appalachian mtn growers/tokers unite!!!!! tn/nc/ky/wv

[George Hayduke]

hey guys I did a search and found nothing for us!!!

now where are all my good ol’ country appalachian mountain tokers/growers/folk at???

the west coast is always talking about their weed… but little do they know some of the best in the world is grown right here in these ranges!!!

its time to unite!!!!

 

[mysticls]

i've seen the weed in tn and it sucks!!!!

 

[clorox]

green mountains checkin in

edit: just saw this was for the southern tier

does it still count if ive hiked through your country and found it beautiful several times?

 

[George Hayduke]

Everyones welcome as long as ya' enjoy the mountain range. hell i should of made it for the whole range and i to have hiked many parts of the range.... green mtn?? what is that vermont??

i've seen the weed in tn and it sucks!!!!

What part of Tennessee, sir? You know the state is over 440 miles long! and we are just talking about one specific region??? that is very rural.. the state is even often times broken up into three regions. east, middle, and west tennessee. so now how can you make such a blanket statement?? i've spent alot of time in the mountains around tennesse and north carolina and have seen some of the best bud in the world coming from this area. this area isnt known as the growers belt for nothin...
and around here not only do we smoke some of the best bud but we also got some damn good moonshine.

 

[Pinball Wizard]

Flatlander here...but watching how y'all do things. I might learn something. Enjoy....

Damn chopper flyovers is my biggest problem.

 

[Wildfire]

there's plenty more appalachia than whats listed! gotta check in for this one, its a beautiful place to visit and grow. just remember leave to leave the land in the same shape you found it in to keep it beautiful!

jlp's pheonix haze:


tres dawg:


purple urkle:

 

[aldus_]

Not from the Appalachian part of KY, but I love smoking the stuff we get from there. A+

 

[Guest]

Checkin in from a little west of the mid-Appalachia region. Such a beautiful place to live and some of the best conditions in North America to grow some bud. I have smoked some killer bud from this region that beats out most elites I have tried.

 

[George Hayduke]

ive got a few articles ive kept over the years on marijuana production in the appalachian mtns. that i can post later. little do people know outside of kentucky and this area... but ALOT of pot is grown around here and its made media headlines over the years. kentucky is second to california in marijuana prodcution, and from what ive found... alot of it is also high grade grade like cali. some of these counties in kentucky are among the poorest in the nation and it seems alot of these families up here have moved from moonshine (although still around!) to growing high grade cannabis. heh, both are vices of mine.

 

[George Hayduke]

Kentucky goes after 'Marijuana Belt' growers

By Chris Kenning, The (Louisville) Courier-Journal
BARBOURVILLE, Ky. — Deep in the Appalachian woods near the Knox-Bell County line, Kentucky State Police Trooper Dewayne Holden's Humvee belched smoke and roared as it struggled up what once was an old logging trail.
As his three-truck convoy stopped at a clearing atop a 3,000-foot ridge, Holden grabbed a machete and joined eight other armed troopers and National Guard members, hiking toward a hill under some power lines.

Keeping an eye out for nail pits, pipe bombs and poison-snake booby traps, they found fresh ATV tracks.

The pot growers had beaten them to the prize: Gone were the 40 to 50 marijuana plants worth as much as $100,000 that Holden spotted from a helicopter more than a week earlier. Only six spindly plants were left.

"Well, that's six they won't get," he says, shrugging and pulling them out of the dirt. "Sometimes they just get here before we do."

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Police | Kentucky | Louisville | DEA | Courier | Marijuana | Holden | Matt Stone | HIDTA
Welcome to the battle police and marijuana growers wage each fall in Kentucky's remote Appalachian counties, where 75% of the state's top cash crop is grown.

According to officials at the Office of National Drug Policy's Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program (HIDTA), Kentucky produces more marijuana than any other state except California, making it home to one of the nation's more intensive eradication efforts — a yearly game of harvest-time cat and mouse in national forests, abandoned farms, shady hollows, backyards and mountainsides.

"We're essentially in a race with the grower to get it before he does," says state police Lt. Ed Shemelya, head of the eradication unit. This time of year, "it's not uncommon for us to be on one side of a hill eradicating, and on the other a grower is harvesting."

More than 100 state police, guard members, DEA agents, U.S. Forest Service spotters and others are part of a strike force based in London, Ky., that works dawn to dark, sometimes roping into remote patches from Blackhawk helicopters.

With a budget of $1.5.million and help from a $6.million federal anti-drug effort in the region, last year the state seized 557,628 marijuana plants worth an estimated $1.billion.

Authorities say their efforts keep drugs off the streets and illicit profits out of criminal hands. But critics call it a waste of time and money that has failed to curb availability or demand.

"Trying to eradicate marijuana is like taking a teaspoon and saying you're going to empty the Atlantic Ocean," says Gary Potter, an Eastern Kentucky University professor of criminal justice who has researched the issue for decades.

Traps and tradition

On a rainy morning at the Civil Air Patrol airfield just outside London, National Guard pilots, DEA agents and state police sip coffee and await their morning briefing.

On the wall hangs a T-shirt reading, "Welcome to the Jungle: Kentucky Eradication 2007," a marker of how big the pot business has become since taking root in the area in the 1970s.

A typical day will involve hitting 15 to 20 marijuana plots — most spotted by Holden or another pilot in a helicopter. They have learned to spot the tell-tale earthen trails and bluish-green of pot patches. They mark the GPS coordinates, then guide in ground forces to cut and burn the crop.

A display case in the squat concrete building where they've gathered is a reminder of the booby traps they might face: Pipe bombs with trip wires, fishing hooks strung face-high across trails, sharpened bamboo sticks, ankle-crushing bear traps; and boards pounded through with three-inch nails that are laid on the ground and covered with leaves.

"Some growers will take a poisonous snake and with monofilament wire, tie it to the plot," Shemelya says, leaving police to find "one (very mad) pissed-off copperhead."

The traps are meant mainly for thieves. Most growers found on the sites, even armed ones, flee when police arrive. Still, the booby-traps are a hazard. A few years ago, three growers blew themselves up rigging a pipe bomb. One of Shemelya's men has had his face sliced with hooks, and another was injured after stepping into a "spike pit," he says.

This morning, rain and a mechanical problem prompt the team to head out without the chopper — although they know it'll be easy to walk right past a giant pot patch amid the thick curtains of Appalachian forest.

The remote and rugged terrain, including the 700,000 acres of the Daniel Boone National Forest, is a pot-grower's paradise — its perfect soil and climate give it a key place in America's "Marijuana Belt."

But the reasons go beyond the landscape.

Many of the small towns of Eastern Kentucky, steeped in a tradition of bootlegging moonshine, also have high rates of unemployment and poverty and in some cases, public corruption, according to federal drug officials. People can make as much as $2,000 from a single plant, an often irresistible draw when good-paying jobs are scarce. Much of what is harvested is carried in car trunks to such cities as Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit, authorities say.

The estimated worth of seized plants alone far outstrips Kentucky's other crops. Federal statistics from the Department of Agriculture for 2005 show state receipts for tobacco were $342 million and corn was $336 million, compared with close to $1 billion of pot eradicated last year by HIDTA.

Over time, growing pot has become an "accepted and even encouraged" part of the culture in Appalachia, according to a 2006 report from the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Still, authorities complain that in some counties it is difficult to get a jury to indict, much less convict, a marijuana grower.

"In one county, we had 45 minutes of surveillance video of a man cultivating. We couldn't even get beyond a grand jury. What better evidence can you have?" Shemelya says.

Holden says that unless a patch he cuts down is huge or contains traceable evidence, he rarely goes knocking at nearby homes in hopes of ferreting out the grower. Everyone knows who it is, he says, but no one tells.

"It's very engrained in the culture," he says.

Dispute over success

At one edge of London's tiny downtown is a bank building with reflective windows. It's not listed on the directory, but upstairs, behind a security door, is the carpeted office of Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA.

The 68 counties in Eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee and western West Virginia that make up the area have less than 1% of the country's population, according to Census and National Drug Intelligence Center data, but HITDA figures indicate the region contained roughly 10% of the marijuana eradicated nationwide in 2006.

Director C. Frank Rapier, speaking in a loping Eastern Kentucky accent, ticks off the success of marijuana eradication — known as "whack and stack" to the locals.

With the help of HIDTA money of $6 million, which covers three states, drug agents destroyed more than a half-million plants last year in Kentucky alone and netted 512 arrests. So far this year, the anti-drug effort has snagged 365,000 plants from more than 3,000 plots in Kentucky, Rapier says.

Since eradication started in the 1990s, Rapier says, the national forests are a little safer for visitors. There's less marijuana, which he believes is a gateway to harder drugs. And last year an estimated $1 billion worth of profits were kept out of Kentucky.

This year, drought has done some of the strike force's work: The total number of plants destroyed and their street value will be down significantly because dry conditions withered many plants, according to Rapier and Shemelya.

But overall, Rapier says, the team's work has resulted in the average plot size declining from 300-400 plants to less than 80. And he says the Mexican drug gangs that control much of the marijuana growing in California have stayed away.

"It's been very successful," he says.

Potter, who has done field research that has put him in touch with many current and former growers, has a different view.

"Simply cutting down and burning plants does no good at all," he says, adding that growers are just planting more in scattered plots, often under netting or shaded areas.

They also shore up profits by boosting levels of THC, or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol — the chemical that causes a high — to 15% today from 3% in the 1970s to 15% today.

Potter also argues that eradication programs often exaggerate the street value of the plants they pull up as a way to justify their existence.

"There's more marijuana, better marijuana, more people smoking and more profits to growers and dealers than ever before," he says. "I don't care what KSP and DEA says, by the mid-1990s the war on drugs was over, and the traffickers won."

Last year's National Survey on Drug Use and Health showed that about 40% of Americans age 12 or older have tried marijuana at least once. Nearly 11% say they used it within the past year.

Criminal justice professor Potter, who lives and teaches in Richmond, says he also believes that more powerful dope and greater police pressure has raised the stakes, and the danger.

"Last summer, I was out in the rural part of the county bumming around with my Jack Russell," he says. "I ran into three guys who were heavily armed. One said, 'You really don't want to be here.' Twenty years ago, they would've offered you a joint — now they're chasing you away with rifles."

Allen St. Pierre — director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws based in Washington, D.C. — agreed with Potter that eradication efforts aren't as effective as authorities say.

Efforts in all 50 states haven't kept marijuana production from increasing tenfold in the past 25 years to 22 million pounds in 2006, according to federal estimates compiled by a researcher from St. Pierre's organization, using statistics from the U.S. Justice Department and other agencies. St. Pierre's group also argues that pot isn't as dangerous as officials contend.

Because production numbers generally are based on eradication figures, it's impossible to know for sure what kind of dent police efforts are making. Shemelya says he thinks they get close to half of what's grown. Potter says it's probably far less.

"There's an old saying," Trooper Holden says. "You plant a third for the law, a third for the thieves and a third for yourself."

This year, federal prosecutors are jettisoning their usual 100-plant threshold — used as a guideline to bring federal cultivation charges — and enacting a "zero-tolerance" policy for violations on federal land, Rapier says.

The idea is to push more growers onto private land, which can be seized.

Shemelya says he believes that marijuana would be on every hillside in Eastern Kentucky if his unit didn't keep it in check.

"You're never going to stop people from growing marijuana," he says. "But the idea is to make it so dad-gummed hard to grow they go to Tennessee or somewhere else."

 

[Wildfire]

the appalachian region is also a very easy place to grow on non-drought years. especially in the southern part where sativas are easier to cultivate as they tend to be more mold resistant than indicas.

 

[George Hayduke]

the appalachian region is also a very easy place to grow on non-drought years.

i did not grow this season but i imagine this year has been extra hard on growers around here because of the drought. where i live we are experiencing the highest levels of an extreme drought. its really been ****ing awful.

 

[Wildfire]

yeah george, i actually had my worst year to date this summer. it was a damn shame too, had some great stuff going. got hit by the drought, got hit by rippers, got hit by construction, just horrible in every way imaginable.

i still managed to make some seeds and a couple zips though so it wasnt a complete failure. next year will be the come-back, lol.

where are the other pics?

 

[George Hayduke]

despite the drought it still looked like some very nice bud. i'm sure you're enjoying it.
man, that sucks construction got to your plants. that crap is going on all over the place around here. they can't build fast enough or something i swear.

man ive been trying for about the last 30 minutes to get some pictures of this nice outdoor indica dom. strain i picked up from kentucky and i haven't been able to get the pictures to load from my camera to the computer. i'll keep trying later.

 

[George Hayduke]

Drought Takes Toll on Marijuana Crop
In Kentucky and Environs, Drought Is Taking Its Toll on the Marijuana Crop
By ROGER ALFORD
The Associated Press
FRANKFORT, Ky.


Sheriff Garrett Roberts hasn't needed a machete to cut any of the scrawny marijuana plants he has confiscated this year.

A severe drought that has parched corn and soybean fields across the Southeast has also scorched marijuana crops, leaving plants that should be 10 feet tall so puny that Roberts and his deputies simply pull them up.

"The plants we've seen have been anywhere from 2 inches to 5 1/2 feet tall," said Roberts, the chief law enforcer in eastern Kentucky's Lawrence County.

Kentucky, one of the nation's top producers of marijuana, has seen a sharp decrease in production of the illegal crop this year. The weather there and in neighboring states is cutting into the supply, and street prices for the drug could rise, authorities say.

Kentucky state police confiscated nearly 190,000 fewer plants between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31 than they did in the same period last year, and the ones they have collected yielded only about half the usual amount of the buds that growers sell as intoxicants.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration ranked Kentucky second last year behind California in the number of plants eradicated. Kentucky state police reported 488,502 plants, nearly $1 billion worth, confiscated between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31 last year. Over the same period this year, troopers have found and cut 299,220 plants.

"I've walked into quite a few plots where the plants are just shriveled up and dead," said state police Lt. Ed Shemelya, head of Kentucky's marijuana-eradication program.

The dry weather has forced many growers to haul water to their marijuana plots, putting themselves at greater risk of being caught, Shemelya said. So far, he said, more than 100 growers have been arrested this year.

"The weather has been our friend and the growers' worst nightmare this year," Shemelya said.

DEA agent Tony King, who heads the Louisville field office, said the weather has sharply cut into the region's street-level marijuana supplies.

"The information received from our confidential sources is that it's scarce," King said. "They're looking for quality marijuana, and there's none to be found right now."

Marijuana sells for $100 to $500 an ounce on the streets, but King said he expects the price to increase.

"It's the old supply and demand rule," King said. "If there's no supply and the demand stays strong, the price is going to go up."

 

[George Hayduke]

i found this video... there is also an article with it too..

The Kentucky State Police Cannabis Suppression unit investigates a patch of marijuana plants in eastern Kentucky

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070930/VIDEO01/70921002

they think they've found 100,000 in crop. when they get there only 6 plants are left. some of the video makes growers look real bad because they talk about traps growers have set up.

 

[George Hayduke]

this article is actually really good. talks to a man who's lived in kentucky his whole life and grows marijuana to support his family.
____________________________
The New Bootleggers

In Kentucky, the hills are alive with the sound of helicopter gunships and the smell of burning weed. But how long can the Feds wage war against dirt-poor farmers with nothing left to lose?

Maxim, Oct 2002
By By Christopher Ketcham


The attack choppers skim the trees, cutting through the July heat on another search-and-destroy mission. It looks like a scene from Apocalypse Now, but it’s just another summer morning in the steamy backwoods of eastern Kentucky, where cannabis is the cash crop that makes any legitimate local commerce look like chump change. The lonely dirt roads are patrolled by armed soldiers, National Guardsmen in Humvees, ready to fan out over the countryside to slash and burn incredibly lucrative patches of Kentucky pot and shoot the shit out of anybody who gives them a hard time for it.

“Boogieman,” a hillbilly horticulturalist with pot patches in this particular hollow, hears the thunder in the distance long before the attack. He drops his hoe, carefully places his beer in the underbrush, and throws his fist into the air. “You futhermuckers!” he yells, disappearing into the foliage. “Leave us growers the hell alone!”

Such is the fuzzy relationship between local marijuana farmers and a federal government hellbent on torching the cash crop that keeps them just above the poverty line. Year after year the government’s marijuana war grinds on in the endlessly replanted Appalachian pot fields that mainline into America’s biggest illicit drug market. As for who’s winning—or whether it’s even worth the fight—you may want to take this singular fact into consideration. The startling truth is that pot is now America’s number one cash crop, with total annual sales of $32 billion. Anybody else got the munchies?

The War: Us vs. U.S.
About 40 percent of the nation’s dope comes from the hills of Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, where the humid summers and lush hilltops produce enough pot to keep a huge portion of the country with its collective head in a bag of Doritos. Of these three states, Kentucky is the cannabis king. State officials report that in the past decade they’ve destroyed close to $11 billion worth of pot. But despite the kick-ass combat machinery and the 500 burn missions they fly each summer, the war hasn’t done much to the marijuana market—except drive up prices.

But that’s typical of what passes for the smell of victory around here. This being a war, everybody wants a piece of the action and a share of the credit. DEA, FBI, IRS, U.S. Marshals Service—all have agents in this jungle. Cost to the taxpayers? Try six million bucks each year.

Our bud-growing buddy Boogieman, 41, has raised eight kids with the money he’s made tilling weed. Cannabis feeds families and keeps whole counties from financial doom. Cultivating that crop right under the nose of the law is embraced as the natural evolution of the bootlegger tradition of their grandpappies. In Clay County, everyone from middle-aged housewives to youth gangs grows weed. “Ninety percent of the people around here has growed it at one time or another,” Boogieman tells me, standing by one of his many patches.

The futility of waging war against a local way of life has pitted police against friends and family, sometimes resulting in sheriffs switching sides as a matter of loyalty—or opportunity. Dope money has sparked corruption scandals and the convictions of at least a half-dozen sheriffs and deputies in doper bribery rackets over the past 10 years. In Breathitt County, just northeast of Clay, Sheriff Ray Clemons was busted for covering up a dope-growing and -distribution ring that included his own daughter, and Sheriff’s Deputy Berry Shouse Jr. was locked up with another deputy for distributing low-grade Mexican weed mixed with superpotent Kentucky green.

And it gets worse. Just last April, during a campaign in Pulaski County, incumbent sheriff Sam Catron was assassinated, allegedly under the orders of the opposing candidate, one of his own former deputies, named Jeff Morris. The deputy’s confessed co-conspirators included “Fingers” White, an accused big-time dope grower looking for protection and willing to pay. Together they allegedly offered local badass Danny Shelley a deputy’s position if he’d bump off Catron. On April 13, the sheriff was stumping at a festive fish-fry when a single shot blew out his brains from the tree line, 100 yards away. Shelley was caught instantly, and within minutes he was flipping on his hillbilly henchmen. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for all three.

The heat brought to bear against an impoverished population with few economic options has led in some cases to criminal organization—and violence. The occasional “hillbilly crime family” has cropped up to protect its investments. Most famous among them was the so-called “Cornbread Mafia” of the 1980s. This outfit was considered the largest domestic dope cartel in the history of the United States. The Cornbread kids got their name by hiding pot plants in corn rows on dozens of farms in Kentucky and the Midwest. They functioned like a cooperative, with affiliated growers sharing equipment, field workers, and muscle.

When authorities caught up with the group in the late ’80s, more than 180 tons of marijuana were seized and 73 Cornbread “family” operatives were arrested in nine states. At least 54 of them—friends, neighbors, sons, and brothers—hailed from Marion County, Kentucky. During his trial, John Robert Boone, one of the grass godfathers, explained to the court: “We were working with our hands on the earth God gave us.” The judge was not impressed, and Boone was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

But organized crime is the exception. The majority of “holler dopers” are lone wolves who grow pot in their own patches, or “hollers,” and sell it to distributors. “Mostly, it’s every man for himself,” says attorney Hunter Payne, who represents dozens of dopers in Kentucky courts.

Boogieman is far from a crime lord. “I’m in it because it puts food in my children’s mouths,” he says over a shared joint. He hides his patches on state-owned mountainsides or abandoned coal land. Small farmers plant on public land because if they get busted growing on their own property, the government can seize it. Not surprisingly, more than 200,000 plants are destroyed each year in the dense Daniel Boone National Forest alone. Boogieman says he loses more than 50 percent of his crop to marauding guardsmen each year. What he does harvest—20 to 30 pounds a season—he sells for $3,000 a pound to a local broker, a guy with cousins in urban markets. The broker drives it north to Cincinnati and Detroit, or south to Chattanooga and Atlanta, or east to Washington and New York, where it trickles down to the streets, retailed by dealers who couldn’t find Kentucky on a map.

Smoking ’Em Out
State Police Sergeant Ronnie Ray is one of the main guys the government sends to scare the shit out of all the Kentucky Boogiemen. He’s in charge of eradication for the Governor’s Marijuana Strike Force. He took us on a burn mission to see how Kentucky intends to put the local industry up in smoke.

A 33-year trooper, Sergeant Ray looks like he was sent from central casting: fatigues, crew cut, boots, pistol strapped to his leg. With all his choppers, and commandos rappelling to the ground in battle gear, this seems like a war game—but Ray’s men aren’t playing.

Big-time farmers, the guys with thousands of plants, tend to protect their investments with ingenious booby traps: makeshift land mines, punji stakes smeared with shit, shotgun shells discharged by rattraps. The cute ones tie poisonous rattlesnakes to the stalks of their plants. These party favors are intended not so much for cops as for local nimrods dumb enough to try and snatch a $2,000 cannabis stalk. Most citizens, though, steer clear of these hollows, for fear they won’t come back. A hotel clerk tells me her uncle was nearly blown up recently near a tripwired plot: “Uncle Vernon was four-wheeling on a trail, but the doper had fenced off the top of that hill with fishing twine tied to grenades. Vern got thrown 30 feet out of his seat in a huge explosion.”

Uncle Vernon was fortunate. Some growers camp at their plots with AK-47s. Two years ago a farmer in Knox County was sniped at on his own property after he stumbled onto a patch with his bulldozer. He raised his plow to block the bullets and escaped.

In 1993 troopers went head-to-head with a gun-toting doper. “A helicopter touched down on a patch near a grower’s home, and the grower came out with an assault rifle,” recalls Sergeant Ray. The crew fled, but when the ground team arrived at the home, Gary Shepherd, the man of the house, was perched in a lawn chair with his rifle on his lap. “You’ll have to kill me to get my pot,” Shepherd said as a SWAT team surrounded the house. When he raised his weapon suddenly, troopers opened fire, and the holler doper was obliterated by 9 mm gunfire.

The troopers and the National Guard always prepare for the worst. They wear Kevlar vests and carry M-16s and handguns. Ray has 200 men, mostly inexperienced guardsmen. He has nine choppers available daily.

Today we’re on a ground mission. The target: Shadow Wolf Hollow in Breathitt County. We drive for miles up back roads into a remote forest. The choppers provide air cover as guardsmen fan out on foot, nervously thinking of how a punji stake would feel in the calf. A helicopter spotter carefully talks them through the bush by radio.

And then he drops a smoke flare anointing the patch. Hot purple tongues of smoke rise over the forest, and the guardsmen go into action. They swing machetes at the weed, counting as they go: 20, 30, hundreds of plants. “Not enough hours in the day,” Ray says.

The plants they find are small and budless—eight- and 10-footers. July is early in the season. It isn’t until the first weeks of September that the females bud large. A mature sinsemilla plant grows up to 20 feet, has a trunk four inches in diameter, and can weigh upwards of 50 pounds. “Those buds grow till you can squeeze the juice out of them and it runs down your hands,” says Sergeant Ray admiringly.

“Sarge, you sound like a pothead.”

“Maybe,” he smiles, sounding caught. But Sergeant Ray has never smoked a joint in his life and never wanted to. “As much as the growers love to grow ’em, we love to tear ’em out.”

By dusk they have snatched 500 stalks. The guardsmen pile it in a clearing and douse it with fuel. “I’d say we get between 60 and 70 percent of the crop,” Ray tells me. “We’re just holding the line in the sand, just keeping ’em in check.” Last year Ray’s men arrested 408 growers tending plots; since 1998 they’ve netted more than 2,000. But they’ve hardly stemmed the availability of the product, and new growers keep emerging to fill the vacuum.

Fighting on the Wrong Front
According to locals, pot keeps some people off welfare. It keeps more out of the grave. “In counties like Clay, the economies have been dependent on marijuana for years,” says Paul Croley, a Kentucky lawyer who represents dozens of growers. In 1990, 100,000 plants were burned in Leslie County, and there were widespread cases of local businesses going bankrupt.

The townies talk about a far more dangerous drug in these parts—methamphetamine. Brewed in bathtubs by amateurs, “bathtub crank” turns users into psychos. The volatile chemicals, including starter fluid and ammonia, tend to explode, and the roads in Clay County are littered with charred houses where brewers have blown themselves and their families to bits. Seizures of meth labs have skyrocketed in Kentucky, from 19 in 1998 to 160 last year, and arrests for distribution more than doubled from 1999 to 2000. Why? One hundred bucks’ worth of ingredients can produce a batch worth $2,000. The DEA says there were 51 meth-related deaths in Kentucky between 1999 and 2001, and 23 last year alone.

The meth producers, who are often users, make dopers look like Mr. Rogers. “They’re lifetime criminals—crazy and dangerous,” says Babe, a 43-year-old Clay Country mother of four who grows marijuana. Her 17-year-old son, Jeff, OD’d on meth when he was 15 and barely survived. “I never knowed of anybody around here blowing up smoking pot,” she says.

People here are protective of their pot. The neighborly feeling toward growers extends into the court system, according to Ray. “There are counties where you will not get a marijuana conviction in a local court,” he says. “We have to go to the federal level to get our cases through.”

State prosecutor Thomas Handy says growers tend to be “good neighbors” who spread dough to people who need it. “In hollows populated by extended family, there might be a majority of people who are connected to the business,” says Handy. Family won’t rat, nor will they look kindly on jurors who convict a cousin.

A Home Made From Grass
Boogieman is half in the bag when I visit his spread. He wears his hair to his shoulders, listens to AC/DC, and has stoner tattooed on his leg—a bona fide hillbilly headbanger. We smoke joints in his “slug shack,” an eight-by-10-foot cabin that sits beside his ramshackle wood-frame home—all paid for with homegrown greenbacks.

Later we walk drunk in the hills, and Boogieman salutes his patches. “I cart water up the mountains,” he says. “Work hard. The bud grows long as my arm, dude! This is our country. It takes care of us. We take care of it.

“They say we’re bad people out here. I drink my beer, and I help the old lady across the street. Think I put my son in danger, man? Hey, Doug,” he asks his oldest son—raised on marijuana money. “I ever given you dope?”

“Nope,” says Doug.

Back in the slug shack, Boogieman suddenly seems pissed and runs his finger gently across my throat. “With people like me, your throat could be cut, right?” Then he tries to stare me down.

“I don’t believe you’d do that,” I say.

“No, I wouldn’t,” he grins. “Because I’m a pothead, man.”

Take Your War and…
Boogieman has never been busted. He’s been lucky. Growing five plants or more is a felony in Kentucky, punishable by up to five years in prison. Get a second offense and you’re in for up to 10 years.

Even some of the guys who chase him through the woods don’t want to bust their neighbors. Moreover, they’re afraid to. “I got mixed feelings,” says one nervous guardsman who grew up here. An officer passes by, and the kid clams up. Like all the grunts, he keeps his nametag covered by tape for fear of repercussion. Country folk turn their backs on these guys. Restaurants won’t serve them; gas stations won’t fill their tanks. They ain’t family no more.

Gatewood Galbraith, the infamous Kentucky attorney, crusades for marijuana decriminalization. He smokes every day and wants pot regulated and taxed to pay for schooling, housing, and education in the counties where it’s grown. “This is a war against our people,” Galbraith says. “Marijuana is harmless. In this war on drugs, we waste the law-enforcement dollar on a substance that poses almost no threat to our society.”

Even the sheriffs—the uncorrupted ones—think this war is a boondoggle. Says Clay County’s Edd Jordan: “Marijuana doesn’t even come near to being a drug problem. Take the money and spend it on the meth problem.”

But the war drags on. In July Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky announced he had secured nearly $1 million in additional funding for fiscal year 2003—adding to the $17 million already appropriated since 1999 for “counter-drug operations” in Kentucky. In August yet another $3.6 million was secured for the National Guard in Daniel Boone forest.

When Boogieman hears that, he fires up another number and laughs.

 

[Wildfire]

more appalachian goodness:

thaitanic f2:


sour bubble bx3 x sour diesel ibl


ecsd x strawberry diesel


pheonix haze- nevilles pheno


dried pheonix nevilles pheno


more pheonix haze:




nl5 x haze:


jock horror:


ecsd clone:

 

[10k]

i've seen the weed in tn and it sucks!!!

You must have only seen some damned commercial mexi'brick-schwaag then, because Tennessee ranks second place in the USA for cash cropping mj outdoors. Only California outgrows us...just barely though.

Some of the absolute best high quality bud is grown right here in middle to eastern tennessee thru north carolina. Monteagle to Deals Gap...and then some "boy howdy"

 

[George Hayduke]

10k you are right.

kentucky and tennessee are constantly in a fight for the number two position when it comes to marijuana production.

great pictures wild! thanks for sharing.