December 17, 2001

By Dion Nissenbaum, Mercury News Sacramento Bureau

San Jose Mercury News 

She has been dubbed the ``Patton of Pot,'' California's street-smart commander of the state's war against marijuana. A former San Jose police officer and a mother of three, Sonya Barna works on the front line in the long-running battle, hovering in helicopters, hiking through forests and hunkering down in a sparse Sacramento office.

Barna heads California's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, the state's 18-year effort to shut down the multibillion-dollar industry.

With the pot season over, the state plans to announce Tuesday at a press conference in San Jose a near-record year: CAMP pulled up nearly 314,000 plants worth about $1.25 billion.

Despite that success, Barna is steering her $655,000-a-year program through treacherous political terrain. Its budget has been dramatically cut since its early days, forcing CAMP to scale back the number of anti-drug SWAT teams it can field from seven to three. And California voters put the operation in an awkward position when they approved Proposition 215, forcing Barna to balance her mission to eradicate marijuana production with the state's desire to allow medical patients to use pot to ease their ailments.

While other drugs, such as crack and heroin, are largely stigmatized in the media and in society, marijuana remains for many hip, trendy, cool.

As Barna sees it, a crucial part of her job is to change that, to help redefine marijuana as a potent drug that can damage your memory, sap your ambition and push you down a slide into aimless obscurity. ``Someday, I hope that kids will look at marijuana in the same light that they now look at cocaine,'' she said.

Barna is intimately familiar with the personal challenges facing children and parents.

During one of her regular searches of her oldest son's room four years ago, Barna discovered a pot pipe in the 17-year-old's room. She sat her son down for a serious talk and he put drug use behind him, Barna said.

But Barna is sympathetic to the goals of Proposition 215, the 1996 initiative that gave Californians the right to use pot to combat ills from AIDS and cancer to arthritis and migraines.

Balancing Act

``If someone is dying of cancer and a marijuana cigarette helps them, one plant that they might have or that their caregiver might have is one thing,'' Barna said. ``Really, who is that hurting?''

Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who is Barna's boss, has been working to honor the intent of Proposition 215 and still crack down on people who grow pot for profit.

The task of deciding what's what falls to Barna.

To Barna, Proposition 215 did more than create a way for people with AIDS and cancer to use pot to ease their pain; it opened the door for drug cartels to expand their operations.

Barna has directed her teams to focus on the big scores, not the small growers who may be tending to a few plants. That she leaves for local law enforcement.

Dennis Peron, who helped put the initiative on the ballot and has a farm in Clear Lake where he has grown pot for patients, supports targeting growers ``in it for greed and money.''

But he sees Barna as a lonely soldier making a last stand.

``The war is over,'' Peron said. ``Marijuana will be legalized in my lifetime.''

Barna, who took over as operations commander of the CAMP operation last year, has been fighting in California's drug war her whole adult life. In 1984, Barna, the daughter of a migrant worker, was a summer recruit waxing vans and doing drudge work for CAMP officers. Soon, she was working undercover in a Central Valley high school, posing for eight months as a student drug dealer.

She went on to work the streets of East San Jose and met her main mentor: Tom Wheatley, who is now an assistant police chief.

Wheatley describes Barna as confident and relaxed, an officer with a knack for winning the confidences of criminals and reeling them in. ``One of the biggest failings of undercover cops -- and where you lose them -- is that they start taking themselves way too seriously,'' Wheatley said. ``She is so down to earth; I don't think it ever got to her.''

Within a few years, Barna moved over to the state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement's San Jose office. There she set up one of her most audacious busts. While working undercover, she persuaded a suspect to pack a truck with all the chemicals and equipment needed to set up a methamphetamine lab and drive it to a meeting point, which was actually the drug team's office. The guy even brought along a bucket of nearly finished speed, she said.

Coordinates Raids

In 1999, Barna returned to CAMP and renewed her focus on marijuana.

Barna's principal role is to assemble the anti-pot teams and lead raids. CAMP has a skeleton crew and draws officers from across the state for raids. Since 1983, the teams have destroyed more than 2.6 million plants -- about $9 billion worth. Although it is impossible to know what kind of a crimp CAMP puts in the illegal economy, even some growers like Peron admit that raids drive up prices.

In the male-dominated profession, Barna is an anomaly. She is a foot shorter than many of her colleagues, wears bright nail polish in the field and loves to joke with her staff. Her sparse office features photos of Barna and her officers on raids with fake Rastafarian caps and dreadlocks.

Earlier this year, Barna launched the CAMP season in Monterey County by leading a team across some of Big Sur's more rugged terrain, a sweltering canyon of manzanita and oak a short crow's flight from the jagged coast. Dressed in fatigues, armed with machetes and coated in poison-oak protection, 16 officers trudged, puffed and hacked their way toward a fledgling pot field in the Los Padres National Forest.

Black tubing from an uphill stream shunted water to the plants. The land was cluttered with trash -- cigarette packs, old rifle shells, rat traps meant to scare off deer, soda cans. The team cut down more than 600 plants. A helicopter hovered overhead as Barna and her crew clipped a cargo net full of 3-foot-tall marijuana plants to a dangling rope.

The raids, which often involve helicopters sweeping low in search of the striking emerald-green plants, have their critics in marijuana-friendly parts of California.

Many view Barna and the program a lot like the owners of speakeasies viewed Elliot Ness and his anti-alcohol teams during Prohibition.

Program Value Doubted

``They're terrorizing citizens,'' said Marie Mills, a lead organizer of the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, a group in pot-rich Humboldt County that keeps tabs on CAMP. ``I don't see it as a valuable service and what they do get is not even touching the tip of the iceberg.''

While most people think of California's North Coast as the epicenter for the pot war, CAMP has been turning its attention to other parts of the state. In recent years, state agents have been pulling far more plants from Fresno and Kern counties than Humboldt and Mendocino.

The state has seen a rise in the number of pot farms overseen by Asian families in the Central Valley. The illegal plants are often tucked amid the bok choy, corn and bitter melon.

Pot plots take a toll on the state's forests. Growers use more than fertilizer to raise their crops. They use potent chemicals that pollute nearby streams and rivers.

``I bet the people who are tending these gardens don't even smoke it,'' Barna said. ``They know what pesticides they're putting on there.''

Barna also frets about the growing violence. Last year in the foothills near Sacramento, a father and his 8-year-old son were deer-hunting on their property and were shot and seriously wounded when they stumbled upon a pot garden. ``Should you really have to worry about getting your head shot off because you suddenly stumbled on a trail where they're guarding it?'' she asked.

Note: Cutting-Edge Cop: Ex-S.J. officer compares marijuana for profit to cocaine.