Kentucky police burn record 557,276 marijuana plants in 2006
Kentucky police cut and burned 557,276 marijuana plants in 2006, the state's most successful eradication year in more than a decade, and made 475 arrests. The DEA flew in helicopters and an aeroplane to spot plots from the air during the summer.
Police across Kentucky cut and burned 557,276 marijuana plants in 2006, up
nearly 50,000 on the 2005 total and the most since 1995.[1][2]Arrests rose
to 475 from 452 in 2005, and at an estimated $2,000 per pound per plant,
police said about $1 billion was kept from the illegal drug market.[1]
The US Drug Enforcement Administration brought in several helicopters and an
aeroplane for six weeks over the summer so airborne spotters could find more
patches, Lt Ed Shemelya, head of the Kentucky State Police
marijuana-eradication program, told the Lexington Herald-Leader.[1]The
statewide effort drew in local officers, state police, the National Guard,
the DEA, the US Forest Service and the Appalachia High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area task force, using National Guard helicopters whose computers
mapped plot locations at the click of a cursor.[1]It was 20 years since
state police and the Guard’s first coordinated one-day eradication sweep in
1986, and growers had adapted by shrinking plots and scattering them through
woods and hills.[1]
Case data
Every number and detail the sources state, with the sources that state it.
California's Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force seized or destroyed 55,308 pounds of illicit cannabis and eradicated 108,226 plants between July and September 2026, Governor Gavin Newsom's office said. The quarter's operations across nine counties led to 14 arrests, nine firearms and $29,215 in cash, and brought the state's nine-month total to more than $230 million in cannabis.
Arrested 14Plants destroyed 108,226Cannabis 25.0873 t
Humboldt County sheriff's deputies eradicated about 3,102 cannabis plants and destroyed about 36 pounds of processed cannabis at two unlicensed grows near Alderpoint and Garberville on 5 and 6 October 2026. No arrests were made and the cases were sent to the District Attorney for review.
On 25 September 2026 New Mexico's Regulation and Licensing Department Enforcement Bureau and the Organized Crime Commission raided 102 Howell Road in Estancia, Torrance County, seizing and destroying about 6,300 mature cannabis plants in 21 greenhouses weighing an estimated 21,000 pounds. The case remains open for prosecution.
On 16 September 2026 U.S. Forest Service officers, Glenn County’s Major Crimes Task Force and a Forest Service helicopter team eradicated about 700 cannabis plants from an illegal grow in remote Mendocino National Forest. No arrests were reported.
