THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sunday, November 24, 1996

MARIJUANA FARMS ARE FLOURISHING INDOORS, PRODUCING A MORE POTENT DRUG

by Mireya NAVARRO

Miami, Nov. 23 - From the outside, the house looked any other in the inner-city neighborhood - bars on the windows, a palm tree or two, a dog in the yard. But inside, past the kitchen, a sticky, pungent smell led to four rooms where 727 marijuana plants in various stages of maturity thrived. The crop, with an estimated street value of $29 million, was among the best marijuana brown anywhere, the law-enforcement agents who raided the house here one night earlier this month said. Indoor marijuana growers can insure better quality, speed up production and create highly potent strains that threaten to make bed pot a thing of the past. "Gone are the days of the hippies and personal use," said Frank Ledford, a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration here who has handled marijuana cases for the last five years. "Now it's, `I'm investing; I'm here to turn out volume and put out a superior product.''

Potent marijuana, with high level of the plant's primary psychoactive chemical, THC, or delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, has been available for years. But with the expansion of domestic growing since 1980's, and particularly the proliferation of indoor gardens specializing in the seedless bud of a female plant, known as sinsemilla, high-grade marijuana is more available now than ever before in area like South Florida, a national leader in indoor growing along with California, Oregon and Washington. Indoor growers commonly sell only the bud, the THC-rich flowering top of the plant, discarding as garbage the leaves or "shake" commonly used in previous generations, law-enforcement officials say. Marijuana advocates say increased potency has the advantage of getting people high with less, reducing the health hazards associated with smoking. They say potency affects only how fast the high is achieved. But drug treatment counselors say that for those whose marijuana use tips the scale toward problematic behavior, hig

her potency means a faster decline into academic failure, social withdrawal and other problems of having a drug habit. "People used to be able to smoke several joints and be somewhat functional," said Jackie Rose, program director at Spectrum Program, a 27-year-old agency dealing in substance abuse treatment, with 17 locations in Florida. "Today you can roll a joint, share it between many people and get really plastered." Studies of marijuana seized by law-enforcement officers show that the average THC level of most ordinary marijuana is about 3 percent, the National Institute on Drug Abuse says, Sinsemilla has a higher THC concentration, about 7 percent on the average, and indoor growing can bring it up into double digits, the agency says. In Florida, Drug Enforcement Administration agents say it is not unusual now for indoor marijuana seized in raids to test at THC levels of 12 to 14 percent, compared with 6 percent five years ago. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, however, calls

these "boutique strains" that are expensive and are not accessible to the average user. "Whoever is growing that would be in the absolute top tier of growers," said Allen St. Pierre, the organization's deputy director. "I'm exposed to marijuana at a fairly high rate, and I've been exposed to marijuana that's double digits twice, once in California and once in the Netherlands." But Mr. St. Pierre and others agree that sinsemilla strains are more prevalent in the market. And in places like Dade County, Miami's metropolitan area, they grow mostly behind the placid facade of suburbia, inside tented apartments and rented houses, in affluent and poor neighborhood alike - dwellings that often have been stripped of interior walls to build hydroponic, or soilless, gardens that turn out crops every 15 weeks. In the latest raid, Dade County police on Friday seized more than 1,500 plants from two houses in a rural area in the southern part of the county. In Liberty City, an area the police say is better known for street

-level crack sales, the grower in the house raided earlier in the month had invested no more than $4,000 in renting the house and installing a hydroponic system equipped with timers, and he had not taken out the walls. Requiring little supervision, the system kept the risk of detection at a minimum and production at a steady clip, State and Federal agents said. The man arrested that night, a 52 year-old self-described mechanic who spoke no English, said he had rented the house for $200 a month from a friend and had not known that the plants were marijuana. The man was charged with possession and cultivation of marijuana, trafficking and possession of a firearm. Of this friend, he said, "I don't know who he is and I don't know his name." Indoors and with the right equipment, anyone can grow marijuana easily and profitably. Law-enforcement officials say growers can buy supplies at legitimate stores and get expert advice from magazines and publications on the Internet. At a residential drug treatment center for

adolescents near here, in fact, many teen-agers said they bought directly from friends who grew their own. Residents at the Starting Place in Hollywood, north of here, described marijuana highs that made them talkative or giddy for a short while, as expected, but also highs that lasted two hours or longer and made them intensely sleepy and hallucinatory. A 13 year-old boy who said he smoked "hydroponics," the marijuana grown in indoor hydroponic gardens, from a friend's attic said that once "I was so tired and sleepy I crashed my bike into a wall." Inside the raided house in Liberty City, four air-conditioned, brightly lighted rooms contained a green-house that included mother plants, trays of clones growing in green rock wool boxes and crop of plants just starting to bud. Windows had been sealed with insulated wallboard, and walls were covered with reflective paper to make the light in the room more intensive. Light, water and carbon dioxide piped in through plastic tubing were on timers. "Very good," said

William D. Lang Jr., a special agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, inspecting the crop. "Not clean but very good." Although market statistics are hard to come by because of the illegal nature of the marijuana business, the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws estimates that domestic marijuana accounts for about a quarter of the marijuana consumed in the United States, with the rest coming from Mexico and other countries. Federal officials say the number of seizures every year indicates that indoor domestic production is growing. The trend toward increased domestic production and THC potency, they say, is primarily the result of law enforcement, mainly eradication efforts focusing on outdoor cultivation and the interdiction of import from abroad. In Florida, state officials say, outdoor growers seeking to avoid detection mixed marijuana plants with legitimate crops, hung them from trees and even used floating platforms placed in swamps, before many of them moved their operati

ons indoors in the late 1980's, although most marijuana in this country is still grown outdoors. Now, instead of aerial surveillance, law-enforcement authorities rely on utility bills - indoor growing inflates the light bill - and tips from neighbors to find the crops, if not always the grower. Although marijuana is still growing outdoors in the Panhandle area of the State, law-enforcement officials said indoor growing had greatly increased over the last five years. The number of drug seizures from indoor sites since 1991 has averaged 150 to 250 each year, compared with 45 in 1990. A similar pattern is showing up nationwide - law-enforcement authorities seized 3,348 indoor operations in 1995, compared with 1,669 in 1990, figures from the Drug Enforcement Administration show. In March, in one of the largest indoor raids ever in the United States, Federal agents seized 11,000 sinsemilla plants from a Miami house property, a site that agents said produced $38 million a year. But because indoor growers face Fede

ral mandatory minimum sentences and forfeiture of assets if caught, they tend to grow less but better - the manicured indoor-grown bud sells for $3,000 to $6,000 a pond compared with $200 to $1,000 for other kinds, depending on the market, Federal officials say. Neighbors in the upper-middle-class community in northeastern Miami where the 11,000 plants were found said they were shocked. Most said they had not known the occupants of the massive two-story house surrounded by a high concrete wall but they had never suspected pot growers. "You never know who your neighbors are or what they do," said Laurie Kaddaby, 35, a neighbor with two children who now call the house "the marijuana house." "It's amazing what this world has come to." "It's obscene," said another neighbor, a man who did not want to be identified. "It's hard to believe all that was going on across the street." "I remember feeling absolutely stupid," his wife said.