EKB News

Ed Shemelya, head of marijuana eradication in the Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, says teams of forest rangers, state police, federal agents and military troops who scoured the Daniel Boone National Forest this year found only 17,000 plants, a tiny crop compared to the 250,000 plants a year that were eradicated from the forest a decade ago before they began an initiative dubbed "Up In Smoke." Shemelya says a crackdown has pushed growers off the 700,000 acre Daniel Boone National Forest and onto even more rugged terrain where they're just as unwelcome. He says the national forest once led the nation in pot production, but, even with it down, the illegal crop still is thriving on private lands deeper in the mountain range. Shemelya says the forest area is much safer now, but that's not the case on the private land - much of it owned by logging and mining companies - where authorities confiscated nearly $2 billion worth of marijuana this year. Shemelya said eradication teams cut and burned nearly 1 million plants, each with a street value at maturity of about $2,000.