
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 15, 1994                   TAG: 9408150029
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A FEW WEEDS

IN OTHER law-enforcement news, authorities have drawn attention to themselves this summer, as they do every summer, by making a big deal of hunting for marijuana growing here and there in remote woods and hollows of Franklin and Pittsylvania counties and other rural parts of the state.

Every year, the helicopters hover, trains of four-wheel-drives snake along back roads, and teams of agents comb the countryside in search of the dreaded weed. Led by state police, the local sheriffs' deputies and state investigators and National Guard members - with a little help from their friends in the federal Drug Enforcement Administration - mount enormous and expensive search-and-destroy missions. The result: not many plants cut down, and even fewer arrests.

We're not impressed.

To be sure, the effort is part of a bigger war on drugs. This year, in what they're calling Operation Triple Play, authorities in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia joined in a 10-day sweep that netted nearly 120,000 marijuana plants and resulted in 131 arrests. (The great majority of the plants destroyed and arrests made were in Kentucky.)

They held a big press conference last week to trumpet their success.

We're still not impressed.

Marijuana, in some parts of southern Virginia, has supplanted moonshining as a source of recreational and entrepreneurial rebellion. Estimates of the state's marijuana crop suggest it exceeds the value of hay, tobacco or peanuts.

This is by no means to suggest approval of the lawbreaking involved, or of the infestation of drugs of which marijuana is one.

But surely some sense of priorities is relevant. There's a point where law enforcement becomes ineffectual overkill. The weed's farmers - mostly growing small amounts - aren't hardened dealer-types toting machine guns.

It's almost too easy to make a public splash out destroying some plants, which are easier to detect than the harder stuff, as if to compensate for losing the war against far more dangerous heroin and cocaine in city after city.

The good news is that the National Guard has apparently cut funding for air support of such operations. The revenuers' successors have more important things to do.

by CNB