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National Drug Intelligence Center |
The diversion and abuse of CPDs will remain significant threats in the Appalachia HIDTA region. Traffickers and abusers will continue to circumvent efforts to prevent CPD diversion in the region by increasingly traveling to Florida, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee to obtain CPDs for personal use and retail-level distribution.
Outdoor cannabis cultivation in the Appalachia HIDTA region will continue at high levels, generally in remote outdoor areas where Caucasian criminal groups and independent dealers have established long-standing, entrenched growing operations. Growers will continue to locate sites near water sources and will most likely develop a greater number of small plots, rather than large plots, to avoid law enforcement detection. Some growers who had refrained from engaging in cannabis cultivation as a result of successful eradication efforts may return to sites that they had previously tended, possibly believing that the sites will not be reexamined once eradication teams move to other locations. Cultivation sites will pose increasing hazards to law enforcement officers and passersby as a result of intensified efforts on the part of grow site operators to protect their crops from discovery, thievery, and eradication efforts.
Local methamphetamine production will most likely increase moderately in the near term. The resurgence of small-scale methamphetamine production and the emergence of pseudoephedrine smurfing operations in the region create conditions conducive to an increase in local methamphetamine production. The use of the one-pot, or shake and bake, method of methamphetamine production will continue to increase in the region.
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