Pot Supply, Demand Dropping, U.S. Reports : Drugs: Law enforcement is driving growers indoors. Claim of reduced demand is disputed as prices soar.

The battle to eliminate marijuana, still America’s most abused drug, is entering a new phase: State and federal drug fighters are scoring major hits against marijuana growers, while, at the same time, both the supply of and demand for pot are dropping, U.S. officials report.

Some marijuana advocates challenge government figures showing reduced demand. But virtually no one disputes that prices are soaring, due in part to stepped-up law enforcement.

Drug Enforcement Administration officials say that the war on marijuana is far from over and cite increasing use of indoor cultivation and other “amazing horticulture.” But they point optimistically to trends of reduced supply and demand, rising prices and victories by law enforcement agencies.

There is “a hardened public attitude toward drugs--a moving away from the casual view toward marijuana that let us slide into the drug acceptance period of the 1970s,” said Stanley E. Morris, the federal drug czar’s deputy director for supply reduction, in an interview Monday.

Because the United States is second only to Mexico in pot production--and produces the highest quality substance--the enforcement successes increase the “credibility of U.S. leadership” in the international drug war, he said.

“The best news is the (increased) number of indoor operations seized in California and Hawaii,” Morris said. He explained that both states are prime areas for growing outdoors and that indoor growing is much more expensive. The fact that growers are being forced indoors shows that law enforcement agencies are “taking the drug business out of the hands of Mom and Pop, casual entrepreneurs.”

“As the little guy gets out, the opportunity to build a hardened public attitude grows,” Morris added. “The more organized grower makes for less sympathetic jury cases. You can really hammer them.”

Mark Kleiman, an expert on narcotics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, sees a dark side to “domestic marijuana production becoming more like a criminal enterprise than a hobby. You’re going to see (more) violence and corruption” as a result, he predicted.

Recent enforcement successes have included major eradication efforts in Hawaii and in Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest and the seizure in the Mohave Valley near Bullhead City, Ariz., of one of the nation’s largest underground pot-growing operations.

Also, the Los Angeles County sheriff, alerted by an abnormally high power bill, uncovered a massive underground growing operation near Lancaster in November. The raid netted 6,000 marijuana plants grown in a high-tech operation in a 7,000-square-foot basement. With four harvests possible, the growers could net an estimated $75 million a year.

Stepped-up enforcement activity along the U.S.-Mexican border over the last year has tripled recent marijuana seizures at official crossing points, officials said. From mid-October through mid-December in 1990, pot seizures at those sites totaled 33,058 pounds versus 9,989 pounds during the same period in 1989.

But those successes took place against a drop in overall marijuana seizures, according to the DEA--from 632,862 kilos in fiscal 1988 to 450,251 in fiscal 1989 to 175,457 in the last fiscal year.

“I don’t think it’s because we’re not doing a good job,” said Steven P. Cummings, deputy chief of DEA’s cannabis investigations section. “Big loads (of pot) are just not coming out of Colombia or Southeast Asia.”

He cited the interruption of “mother ships” from Thailand that unload pot to smaller vessels for delivery to the western United States, including Seattle and San Simeon and San Luis Obispo in California.

The shut-off of foreign sources, including the intensified interdiction efforts along the U.S.-Mexican border, leads to “the void being filled from domestically grown marijuana,” Cummings said in a recent interview.