COLUMN ONE : Back Yard Brawl in Drug War : Marijuana has become an important cash crop in impoverished eastern Kentucky. A looming effort to destroy pot fields there parallels the coca battles of the Andes.

Here in the heart of Appalachia, the silence of spring will soon be shattered by the roar of National Guard helicopters. The federal government is taking aim at America’s No. 1 cash crop--marijuana.

In a decade of stern anti-drug rhetoric, figures from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration show that domestic marijuana production has jumped sixfold, tripling in the past three years alone. And perhaps nowhere has the transformation been so striking as in these hills and hollows of eastern Kentucky. This poverty-cursed land, which once drained dollars from moonshine stills, now depends largely on a marijuana economy. The back yard boom here in America has spawned hostility and an unanswered question in Peru and Bolivia: Why is the U.S. government cracking down on coca production in those countries while allowing Americans to grow marijuana with impunity at home? The impending Bush Administration crackdown marks a belated American attempt to set a better example.

But even with a proposed 400% increase in anti-pot spending, the prospects for inroads against American marijuana remain bleak. Even the most optimistic Administration officials say that an all-out, two-year effort might reduce domestic production by a modest 10% at most.

For those who have watched marijuana take control of this impoverished rural region, the obstacles appear even more considerable. Far from being a hippie pastime, marijuana has become a way of life--a garden-path to prosperity in places where residents have little to lose.

With summer fast approaching, the impending clash in the Marijuana Patch looms as a home-grown parallel to the intractable coca struggles of the Andes, as governments search for ways to persuade farmers to abandon crops that are lucrative but illegal.

The Kentucky operation will be costly, as helicopter-borne National Guardsmen slash and burn marijuana crops. But because the crackdown is intended primarily for foreign consumption, the Administration plan is likely to renew an old debate about the wisdom of a war on marijuana, a widely used drug about which the public has long been ambivalent.

“It’s going to cost a lot of money to get a little payoff,” federal drug czar William J. Bennett acknowledged recently. But, he hastened to add: “If we don’t act on our own land, we have no place to stand when we ask others to act on theirs.”

At least 5,000 tons of American marijuana made its way to the U.S. marketplace last year--enough to meet an unprecedented 35% of the domestic demand. Now more potent than dope grown anywhere else in the world--with eight times the kick of 1960s-vintage pot--a single 1-pound plant brings an average $1,200 return.

Those numbers combined last year to push marijuana higher than corn as the nation’s biggest cash crop. Farm-gate receipts for pot-growers currently are estimated at more than $13 billion. At street prices, the domestic industry is even larger, government experts say.

“At minimum, this business is worth $20 billion to $30 billion a year,” says John P. Sutton, chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s cannabis investigations branch.

Kentucky is hardly alone among the states as a major marijuana grower. The top five states--which together produce 90% of American-grown pot--also include Hawaii, California, Tennessee and Missouri.

But it is in eastern Kentucky, frustrated federal anti-drug officials say, that the pot boom most typifies the out-of-control germination that brought the marijuana rage to the nation’s unlikeliest places. And it is in dirt-poor places like Booneville, seat of Appalachia’s most impoverished county, that the potent weed appears to have assumed the most control.

While the mountain terrain is too steep and remote for any exact accounting, the evidence is overwhelming. A full one-third of all the marijuana plants cultivated on U.S. public lands are found in this region’s multi-county Daniel Boone National Forest. And state officials say that even among its pot-rich neighbors, Booneville’s Owsley County stands out in emerald-green at harvest-time when it is viewed from a helicopter.

Informants tell prosecutors that as many as four in 10 residents now grow marijuana for profit. When the crop comes in, the marijuana-growers settle their grocery store debts in C-notes. Field hands who earlier seemed to be unemployed pay cash for new trucks. Even those who do not grow marijuana themselves make clear where their loyalties lie.

“It doesn’t mean we’re bad people,” protests Jody Sizemore, a sixth-generation Owsley County resident. “We’re just poor as Jobe’s turkey.”

“People used to get out and bad-mouth the growers,” said Judge Jimmie W. Herald, a bearded young man with a bowl-haircut who is the newly elected top official in the county of 6,000 persons. “Now, they just stay quiet.”

The reasons for the transformation began outside eastern Kentucky. By focusing its attention on foreign marijuana, the federal government for years provided a de facto subsidy for the home-grown market. Meanwhile, a paraquat herbicide scare tainted Mexican marijuana in the ‘70s, and interdiction halted a Colombian flow in the ‘80s. As a result, domestic growers flourished, producing the marijuana of choice for the nation’s estimated 12-million regular users.

That meant easy cash for anyone willing to take the risk. It was the depths of Appalachia, where a moonshiners’ legacy gave a particular allure to lawlessness, that held the readiest crop of risk-takers.

The rugged terrain proved an ideal camouflage for marijuana, even as it grew to three times a man’s height. And at big-city prices--paid to local brokers by eager Eastern merchants--even a small plot could bring profits of thousands of dollars. “Topography used to be our curse,” said one grower of a particularly potent local variety. “But for Bible Weed, it has been a blessing.”

The result throughout the region was a near-epidemic of pot-growing in communities where earlier it had been hard to find even a marijuana cigarette. “The people we’re finding in the marijuana patches--by education, skills and economic class--are exactly the same kinds of people as we used to arrest at the moonshine stills,” said Michael Murphy, an assistant U.S. attorney who specializes in drug cases in the region.

“People’s out of work, and naturally they got to feed their families,” said Sheriff Edd Jordan, whose Clay County office already is cluttered with marijuana seedlings seized in recent raids. “That’s why they got this stuff coming in.”

If Owsley County has now become home to the most concentrated of the state’s pot-growing, residents and outside experts both say the most important explanation lies in its down-and-out economic status. With a per-capita income of less than one-fourth the national average, the county is devoid of any real industry. Of the 20 coal mines in operation in 1980, only two remain. The average tobacco plot brings in about $2,000 a year. Nearly everyone who works must cross county lines.

“What else are our people going to grow?” asked Charles Beach Jr., vice president of a Beattyville bank that serves much of Owsley County. “Nobody thinks anything more of growing marijuana than when they were stripping tobacco stalks and hauling it to market.”

Over a pork-chop lunch at the Purple Cow restaurant, Food Town grocery store owner Junior Brewer nodded his head in agreement. “A lot of these people just don’t have anything to lose,” he explained.

As in the case of moonshine-making during the 1930s, such Appalachian desperation has bred stubborn resistance in the face of just about every government effort to beat back the Marijuana Patch. While in Northern California the seven-year Campaign Against Marijuana Planting shrank the crop there by about two-thirds, Kentucky and its neighboring states can hardly claim a single success. Every year, machete-wielding lawmen cut down more marijuana; and every year, more of it is grown.

The difference, federal officials contend, is that the old California growers were largely outsiders who fled in the face of government pressure. In eastern Kentucky, the problem is home-grown.

“I don’t know what it’s going to take to get control of it,” said an exasperated Jack Gregory, a Forest Service official who heads up anti-marijuana efforts in the South. “The fact is, the dope growers outnumber the good guys.”

Indeed, when the Kentucky state police and National Guard mounted a joint “whack-and-stack” offensive against Owsley County marijuana early last summer, they found locals so hostile that one storekeeper padlocked his store rather than sell soft drinks to the “brought-ins.”

And when the lawmen pulled into a nearby gas station for a fill-up, they found the pumps suddenly rendered inoperable. By day’s end, the team had to regroup at a makeshift supply depot on safer ground--the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in a neighboring county.

If the government has its way in the new war on marijuana, huge increases in manpower and machinery this summer will make such resistance irrelevant. The Administration proposes to increase anti-pot spending from about $9 million last year and $18 million this summer to more than $36 million beginning Oct. 1. Millions of dollars more in Pentagon assistance already is on its way to the National Guard.

At the same time, the White House is planning a major prosecution effort aimed at interrupting a pattern that has resulted in the destruction of millions of plants, yet permitted most growers to go free and plant again.

But with the initial stage of Kentucky’s operations already under way--and the first of a projected fourfold increase in National Guard air missions slated to begin in less than two weeks--pressure on both sides is such that it is uncertain what the effect of the crackdown might be.

In eastern Kentucky courtrooms, lawyers and judges say, past prosecution efforts have stalled--not because evidence has been lacking but because small-town juries no longer recognize marijuana-growing as a serious crime. Prosecutors strain to recall when last they won a marijuana case, telling instead of countless hung juries even in the face of ironclad evidence. So clannish are these counties that a defendant is inevitably an acquaintance, causing jurors to think twice about judging a neighbor.

“Even in court, the people really do have a lethargic attitude when it comes to marijuana,” said Commonwealth Atty. Thomas K. Hall, whose responsibilities include Owsley County. Adds another embittered prosecutor: “The judge is not going to put his people in jail.”

“Frankly,” said Commonwealth Atty. B. Robert Stivers of Clay County, “it’s almost impossible to get a conviction.”

In frustration, the state now plans to turn to federal courts for help with marijuana-cultivation cases from the most-blighted counties. In that more-removed system, prosecutors have succeeded in winning prison sentences of as much as five years.

But at all levels, officials acknowledge that such a stop-gap solution is unlikely to affect the so-called small-time grower, whose 50 well-tended plants might bring a net income of close to $50,000 a year. In Owsley County, such an entrepreneur still need have little fear of prosecution. A significant reason, officials hint: Marijuana-induced apathy has not stopped at the line of the law.

“You’d have to be a fool not to notice that all these big ‘uns everybody’s talking about, nothing’s ever happened to them,” said Stivers, the county prosecutor. “Hell, yeah, there’s corruption. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

The airborne assaults may bypass courts and sheriffs, but critics remain skeptical that even an all-out air war this summer can finally reverse the marijuana boom. Public opposition to aerial spraying leaves the government with one hand tied.

And already, some growers have sought to blunt the more-rudimentary “machete” offensive, either by planting decoy crops or by scattering their pot plants to ensure that at least some remain unscathed. While authorities contend that the growers’ new caution is a sign that the government is making progress, they acknowledge that the 750,000-acre Daniel Boone Forest still offers plenty of places to hide.

“It’s always been one for the thieves, one for the helicopters, and one for me,” said Harper Corder, a Forest Service special agent.

In a land where guns and mining explosives are commonplace, there are also new signs of resistance of a more-assertive sort. Deadly booby-traps, now rarely seen around marijuana fields elsewhere, tripled in number last year in eastern Kentucky. Marijuana-related murders took three lives in Owsley County. And in these heavily timbered woods, arson is a constant--and often-heard--threat.

At the same time, in counties mistrustful of outside authority and grateful for even illicit riches (“Marijuana?” a grinning car dealer said. “That is the economy.”) there are new indications that the crackdown will face stiff resistance. Some Owsley County residents tell of the 21-year-old who cracked up his brand-new Corvette on a mountain road last month, then walked away untroubled. “It was paid for,” he told onlookers, “And so’s the next one.”

And even when the stories are scornful--the backwoods family that weekly squandered hundreds of dollars in marijuana riches on store-bought potato soup, a pre-prosperity delicacy--there is solidarity in a mountain kinship.

“You might not like what some of your neighbors are doing, but you like the people,” said Sizemore, the lifelong Owsley County resident. “You might wish it to stop, but not so bad that you’d wish anything bad to happen to them.”

“Every time they go out there with those helicopters, that’s a vote for me,” chortled Gatewood Galbraith, a Lexington lawyer who is gambling a dark-horse gubernatorial campaign on a legalize-marijuana platform tailored for eastern Kentucky.

In South America, politicians will be watching as well--but for different reasons. Resentful of an Administration plan to link foreign aid to coca-eradication, Peru and Bolivia have already made clear that they view the marijuana-crackdown as a test of U.S. hypocrisy. “In reality, we have to prove to these countries that we’re serious about our own effort,” said the DEA’s Sutton.

Conversely, with the Administration preparing to dispatch $175 million in assistance to help wean Andean farmers from their illegal coca crops, some wonder whether the parallel ought to be drawn more exactly.

“Marijuana has become a way of survival for some of these folks,” said Richard (Smitty) Taylor, who heads the Drug-Free Kentucky Commission for Gov. Wallace Wilkinson. “If you don’t address the economic system in these places, ultimately, you’re not going to be successful.”