Kicking Grass and Taking Names

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By Chelsea Kopta

Summary

After a stop in Yakima, local, state and national drug enforcement agencies pulled up thousands of plants in spots all over Franklin County. Action News reporter Chelsea Kopta takes you right to the action.

Story Published: Jul 30, 2008 at 6:29 PM PST

MESA -- It's not something you see everyday: marijuana dangling from the sky.

At several grows spotted in Franklin County, a National Guard helicopter picked up law enforcement, and dropped them off in the grow to pull the plants, and hauled the stacks back.

It's called whacking and stacking.

"Washington's number three in the country for outdoor marijuana and number two for indoor," Washington State Patrol Lieutenant Rich Wiley said. "Last year we had almost 300,000 plants that were eradicated and this year we're on track to meet or exceed that. So we do we have a significant problem."

Wiley headed up the Cannabis Eradication and Response Task (CERT) force who pulled about 10,000 pot plants in one day. CERT agencies included the DEA, National Guard, State Patrol, several local sheriff's office, including a group from Clark County, and dogs.

"It's the first year we had that," Wiley said. "We have two K-9's from Clark County and one from Border Patrol. K-9 and K-9 handler efforts are trained and working with us."

Bringing in the dogs helps sniff out the dope, but it's part of a larger plan to weed out the people running the illegal operations.

"A lot of times you'll have people out in the grows who are paid as just workers, and just tend to their grow," Wiley said. "But they're not, you know, we'd like to arrest them but it's really just people paying them to come and set these gardens up so that's who we're actually after."

Lieutenant Wiley runs these operations year round. He told Action News that these larger grows aren't the work of petty dealers. Major drug lords run a majority of the larger grows in our area.

"The same people included in marijuana growing are bringing cocaine and methamphetamine into our communities," Wiley said. "and it's the drug traffikers in general that are involved in this. This is an easy way to make some more money so they do. There's a lot of money in marijuana."

For Wiley and this crew, whacking and stacking won't stop the bad guys. So they keep coming here, making arrests, and tracking down the people who set up the grow in the first place.

"It does take the drugs off the street I guess, but we're more concerned with arresting the people that are behind this," Wiley said.

So far these crews arrested three people at their raid in Yakima.

As of Wednesday afternoon, they had not cuffed anyone in Franklin County.