Published: September 18, 2009 02:20 pm      

Pot's comeback — 09/20/09

Prescription drug epidemic is our most serious drug problem

An ailing economy coupled with stricter control of the United States’ border with Mexico have led to increase in the amount marijuana being grown in Kentucky.

While area law enforcement officers certainly must be vigilant in their ongoing efforts to find and destroy illegal marijuana crops, the destruction of pot must not divert attention and resources to this region’s most serious drug problem: The misuse of prescription drugs, primarily pain pills.

Our reasoning is simple: While hundreds of area residents have died from overdoses of prescription drugs, we don’t know of anyone who has died from smoking marijuana. While we don’t condone the smoking a pot, it pales in comparison to using prescription drugs for purposes other than what they are intended.

Kentucky used to be considered the nation’s top marijuana-producing state. That “honor” now belongs to California, where voter approval of the medicinal use of marijuana has led to a surge in both the cultivation and use of pot.

However, Kentucky remains a major marijuana-producing state. Ed Shemelya, head of marijuana eradication for the Office of Drug Control Policy’s Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, said. “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.”

Unlike marijuana farmers in other states, 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 western states have focused on larger fields run by Mexican cartels with immigrant labor.

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, putting demand for domestically grown marijuana at a record high. Growers large and small across the country are trying to fill the void, Keller said.

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.

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, growing marijuana in Kentucky remains risky. Law enforcement officers estimate that only 20 to 40 percent of the growers in the region manage to harvest and collect their payoff without being detected by law enforcement officers assisted by spotters in helicopters. Many times, however, the pot field is destroyed without the grower being arrested or even identified.

Increased enforcement in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia has had the desired effect. The amount of marijuana plants destroyed by police 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.

While there are many in this country who support the legalization of marijuana, that’s an issue for legislators, not law enforcement officers. Whether they agree with the law or not, law enforcement officers are sworn to enforce the law. That means efforts must continue to make pot farming unprofitable by destroying crops.

However, while chopping down marijuana plants, law enforcement officers must not forget that the abuse of prescription drugs is an epidemic in the mountains. Curbing it must be given the highest priority by area law enforcement agencies.