Marijuana Policy Project

Officers take to the skies, fields in search for marijuana plots.

Denise Forsythe got an unexpected surprise when she returned home from a meeting at Oaklandon Christian Church one afternoon last week.

The rural Hancock County woman found Indiana State Police troopers in her driveway with 55 marijuana plants they had pulled from a neighbor's cornfield.

Police say someone—not the farmer—had secretly planted the marijuana in the field, hoping to harvest it before anyone noticed.

"It's kind of disheartening because you think, 'OK, well, how did they get there? When did they do that?' " Forsythe said. "I'm not overly scared. But I hate the idea people do that because . . . for the farmers, this is their land. This is their livelihood."

But such surreptitious marijuana farming is more common than you might think.

Working through the Drug Enforcement Administration's Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program, State Police pulled up more than 100 marijuana plants in Hancock County on Tuesday alone.

Last year, they destroyed more than 31,000 cultivated—or intentionally planted—marijuana plants, records show.

The illegal crops can be hidden in homes and other buildings—or secretly planted outside.

Farmers' fields and wooded or overgrown areas provide perfect cover for outdoor growing, police say.

This time of year, State Police turn their attention to growers who hide their marijuana in farm fields like the one in Hancock County.

The 55 plants that authorities found near Forsythe's home were not fully mature, said Larry Antic, a State Police trooper.

If they had been, they could have been worth $1,000 to $3,000 each, said 1st Sgt. Michael Crabtree, of the Indiana State Police Aviation Section.

"We've ruined somebody's crop for the year," Antic said. "We love it. We're taking stuff that could end up in the school or God knows where. So you're taking and eliminating the drugs from getting on the street."

If caught with the plants, suspects can be charged with possessing and cultivating marijuana.

But police say it's impossible to arrest the growers of every marijuana plot they find. So, they set their sights on arresting people with the most elaborate plots and destroy smaller patches without searching for the owners.

The plots near Forsythe's home fell into the latter category.

"We're wasting our time to try to figure it out, so we'll just yank it and take it back and destroy it," Antic said.

Not everyone thinks all that effort is worth it.

Activists working to get marijuana use legalized say it's a waste of resources.

"It's not protecting the citizens from anything," said Steve Dillon, a Monroe County resident who is chairman of the board of directors of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "We have real . . . needs, especially with the methamphetamine problems we have here."

This year, more than $670,000 in federal money is helping to fund the Indiana State Police program—which includes field searches and a host of other anti-marijuana efforts, records show. Authorities did not have figures on the total cost of Indiana's program.

Dillon is a defense lawyer based in Indianapolis. His organization, NORML, works to legalize marijuana use in the United States.

He particularly questions the effort State Police put in each year to kill millions of wild marijuana plants—219.1 million in 2003. Those wild plants have relatively low concentrations of the chemical that causes euphoria in people who use it, compared with their cultivated counterparts.

Smoking such weeds wouldn't even give people a high, Dillon argues.

Police disagree. Smoking wild marijuana could, indeed, have an effect -—especially on young users, they say.

"At 12 and 13 years old, if you have never done it before, it's no different than alcohol or smoking cigarettes," Crabtree said. "Would it create euphoria? Yeah."

Many wild marijuana plants—also known as ditch weed—are leftovers from a World War II effort to grow the plants as a source of hemp to make rope, Crabtree said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture paid farmers to grow it, and the wild descendants can be found today primarily in northern Indiana, he said. Police kill them with spray.

"Marijuana is a very hearty plant," Crabtree said. "It thrives and reproduces easily, and the horse was out of the barn before they realized that people were smoking it and it was having an effect on them."

Today's eradication efforts are an attempt to shut that door again.

Jerry Lowder, who farms the Hancock County fields near Forsythe's home, didn't weigh in on the social debate.

But he knows the marijuana plants that displaced some of his corn were a nuisance.

"It ticks me off they cut my corn down," Lowder said. "They went to all that trouble and didn't get anything out of it. The only people that got anything out of it were the authorities."

Recent anti-marijuana efforts by State Police

Cultivated plants eradicated by Indiana State Police dropped after 2000 but rose again in 2003. Arrests have consistently increased.