(Ed. note: This is bizarre, as a waste of scarce resources, the militarization of law enforcement, and a grudging concession on the part of narcs.)

AN AERIAL WAR ON POT GROWERS

Drugs: it’s harvest time, and the helicopters are flying in Humboldt County, state hub of marijuana growing.

Garberville, Humboldt County-Tom Samuels, a short, wiry 47-year-old pot grower with squinting eyes and a grizzled beard, was not completely at ease as he left his isolated two story cabin parcel to show his letter to the sheriff’s deputies.

Now half a dozen officers dressed in camouflage and flak vests had cut the lock on his gate and were in his garden sizing up his summer’s effort. Mutely, Samuels handed over a folded letter.

"It’s another 215," said sheriff’s Sgt. Wayne Hansen to his boss, Lt. Steve Cobine. The letter was from Samuels’ doctor, and - citing the recent passage of Proposition 215, the Medical Marijuana Initiative - it prescribed the use of up to 3 pounds of pot per year for his chronic neck and back pain caused by spinal arthritis.

Samuels told the deputies he had 30 pot plants growing in the ravine (deputies found a total of 81 on his property). But since they were growing in the shade, he said, they’d probably produce only a couple of ounces each, instead of the 2 pounds per plant from pot grown in the sun.

"OK,"said the sergeant, shrugging, "we won’t arrest you, and we’ll leave you 10 plants for your arthritis." "Right," said the lieutenant, "but this isn’t going to be like picking the Christmas tree. You get the first 10 in the row, and we cut the rest."

Samuels, looking pretty glum but moving with greater dexterity than some of the middle-aged deputies, led the way down the steep slope to his concealed plants, all of them rooted in 5-gallon black buckets, protected by chicken wire and strung along the ravine like a trap line. "This 215 thing is evolving," said Cobine. "Right now the district attorney’s policy is that if they got the 215 letter, we let them keep 10."

It’s late summer, and it’s the pot-raiding season in Humboldt County, an endeavor fueled for the past dozen years by the state’s CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) grants. This year the county received $250,000 to pay for a dozen officers and two helicopters for eight weeks.

"We don’t want to go back to the early ‘80s when people out here were growing it like corn," Cobine said. These days, Samuels’ garden is pretty typical of the outdoor grows the deputies are finding.

Viewed from the helicopter, every ridge, every ravine, every meadow, has a cabin, trailer or owner-built home, all off the grid, with electricity supplied by generator, most with outdoor plumbing and water from a spring.

"At night, with all the generators humming, it sounds like a giant insect," Hansen says. Although the hills have been heavily logged, there’s still enough forest left to conceal plenty of pot. The bigger grows(sic) of several hundred plants feature fancy drip-irrigation systems, with electric water pumps and timers.

A dew days before the raid on Samuels’ place, deputies had discovered a hanging garden, plants in pots suspended in the trees. Other cautious growers, when they hear the whop-whop of a helicopter in the neighborhood, load the 5-gallon buckets containing the plants onto flatbed trucks and drive them to safer locations deeper in the forest.

But most grows are like Samuels’, the water coming to the garden through gravity-fed pipe, the plants wrapped in wire to keep the deer out, and a half-empty fertilizer bag under a nearby tree. "So you could see the plants from the air," says the chagrined Samuels.

Howard Lewis is one of the helicopter pilots and pot spotters. "Between 11 and 2, with the sun high, the pot really stands out," Lewis says. A Los Angeles firefighter and National Guard Reservist on two-week active duty, Lewis was coordinating the ground teams, while contract pilot Mark Gunsaul handled the tricky business of lowering two officers dangling from cables onto the almost inaccessible hillsides.

STABO (short-term airborne operations) is a new wrinkle. In years past, helicopters have been limited to lowering nets into remote gardens to hoist up plants. This year, operating from an "LZ," which means any flat ground in the vicinity, the JetRanger lifts two officers at the ends of 100-foot steel cables, flies them to the suspected pot patch at 80 mph, then lowers them onto the hillside.

"It’s a lot more pressure," says Gunsaul. "The guys on the cable have no control. If anything happens, it’s my fault."

Turbulence, downdrafts and tricky winds in the canyons don’t make it any easier, he says.

The head of the Marijuana Eradication Team is Sgt. Steve Knight, a lanky veteran deputy who grew up in Orange before attending Humboldt State University in Arcata. "The raids have driven a lot of the pot growers indoors," Knight says.

On June 23, Knight’s team, acting on a tip, made the biggest indoor pot bust in state history, knocking over a grow room containing 12,000 plants.

The previous record for an indoor grow was 8,000

"The two owners (warrants are out for their arrest) were pretty ingenious," Knight says. The grow room looked like a regular two-store house. It even had children’s toys, a swing set and trampoline in the front yard, and flower pots in the window (although the flowers turned out to be plastic).

Behind the chintz curtains, however, were plywood panels, and the interior had been gutted to make room for rows of growing trays under 250 grow lights.

Rondoni says that while he carries no brief for pot growers, the raids have been a failure and a waste of money. Because of budget constraints, there is no basic law enforcement in much of the county, no 911 service, no resident deputies, Rondoni says. "Instead we have these guys dressed like John Wayne running roughshod over local residents." And, he adds, if anything goes wrong with the team’s helicopter operations, the county would be held liable. "It’s a nosebleed waiting to happen."

Up on Duty Ridge, the deputies have finished piling the cut pot stalks from Samuels’ garden into the back of a pickup, and the pungent weed perfumes the afternoon air.