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 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 past 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 for 2009, officers across 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 National 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.
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. Mr. 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, Mr. 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 past 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, Mr. 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 that 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, Mr. Shemelya said. The plants’ street value of about $2,000 each creates an often irresistible draw in communities where long-standing poverty has been exacerbated over the years by the shuttering of factories and coal mines.
“The economy, or lack of economy, has always driven the marijuana trade,” Mr. Shemelya said. “It still is the cash cow as far as illicit drugs. It offers the greatest return on investment.”
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