2,200 Federal Agents Deployed to Root Out Pot on U.S. Lands

About 2,200 federal agents spread out across the nation today to uproot marijuana plants hidden in federal lands, and Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III inspected two trucks full of seized crops in Arkansas.

Meese originally had planned to accompany federal agents on a raid in northwestern Arkansas but was diverted by bad weather.

He took a helicopter trip instead to see the illegal substance, then landed at the Harrison, Ark., airport and walked around two pickup trucks containing 2,200 marijuana plants.

Earlier, Justice Department officials denied that Meese’s plan to go on a local raid was a publicity stunt to dramatize the federal government’s drug enforcement effort.

Federal drug agents raided a marijuana-growing operation in Epping, N.H., and U.S. Atty. Richard Wiebusch said the agents, alerted by a blueberry picker, uprooted 113 marijuana plants in a blueberry field.

Asked why he did not join agents, Wiebusch said facetiously, “We have instructions from the Department of Justice that U.S. attorneys are not to participate in raids personally. Edwin Meese put out those instructions so he could violate them.”

In Tennessee, about 30 agents used a state Highway Patrol helicopter to scour the mountainous Great Smoky Mountains National Park for patches of marijuana, and similar operations were conducted in western Tennessee.

At the Ohio attorney general’s office, spokesman Robert Tenenbaum said work on the operation actually began about 2 1/2 weeks ago and “will continue into September.”

Kentucky authorities got a one-day jump on the federal raids with an anonymous telephone tip Sunday afternoon that netted them 10,000 plants under cultivation in a field near Russellville.

Meese had planned to join agents in a remote area of Arkansas to see agents manually uproot and destroy fertile marijuana crops surreptitiously planted by drug dealers.

“This massive coordinated effort signals the resolve of the Reagan Administration to deal effectively with widespread cultivation and sale of marijuana grown within our borders,” Meese said in a statement.

“We are sending a strong message, both to the domestic producers of marijuana and to the source countries outside our borders, that the U.S. government takes very seriously the need to attack the production of this drug.”

Drug Enforcement Administration chief John Lawn, who held a briefing Friday for reporters on the raids code-named “Delta 9,” said 25% of the marijuana consumed in the United States is grown domestically.

He said drug dealers are turning to domestic crops because of the federal government’s successful interdiction of shiploads of marijuana from South America and elsewhere.

Lawn said domestic growers, many using federal lands as their fields, have been known to place booby traps, such as eye-level fish hooks, near the crops to deter intruders. Lawn denied that there would be any danger to the attorney general.

He said authorities hoped to destroy 250,000 marijuana plants over a three-day period and to continue the manual eradication program for the rest of the growing season, which ends in October.