By Bill Estep, Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky.
Mar. 4–There was a time in the late 1980s when J.C. Lawson of Clay County symbolized the pugnacious defiance of Kentucky marijuana growers.
He became the most notorious cultivator in the state, at least for a time, by talking openly with the Herald-Leader about his success in the illegal business, bragging about making $1 million in a few months and posing for a photo in his pot patch, diamond cluster rings glittering on his fingers.
He defended his “farming” as a way of providing money in a poor county, saying he employed more than 20 people.
“There’s bad pit bulls and there’s good pit bulls, just like there’s bad dope dealers and good dope dealers,” Lawson said back then.
These days, Lawson is still a symbol, but of a world and a war that is much different than 20 years ago. The drug problem is worse in some ways, the war against it has escalated, and Lawson is headed to federal prison.
Now 53, he pleaded guilty Monday to conspiring to grow more than 100 marijuana plants in Clay County in the summer of 2006. His ex-wife, his son, another relative and a partner also pleaded guilty.
Robert O’Neill, an agent with the U.S. Forest Service, said in a court document that he saw Lawson and Douglas Imhoff in several pot patches in the Mosley Cemetery area and later learned the two were working to set up an indoor growing operation in Imhoff’s basement.
Lawson, who could be classified a career criminal and face life in prison when he is sentenced in June, told a reporter last week he didn’t want to comment on his case, at least not yet.
It was a different time when Lawson came to fame.
State and federal authorities felt that many people in Eastern Kentucky embraced marijuana cultivation — or at least tolerated it — because of the money it brought. Some took Lawson’s public defense of pot growing as a sign of that acceptance; in a 1989 article that called him a “Robin Hood,” a preacher told USA Today that Lawson had given him money to repair the roof and parking lot at his church.
Drug money had corrupted some local officials. A key federal investigation that led to the conviction of three Eastern Kentucky sheriffs, a deputy and a police chief grew from information in the late 1980s that one of the sheriffs was taking payoffs to protect marijuana growers, said David Keller, the FBI agent who handled the case.
The acceptance of marijuana growing colored local justice systems, according to some authorities who thought they couldn’t get a meaningful conviction in some counties.
“That was a time when there was a lot of apathy as far as the marijuana problem in Kentucky,” said Keller, who now heads the Kentucky section of the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. “It was just wide open.”
Pot growers “knew if they got caught in local court probably nothing would happen,” he said.
Lawson had been arrested twice in Clay County on drug charges before the 1987 article, including once for growing pot, but hadn’t spent any time in jail.
These days, police have more resources to fight drugs than they did in 1987, and the approach is different.
The HIDTA was set up in 1998 — a recognition that parts of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia were supplying high-quality domestic marijuana to other parts of the country.
With the HIDTA came a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration office in Eastern Kentucky and more money to hunt for marijuana, though the agency has since been designated to work against a variety of drugs.
O’Neill, the officer who caught Lawson, is assigned to the HIDTA.
Another key change is that state police now work year-round on the program to eradicate marijuana, cooperating in a task-force approach with the HIDTA, the National Guard and other agencies.
And police have high-tech weapons, putting cameras in the woods to spot growers and plotting the location on helicopter-borne computers.
Growers have responded by reducing the size of plots and trying to hide them better, sacrificing weight at times to keep the plants under better tree cover, said Lt. Ed Shemelya, who heads the state-police marijuana program. “They adapt and evolve their techniques just like we do,” he said.
Prosecutions by the U.S. attorney’s office have been a big plus in fighting drugs in Eastern Kentucky the last several years, including marijuana cultivation. Drug traffickers often receive stiffer sentences in federal court, and there is no parole.
Lawson is an example of those prosecutions. He went to prison in 1990 and again in 1999 on federal drug charges.
Another weapon against drugs came online after U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Somerset, created Operation UNITE in 2003. The task force takes a three-pronged approach, investigating drug traffickers, providing addict treatment resources and backing education efforts to curb drug abuse.
Dan Smoot, a former state police detective who is now law enforcement director for UNITE, said the treatment component is critical to trying to get the upper hand on drug abuse, because many pushers are just selling drugs to feed their own addiction.
“That’s how I think we’re going to win,” he said.
State and federal authorities said local police have gotten more professional and that local officers and courts are doing a better job in many places in the fight against drugs.
As for public corruption, “It’s still out there, but it’s nothing like it was in the ’80s and ’90s,” Keller said.
Attitudes about drugs have evolved as well, in large part because of abuse of powerful prescription pills, unavailable in the late 1980s, that have brought misery and death to many families.
People who said little or nothing about marijuana cultivation in 1987 now work to promote awareness of drug abuse and keep track of how cases are handled.
“The real change that you would see is the attitude of people in the community, particularly in our churches,” said Manchester City Council member Harvey Hensley, a retired Clay County banker.
Some people still tolerate marijuana for economic reasons, but in general people do not support it, Hensley said.
Some groups that advocate legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana use for adults argue that programs to eradicate marijuana do little to reduce the supply of pot, serving only to keep the black-market price artificially high.
“It maintains a price support for vegetable matter,” said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
But police argue it is important to wipe out as much marijuana as possible because it is a much more powerful drug now than in the 1980s, and is the substance many abusers start with before trying others. Eradicating it also limits the supply of cash available to buy other drugs or use for other criminal purposes, such as buying votes, authorities said.
Police said they have been successful in knocking down the supply of Kentucky marijuana.
One thing that hasn’t changed much in some parts of Eastern Kentucky since Lawson first got famous is the economy. The poverty rate in Clay County in 1989 was 40 percent, according to U.S Census figures; in 2005, the estimated poverty rate was 37.2 percent.
Police say that one mature marijuana plant produces a pound of pot worth $2,000. Some critics say that figure is too high, but no one denies pot cultivation can be lucrative.
The economy, and the belief that some people still have that it’s OK to grow pot, is why people keep slipping into the woods to try to plant pot patches in Eastern and Southern Kentucky despite efforts to wipe out the crop, said Shemelya. “Until those things change, we’ll always have people wanting to grow dope,” he said.
KENTUCKY MARIJUANA PLANTS ERADICATED:
–1990: 546,125
–1991: 828,776
–1992: 918,931
–1993: 659,811
–1994: 477,355
–1995: 607,713
–1996: 529,560
–1997: 453,486
–1998: 350,171
–1999: 517,400
–2000: 463,989
–2001: 413,851
–2002: 373,117
–2003: 519,986
–2004: 471,075
–2005: 507,862
–2006: 557,628
–2007: 490,020
Herald-Leader News Researcher Lu-Ann Farrar contributed to this report.
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