High-Tech Pot War : Authorities Consider Using Infrared Scanners to Focus on Marijuana Farms

California’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) wants to go high tech this year in the ongoing war against the state’s pot growers.

Officials of CAMP--a federal, state and local law enforcement project aimed at eradicating pot gardens in California--are considering use of spy-in-the-sky infrared devices to spot marijuana farms in remote, rugged areas.

CAMP officials, while boasting of the effectiveness of their program in cutting back domestic marijuana production over the last five years, say they need increasingly sophisticated technology to outwit growers who become more wily each season in avoiding detection.

Latitude in the Air

“We’re really seriously considering (infrared devices) for use on public lands,” said Jack Beecham, commander of the CAMP program. “And, of course, if there’s an opportunity where we can get a warrant on private lands, we’ll use it there, too.”

Police have greater legal latitude for air surveillance over publicly owned land than they do for private property.

Not surprisingly, the idea of using infrared surveillance devices in the forests and mountains has not been greeted by universal acclaim.

“It seems kind of contradictory for people who are going out on a camping trip to be subjected to that kind of surveillance,” said Alan Schlosser, staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

“It opens up a serious public policy question,” he continued, “of whether what they’re looking for is of such great concern that we should open the skies for surveillance.”

Infrared devices are commonly used by many police agencies for various types of surveillance and searches. Use of the devices to locate marijuana gardens has long been rumored, especially among growers, but there has been little evidence of such activity. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which takes part in CAMP, acknowledges using infrared devices to spot cocaine labs in the jungles of Latin America, but DEA officials insist that efforts in 1983 to draw an infrared map of California’s marijuana plantations from a high-flying U-2 spy plane were unsuccessful.

Still, visions of a high-tech pot war apparently are as hard to kill as the illegal weed itself, and CAMP officials recently have been coveting a newly developed quiet-flying surveillance plane built by Schweizer Aircraft Corp. that sells for $350,000 and that can be equipped with $1 million worth of highly sophisticated infrared viewing and recording equipment made by Hughes Aircraft Co.

Salesmen for Schweizer and Hughes told CAMP officials that the slender, wide-winged, gray plane could pass overhead unnoticed at 2,000 feet while taking infrared videotape of marijuana-growing equipment such as waterlines in the wilderness.

Probably a more realistic idea, however--considering that CAMP’s total budget this year is $2.5 million--involves leasing a less sophisticated and far less costly infrared unit built by FLIR Systems Inc. and owned by the Horizon Helicopters company in the Sacramento area.

Sgt. Ron Chaplin of the Butte County Sheriff’s Department says he used the FLIR Systems infrared device in a helicopter last summer in successful experiments to find heavily camouflaged marijuana gardens in a remote area. He plans to use the device for marijuana garden surveillance this season. CAMP officials have conferred with Chaplin and with Horizon Helicopter personnel and also are considering using the FLIR Systems device on a lease basis.

An infrared surveillance device works by detecting differences in heat waves emanating from objects in a targeted area. Heat waves from the objects draw a television-like image on a monitoring screen.

The devices under consideration by CAMP may not be sensitive enough to register the difference in heat put out by a marijuana plant and a manzanita bush, but can register the difference in heat emanating from, say, an irrigation line and surrounding earth and shrubbery.

Limited Usefulness

The devices, says Chaplin, are not effective for searching wide areas of the countryside for marijuana because the process is too time consuming, but the instruments can be used, he says, to follow up a tip that there’s a camouflaged garden over in Hell Town Canyon, for example, or a suspicion that somebody is growing pot in French Creek Basin.

When a wilderness area in which a garden is suspected is scanned on an infrared screen, says Chaplin, a trained operator can spot irrigation lines or other man-made articles.

“We’re not looking for the marijuana,” said Chaplin. “What we’re looking for are man-made objects.”

The most telltale such objects, say officials, are waterlines necessary to irrigate marijuana gardens in the wilderness. Growers in remote areas frequently install and camouflage large plastic backyard pools on hillsides, pump water into the pools from nearby creeks and then run irrigation lines to small hidden marijuana gardens. The camouflage gets better every year, officials say.

If an irrigation system is spotted in the mountains with an infrared device, said J. P. Johnston, litigation coordinator for CAMP, “Someone is irrigating a crop--and what other crop is there going to be up there?”

“If we can see a half-inch water line . . . look out,” Charles A. Stowell, a DEA special agent and member of CAMP, said. “I will throw some people in jail.”

A highly effective infrared surveillance program, said Stowell, would virtually force the growers out of the wilderness.

“For the CAMP program, it would be outstanding, because they would just about have to go indoors.”

CAMP is already driving growers indoors even without infrared devices, says Gordon Brownell, an attorney and board member of the National Organization for Reformation of Marijuana Laws. And the hothouse pot farmers, he says, are known to be harvesting two to three crops a year inside instead of one outside. Even so, Brownell acknowledges that the CAMP program has severely cut total California marijuana production.

To that extent, CAMP has been successful, but Brownell maintains that the higher prices for a scarcer commodity make growers willing to take the risk.