range. "The more you hit the supply, the harder it is to get." Then the price goes up, and it becomes more profitable, and since it's unregulated, disputes are settled with violence.CAMP should be so proud that their efforts have taken a humble weed that could grow anywhere and turned it into something more valuable than gold. Prohibition will never work. Wonder how many taxpayer dollars this clueless drone gets paid to wage a battle she can never win, but only make things worse. Insanity in action! [ Post Comment ] Comment #2 posted by Commandante _Marcos on September 06, 2000 at 12:29:44 PT Mas Guerra!!! viva la Revolucion!!!Long Live the Memory of Jesus Erasmo Figueroa-Valencia!!! [ Post Comment ] Comment #1 posted by michael on September 06, 2000 at 12:11:12 PT: 2%----------98% If the potency of marijuana was 2% in the sixties, I must have been one of the lucky ones able to get what was leftover, the pot with 98%. :-) [ Post Comment ] Post Comment Name: Optional Password: E-Mail: Subject: Comment: [Please refrain from using profanity in your message] Link URL: Link Title: