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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 12:08 am Post subject: A growing concern |
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| Quote: | A growing concern
Gone are the days of amateur enthusiasts with a greenhouse. Criminal gangs have taken cannabis cultivation to Britain's suburbs. Patrick Barkham investigates
mmm cannabis!
Growing your own was once the preserve of hobbyists and hippies with access to a greenhouse or remote allotment - organised crime didn't bother with marijuana plants. In the past five years, however, international drug gangs have abandoned cannabis smuggling and have started growing the drug in Britain. As a result, the UK has gone from producing 15% of its own cannabis in 2002 to up to around 90% today. What was a cottage industry is now a slick and secret network of factories and farms, many based in respectable suburbs.
This year alone, police have discovered cannabis factories in Portsmouth, Lincoln, Doncaster, Yeading, Peterborough, Swansea, Norwich, Swindon, Hertford, Hetton-le-Hole near Sunderland, Littleport in Cambridgeshire, Blackpool, Stewarton in Ayrshire and dozens of other towns and cities. After busting four operations in one day in April, Cardiff police were not surprised - they were uncovering, on average, one factory every week, they said. More than 300 cannabis were discovered in the West Midlands last year, while detectives estimated that a factory found near Scunthorpe in April contained plants worth £4m.
Many of the factories are run by foreign gangs, according to the police, and there have recently been a spate of prosecutions of people from Vietnam. A young Vietnamese couple were last month sentenced to 27 months and 18 months in jail respectively for running a £7m network of factories in seven rented houses in Reading, while three Vietnamese men were jailed for seven years each for using a chain of beauty parlours called Planet Nails in Croydon and Camberley, Surrey, as a front for large-scale cannabis cultivation.
In almost all cases, the modus operandi is the same: anonymous suburban houses are rented out, often with rent paid for a year in advance. The houses are kitted out with heaters, lighting, bags of compost, sprinkler systems, fast-growing strains of skunk cannabis and a tenant to look after them. These "gardeners" are usually young, seldom speak English and work under duress - the victims of human traffickers. A factory costs £20,000 to establish, but that can be recouped by a first harvest after just eight weeks. In a year, a factory can yield up to £500,000.
They may be concealed in ordinary houses or on nondescript industrial estates but one thing tends to give away the growing operations: heat. During the winter, several were spotted during snowfalls because the conditions needed to grow the plants were hot enough to melt the snow from their roofs. In terraced houses, high temperatures can make neighbours' wallpaper peel off. Police use thermal imaging equipment from helicopters or cars to detect unusually warm houses. High electricity consumption can also betray a cannabis factory, although gangs commonly bypass metres and hack into the mains, sometimes sparking house fires.
Although some factories seem particularly ingenious - police busted an underground operation built from buried cargo containers at a farm near Burgess Hill, West Sussex, earlier this year - most recent discoveries have been in anonymous neighbourhoods with plentiful supplies of cheap rented accommodation.
Bournemouth is one such town. In February, a cannabis farm was discovered in a rented house in a popular student street when it went up in flames. The fire followed a series of raids on houses in the area under Operation Dismantle, whereby Dorset police have tried to get a grip on cannabis production in the once genteel seaside town. Raids in January uncovered two cannabis factories in ordinary houses in the suburb of Winton. In total this year, Operation Dismantle has discovered and shut down 14 cannabis factories in Bournemouth and Poole.
Dirk Lewis, 24, a psychology student, lives opposite the house where a cannabis factory caught fire. "My friend opened the window and it was like having a spliff. I looked through the window and saw policemen, firemen and the whole blaze. They were throwing burning cannabis plants out of the window," he says. He had no idea the factory was directly opposite; he assumed the house was empty or that students lived there. "There are only a few houses where people live here for more than a year. It's all 11-month contracts. When you're at uni you don't keep track of what's going on next door."
Another local resident, who prefers not to be named, has lived on the street for 27 years. There is a faded Neighbourhood Watch sticker in her window but no one knows what's going on any more, she says. "It's worrying. You see people coming and going. It used to be all families. Nowadays, apart from my friends next door, I don't know anybody in the street at all."
"Bournemouth is no different to any other place in the country," says Superintendent Stuart Katon, who heads Operation Dismantle. "It's just the fact that we've taken a positive stance on it." His tactic, he says, has been to "hit them hard and hit them early with maximum publicity" and he believes organised criminals are now deterred from setting up factories in the town as a result.
In Bournemouth - as everywhere - most factory-related arrests are of the people who are caught "gardening" the cannabis inside. Katon admits it is "very difficult" to track down and arrest factory organisers higher up the chain.
"Some cities are targeted more than others and ours appears to be one," says Detective Inspector Michael Branston, senior investigating officer for Operation Tooting, a crackdown on secret factories in Peterborough. His officers have disrupted more than 30 cannabis factories - each with an average value of an average value of £100,000 - since October. With thermal imaging equipment and tip-offs from local people increasingly alert to the signs of cannabis factories, they can be identified "with relatively little effort". "It doesn't seem to stop them," says Branston. "You can't keep closing down factories, you've got to look at the next level. That's the only way you can stop them from springing up."
The gangs running the factories are "very organised, very secretive," says Branston. "The intelligence is not forthcoming. It's very much a closed scene." Operation Tooting is focused on the drug chain beyond the factories. "We've been looking at what type of premises have been used and whether they are coming from particular letting agents," says Branston.
Why have these factories proliferated? It has not been led by demand: paradoxically, the factory boom has come against a backdrop of a gradual fall in cannabis use. Nor has it caused price falls in cannabis by flooding the streets with skunk. Home-grown cannabis has simply replaced imported cannabis. Earlier this year, the government's expert committee on drugs was told the rise in the use of "home-grown skunk" was because of these factories. Cannabis smuggling, it seems, is too difficult and costly.
International police operations have disrupted smuggling routes while foreign governments, such as Morocco, have cracked down on domestic production and cannabis resin exports.
Some link the flourishing factories to the downgrading of cannabis from a class B to a class C drug in 2004 - a decision that the home secretary has now recommended be reversed. But Martin Barnes from the charity DrugScope says the connection is coincidental. "There was no reduction in the maximum sentence for the supply of cannabis when it was reclassified," he says. "Canada and Australia have had a similar experience."
Allan Gibson, the Association of Chief Police Officers' lead on tackling cannabis cultivation, agrees that it was not the reclassification of cannabis but a mixture of "criminal enterprise, opportunism and spotting a market opening" by international gangs. Similar factories set up across northern Europe in countries including Denmark, says Gibson, show the globalisation of this production.
Disrupting factories does hit gangs' profits, but officers know they have to go further to dismantle this business model. Gibson would like to see more vigilance from landlords and letting agencies accepting cash-in-advance rental deals and not checking on their properties, and also a crackdown on the (legal) suppliers of hydroponic growing equipment. "Ten minutes' research on the internet and you could go about setting up," he says. He would like to see sellers licenced and obliged to keep records of who they sell equipment to.
Cannabis factories are a national problem now, says Gibson. So far, police crackdowns have only shifted the problem on: the successful closure of so many operations in London may have caused more factories to turn up in suburban towns. The Metropolitan police closed down 208 factories in the 12 months to April 2005, then an astonishing 648 factories in the following 12 months. A Metropolitan police authority report suggests expensive house-rental prices in the capital may also have shifted production to suburbia.
Some may see a fairly harmless novelty in these cannabis factories, but their social effects are profound. The gangs are linked to people smugglers and trafficked teenagers are often found forced to be "gardeners", virtually imprisoned in the overheated farms. While many factories are invisible, neighbourhoods are woken at night by police helicopter patrols and by day local residents are increasingly scared of anonymous neighbours and suspicious of completely innocent foreign students who may move in. And there are genuine concerns about the effects, particularly on teenage users, of the stronger skunk grown in the factories.
Factory operators are now looking to foil increasingly successful police action by putting operations in basements and using technology to conceal their "heat footprint". Police have also found a number of factories to be booby-trapped, not only to thwart detectives but to keep out rival gangs. According to Barnes, "There is evidence that as this market matures there will be more potential for inter-gang rivalry and violence." Maybe what we are witnessing now will be looked back on as the innocent early days of a growing industry. |
from http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/26/ukcrime.drugsandalcohol
someone needs to tell these growers about c3 anti detection film - its 90% infrared camera proof 
its makes me wonder what the future holds for cannabis, theres a huge industry thats grown up around the growing and smoking of it, theres new growshops, seedbanks and all sorts starting up all the time, theres all the paraphernalia that goes with it, all the papers ( rizla know who are buying their king size papers! ), pipes, bongs etc ( not to mention lots of business for fast food places! ) its weird because that side of its all legit, the governments taking tax off it all - and yet cannabis is illegal ... its weird. a few years back i thought we might be heading towards legalisation ... now they seem to be getting more hardcore again  |
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Iro
Joined: 19 Jun 2008
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| Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 12:49 am Post subject: |
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I saw a police team with a hand held infa-red camera walking along my street a few weeks ago pointing it up at roofing of houses ..... idiots.
This is a massive car crime centre, and all they do is waste their time looking for people growing pot in their roof space. Talk about priorities |
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Brown Sauce
Joined: 07 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 8:58 pm Post subject: |
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| just who the hell is Patrick Barkham ? He'd be better off going back to reporting on weddings I think a whole load of this is at best highly exaggerated if not totally made up nonsense. |
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