Two long-haired jail inmates armed with gas-powered weed-whackers shaved a steep shoulder of Interstate Highway 74 on a recent sun-scorched morning while their overseer, Sheriff and Noxious Weed Superintendent Gib Cady, practiced his particularly genteel brand of cursing on his criminal archfoes: ”Pardon my French, but these dummies come into our county and pick this stuff . . . and all they`re gonna get out of smoking it is a headache and a sore throat.
”Would you want to go to prison for 10 years for the sake of a headache and a sore throat?” the lawman asked as he rubbed a aching knee.
Firm-bellied and easy-going, Cady exudes the earnest demeanor of an Eagle Scout rather than the red-neck bluster associated with cliched images of rural sheriffs.
But lately, this abidingly decent and proud native of Henry County has worked up some law and order lather, aggravated by serious knee-joint pain, all due to the illegal exploitation by outside criminal elements of another native to this little-noticed, drive-by sector of northwestern Illinois: wild marijuana weed.
It seems the sheriff`s territory has become recognized by dope heads around the U.S. as a place where wild marijuana plants are easy picking. And that offends Sheriff Gib Cady no little bit.
”Henry County has been known for years as the Hog Capital of the World, and now it`s getting known for something other than that, and I find it highly insulting,” said the sheriff, the son and grandson of hog farmers.
Hog houses greatly outnumber human dwellings in this county of 53,000 people, about 150 miles west of Chicago. Huge hog runs dominate and odorize the countryside. The lawn ornament of choice in yards between Cambridge and Kewanee is the plaster pig rendered in noble pose. And annual hog festivals are a seasonal highlight in these communities where porcine is divine.
Henry County has led the nation in pork production for generations, and it simply is not about to let that reputation go to pot, the sheriff said.
”I`m taking this personal,” he said. ”If I wasn`t I wouldn`t be out here in 90-degree heat, looking for weeds and falling in holes banging up my knee.”
The sheriff`s insult and injury can be traced to the arrest in Henry County last year of 47 people from nearly as many states as they cut or yanked up the indigenous, mood-altering plants that grow in convenient stands right along two heavily-traveled interstate highways, I-74 and I-80, which intersect in Cady`s jurisdiction. In just the last few weeks, 12 more roadside pot-pickers were pinched-and the plants aren`t even mature yet-and now they await trial in the county jail in Cambridge, eating up time, space and tax dollars there, according to Henry County State`s Attorney Larry Vandersnick. Most jail sentences range from a few months to three years, law officials said.
The sheriff and the prosecutor agree that the invasion of the pot-snatchers threatens the county`s financial health as well as its pork-related identity.
”These people are clogging up our jails and our court system,”
Vandersnick said.
Indians used the hemp
The aggravating factor here is that most of those arrested for illegal weeding in Henry County are unable to post bond, nor can they afford their own attorneys. So the county must ante up about $40 a day to keep them in jail, pay for any medical or dental problems that arise, and also foot the bill for the legal defenses of these out-of-county undesirables, the lawmen said.
”It has devastated our budget,” Cady lamented.
Exasperated by the increasing burden of busting the drug traffickers, the sheriff went to Vandersnick a few weeks ago with a proposal to attack his county`s weed problem at its roots.
The prosecutor in turn went to his ordinance books and found a law that allowed the county to appoint its own ”noxious weed superintendent.” County board members then did just that, making Cady a determined double-threat in the drug wars of Henry County.
Since Cady`s appointment, the sheriff and his pot-seeking posse of auxiliary deputies and inmate volunteers have taken to the highway embankments wielding county-issue weed-whackers for what may prove to be a drawn-out battle to eradicate the source.
The resilient plants, known locally as hemp weed, have grown in abundance here since frontier days, when thousands of buffalo roamed the region and rolled in the area`s large wallows: swampy, low-lying areas that still give up buffalo bones and arrowheads.
The Indians followed the buffalo, and they cultivated the hemp weed for making rope. The weed was valued by the U.S. military for the same purpose, and during World War II three hemp factories were located in Henry County for the war effort, Cady said.
Apparently unaware that the war is over and that most modern rope is made of nylon, Henry County hemp weed seems to still see its proliferation as a vital patriotic mission.
”We`ve even found it growing in the cracks of the blacktop in the jail parking lot,” Cady said. ”We figure the seeds fall out of the cars of people we arrest and, come the next spring, here it grows.”
Cutting the weeds is a hot and time-consuming job, but there are not a lot of alternatives, the sheriff said.
”It would be neat if some company would breed a bug that loves this stuff, so we could let them go to work for us, but then someone said once the bug eats all the marijuana, then what`s he going to eat?”
Filler for good stuff
Henry County had occasional problems with pot-pickers when marijuana became popular with hippies on the highway in the 1960s and `70s, but even as drug abusers moved on to cocaine, crack and other more powerful substances in the `80s and `90s, the area seemed to have increased trafficking in local weed, the sheriff said.
Some suspect there is a network of marijuana manufacturers who have focused on Henry County weed as a cheap alternative to more desirable cultivated brands. Several maps have been found in the cars of those arrested, and they provide detailed directions to marijuana patches here. Some are accurate down to the highway milepost number, Cady said.
”I`ve heard that the maps sell for as much as $75 in Michigan,”
volunteered one of Cady`s weed-whacking inmates, who was doing time for an unrelated violation but still enjoying his daily field trips.
”Every day the other inmates ask us if we brought them some,” the trustee said, bringing hasty assurance from the sheriff that, ”Every night we hold them by their ankles and shake them.”
A fair number of those arrested in Henry County have hailed from Kentucky, including a recent batch from the burg of Blue Lick, and Cady has received reports that the Kentuckians are sent to pick weed here to be used as ”filler” when their own native drug dealers dole out more potent strains, he said.
Though the smoking pleasures of Henry County weed are said to be notoriously scanty, if not health-endangering, the pickers persist. And there has been at least one failed effort to enhance the local product, the sheriff said.
”Several months ago we caught a young guy from New York state with some potted plants in the backseat of his car. It was marijuana, and he said that he had come to plant it in Henry County to improve the quality,” Cady said.
”That emphasizes my point,” the sheriff added irritably. ”This isn`t fun anymore, it`s just plain stupid.”
Keeping a roadside watch
Cady confessed that when he first started nabbing increased numbers of pot-hunters in the 1980s, ”it was kinda fun.”
Those arrested appeared to be well-to-do, if lesser, drug lords, and most of them drove nice cars that they regretfully left with the sheriff after they`d been busted and posted bond, he said.
Since 1980, more than 200 cars, trucks and vans have been confiscated from the weed hunters and either rehabilitated into law-enforcement vehicles or sold to profit the county treasury, Cady said.
”Some of them even accused me of sending out the maps to lure them here so we could get their cars,” he said.
But more recently, those arrested for pot-picking here appear to be less affluent flunkies, the sheriff said.
”So now, we are trying to get the message across that, `Hey, suckers, we`re tired of you coming here and fooling around. Crime doesn`t pay in Henry County,` ” he said.
Along with trying to chop down as much of the weed as possible, the county`s top lawmen have agreed to be even more aggressive in arresting and prosecuting the pickers, they said. Local residents, highway maintenance men and others on area highways and byways have been enlisted in the county`s roadside watch program.
While the sheriff weeds out crime, Vandersnick will be seeking higher bonds and tougher sentences as a deterrent, which means, of course, that those arrested should become even more imaginative in their defenses, he said.
”We`ve heard all kinds,” the prosecutor said. ”Some have claimed that we entrap them because we make it so available here they can`t resist it.”
One recent arrestee told Cady that he had been innocently driving through Henry County on the interstate when ”he saw a plant up there waving to him,” Cady related. ”So now when I see one waving, I cut it down.”
Three men from Detroit recently detained in the Henry County Jail offered the defense that they were in the area in search of fish, not evil fauna, Cady said.
”But they didn`t have any fishing equipment, or fishing licenses,” he noted. The Motor City threesome also had the unfortunate distinction of being caught green-handed, Vandersnick said.
”At first they denied they`d been picking it, but their hands were completely covered with a slimy green substance, so we took pictures for evidence that they`d been pulling the weeds,” the prosecutor said.
Another problem is how to dispose of the evidence seized from the pot-pickers, some of whom have been nabbed with entire vanloads of the stuff.
”Geez, one year we filled the drunk tank in the jail with what one guy picked, and stink? . . . that doggone weed . . . the whole building reeked,” Cady recalled.
The current method of disposing of the evidence is to bury it with a backhoe, he said.
”But you gotta laugh at yourself, we did try burning it one time,” Cady confessed. ”We had a three-walled pit behind the jail, and one year we filled it with hemp weed and lit that sucker and the wind came up and blew it right into the jail cells.
”The comment later was that we had the happiest group of inmates in history.”
