was to make the plants indelible and make them smell and taste bad, thereby making them useless to a pusher. However, the dye apparently interfered with the photosynthesis of the plant and it smothered to death. Of the ten actively growing sites sprayed, all ten died before the end of the project.

The dried leaves of the treated plants, when burned, gave off an indescribable smell. It stayed in the nose and on the palate for hours afterward. No one with a working olfactory system could take over one drag from a cigarette made from this treated marijuana, even if he or she were so foolish as to buy marijuana dyed bright red.

About the expense of the treatment, let me say this, I treated 12,500 plants with this mixture. Using the old method to destroy that many plants would have taken 40 to 50 man-hours. I did it by myself in one hour and 45 minutes. A helicopter equipped with a spray rig could do it in less than ten minutes and that includes flying time between locations.

Allow me to present the following scenario: A helicopter, equipped with a spray rig, hovers over a marijuana field. The observer marks the location on his map and estimated the number of plants. The helicopter then makes two or three passes over the field and as it does, the plants turn from bright green to bright red. The helicopter flys away.

The owner of this particular field comes to investigate and finds his plants coated with a foul smelling indelible red dye. He knows what it is because he has heard about it and so have his customers. He knows he won't be able to sell it or even use it himself. After a few choice words about cops in general and narcs in particular, he walks dejectedly back where he came from.

In closing, I would like to make the following statement. As a front line narcotics officer, I appreciate the aid that has been rendered to my Department by agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Land Management. Their aid has turned a no win situation into one that not only can be won, but will be won.

Speaking for Arkansas, I can say that we have a small tax base and are barely able to maintain essential services. In order for us to maintain the high level of efficiency in enforcement that we now enjoy, we must have more aid. We will continue to remove marijuana from our woods and forests whether or not we receive it, but we could do so much more with it.

Mr. HELSLEY. It is a pleasure to be here today. I would like to share with you some of the successes and failures we think we have had.

I would like to depart from the prepared statement, because a great deal of what Sergeant Combs has said here today is totally

consistent with our experience, so I will try not to hit those same points.

We are very much aware that the eyes of some of our source countries are focused on what we are doing. We have tried to develop a very strong response to what I feel is probably one of the most significant drug law enforcement problems we now face.

We first became aware of cannabis production on a commercial scale in our State about 4 years ago, when four sheriffs came to us and asked assistance in obtaining an LEAA grant to support their enforcement work. We, with the Drug Enforcement Administration, obtained this grant and went on to put on the required training schools and developed the reporting sessions that were required.

At that point, we felt it was a problem that was confined probably to the north coast of our State. After that first year, though, it was quite apparent that it wasn't confined to the north coast, it was statewide. So in the years that followed, we expanded the types of training we gave to local sheriffs and tried to modify our program.

It worked well, but, then and now, we don't know how much. there is out there to seize. Our reporting has improved. We can speak to the amount that is seized and feel very good that that data is hard, but we do not know how much is out there to get. Last year, our situation changed. We had the U.S. Forest Service and BLM join in the battle. I might add I would like to echo what Sergeant Combs said. Those two groups have turned out to be just first-string support for us. I can't speak well enough of what they have done for us. Along with Customs, they are sort of a can-do group looking for ways to get this problem solved.

What we had, though, is a number of Federal agencies all trying to help sheriffs. I can say with a great deal of certainty that sometimes the coordination was not as it might have been. We had 58 sheriffs who had their own plans, and then we had each of the Federal agencies with their own plans, and we had our own plan, and what had been good reporting compliance was starting to fall off on the part of sheriffs.

You heard Sergeant Combs explain, and others who spoke here today, the process that you go through to identify and destroy the crops. It is labor-intensive work with long days and, without helicopter support, in our case, it is very difficult to do.

I would like to point out at this point that the average crop that we have dealing with now for 5 crop years is about 140 plants. Those 140 plants, if they grow to full maturity, are going to constitute around a ton of wet weight to haul out. And we are very much enthused by the development of this dye and have made a request to BLM to provide it to us, so we can see if it will work in our program.

There are some key points to keep in mind here. It is very laborintensive work and, in our State, the sheriffs do have to confront this. They have very small staffs. Regardless of the funding support that those sheriffs are given, they still have to keep patrol cars out on the street, and they still have to man the jails, and they, many times, cannot divert the very few law enforcement officers they have to do this type of enforcement work. In some of our experi

ence, the funding support that was provided to sheriffs went to buy equipment rather than for raids.

In the latter part of last year, we had to make a decision as to whether we were going to continue with what was a very fragmented approach, or try to develop a common plan, a statewide plan. To give you some idea of the coordination problems that we experienced, we set a meeting up with some sheriffs in a very remote mountain town, only to find that the U.S. Forest Service had set up a national meeting in the same room, the same day, the same time, and the subject was the same. We had to solve that.

So what we did is we went to the Drug Enforcement Administration for some funding support to test out a regional approach rather than each sheriff going about it in his own way-could we do a regional approach? What we did is, instead of taking full-time policemen away from their jobs of patrol or manning jails, we thought that, with a number of reserve sheriff deputies who were in those areas and the number of full-time police officers who had been laid off because of the economic conditions that existed, perhaps we could hire them to constitute the bulk of the raid teams. What we had to do is get the sheriffs to extend peace officer authority in the region that we selected so that those reserves and laid-off police officers could move from county to county and use law enforcement authority. The sheriffs agreed to do it. We ran the program in October of last year, and it worked very well.

With that as a base, in March of this year, we invited what we felt were the principal State and Federal agencies, who were responsible for providing support to sheriffs to sit down and develop a State plan. What we did is we took the then 4 years of data that we had on what crops were in the State and developed some regions where we felt the raid teams could move to to conduct the raids. We approached 15 sheriffs, and 14 sheriffs agreed to become involved.

The assumptions of our program were these. First of all, it was to be a prototype, and we realized that if it was going to have impact, it was probably going to take at least 3 years. What you heard described here as CAMP was not designed to replace what sheriffs were doing, it was designed to enhance what sheriffs were doing. So the sheriffs could conduct the regular enforcement operations, and then the CAMP teams would come in and support them above and beyond whatever they have been doing.

One of the key points was that, if all of the State and Federal agencies put in what we felt was their fair share, we wouldn't have to go out and buy a bunch of hardware because the theory was that, somewhere along the line, a Government agency must have bought it and it must be on a shelf. That turned out to be true.

It was designed to be virtually no cost to sheriffs, and it was designed to attack crops in areas of the State where, because the sheriff had not been able to access them for lack of staff or helicopter support, we would go to get the tough ones.

We then had to go sell it to the sheriffs who, I might add, had some concern about this mass of State and Federal support to them. They agreed to participate, and what flowed from that was what you have heard described as CAMP. It was comprised of four raid teams, three helicopters, four fixed-wing planes, and the

strength to raid for 9 weeks straight, 4 days a week. When we could, we would bivouac out on either U.S. Forest Service camps or California Department of Forestry camps to save on cost.

All of this was under a single command. That command was staffed with people from the U.S. Forest Service, from BLM, from DEA, from all of those State and Federal agencies participating.

The raiding began on August 15. At that point, I felt that we had accomplished a miracle because we had 27 State, Federal, and local agencies who had all signed MOU's to do the same thing, the same way, at the same time.

In addition to that, a number of chiefs of police from the Los Angeles area agreed to send parts of their staff to participate in the raid teams as training to further cut down our costs. This also was the first time that the National Guard had been used, and they provided the vast majority of the helicopter support to us. What they would do is they would fly the raid team in, fly the material out, and fly the raid team out. We used funding support from DEA to hire reserves and the laid-off police officers, or whoever else we used to man the teams.

CAMP resulted in raids on 524 sites. There were 78 arrests, there are 50 warrants outstanding now, 64,000 plants plus were seized for about 215,000 pounds. That is not what was seized in the entire State. That is only what this multiagency approached seized. At this point, a total of 212,000 plants had been reported seized in the State.

To the credit of these teams, we fired no shots, and no suspects were hurt. The only people hurt were two people on the raid teams who broke their legs. It was also very well received by the press. We had media days where we took the press out on these raids. We got an unexpected amount of support from the people who lived in the areas where we raided. It was almost as if we recaptured the area for the State.

On the first of this month, we held a critique where we brought all the people from the various agencies involved back to talk about what we had done right or wrong. We are preparing a final report now. If you would like, we would be very pleased to submit it for the record.

Mr. HUGHES. We would be very happy to receive it.

[CLERK'S NOTE.-The final report on the CAMP critique referenced on the preceding page will be forwarded in approximately 2 weeks.]

Mr. HELSLEY. We are beginning our planning now for next year. The sheriffs who were not involved for this last year are going to be invited to attend a briefing this next month to see if the program fits their needs or not.

I think it is critical to keep in mind here that it is the sheriffs who bear the primary task of getting this type of enforcement work done, and our role is to support them.

We intend to expand the program for next year. The problems that we think we face in doing it, though, are large ones. First of all, the prosecution has not been as good as it could be. It has improved over the 4 or 5 years that we have been involved in this, but it is nowhere near as good as it could be.

Our intelligence is poor. I listened to the statements here this morning, and if there is a place where we have an Achilles' heel, where we are weak, it is in the area of intelligence. We simply don't know where the product is going, and we don't know how much is there. We know how much we seize, and we can make some educated guesses as to what percentage of the crop it is, but we don't know.

In spite of the fact that we set out to provide some services to sheriffs free, we put a tremendous burden on their clerical staff, on the lead sheriff deputies that they assigned to produce search warrants and, as the year goes along and their people are called to court, there will be an overtime cost to the sheriff departments as well. We have to figure out a way to solve that for next year.

The most critical problem we have, though, is in the area of aircraft support. Helicopters are simply the key to the success of the program. The type of the helicopters that we need are the UH-1H, referred to as Hueys. They are not the type of aircraft that you can go out and rent. You more than likely could, but the cost is incredible.

The National Guard did a superb job for us this year, but with the commitments they have and the flying hours that are allocated to them by the Department of Defense will almost preclude them from supporting us for next year. So, as it stands now, we may have no helicopter support at all for next year unless we can solve the problem.

We have set about trying to do that. I know that you spoke at the conference we had last week concerning the use of the National Guard. We have met with White House staff to see if an increased authorization of blade time can be given to our Guard. We don't know how we are going to solve this, but we are proceeding full speed ahead now to fix it.

We think that one of the finest things about this type of approach is that the structure of CAMP, the whole design of the program, allows public sector involvement if they wish. We would like to see groups like the Sierra Club become involved to give us some suggestions on how we can go about destroying the plants or how we can go about doing these raids. We would like to see parent groups involved. We would like to see all those groups get involved that feel they have an interest in this type of enforcement work. Thank you.

[The statement of Mr. Helsley follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF S. C. HELSLEY, CHIEF, BUREAU of Narcotic EnforcEMENT, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

CAMPAIGN AGAINST MARIJUANA PLANTING (CAMP) 1983

Marijuana is one of the most frequently abused drugs in the United States. The cultivation of cannabis and smuggling of marijuana are illicit industries which exceed an estimated $20 billion annually in the United States. This untaxed and unregulated flow of cash forms a financial base for numerous other criminal enterprises. Violent crime is also often associated with such huge sums of cash. The takeover of legitimate businesses and the corruption of public officials are historically two uses of underworld cash.

Traditionally, Mexico and Colombia have been the sources of marijuana, However, in recent years, domestic commercial cannabis cultivation has supplied an increasing amount of the market demand. New growing techniques used by the do