HIGH GOAL FOR DRUGS

Police Unit Sets Quota Of $1m A Month In Pot Busts

City police drug-unit pot busters have been ordered to hit a new quota of
wiping out $1-million worth of marijuana a month.

And the new blitz is already ringing alarm bells among the city's huge army
of basement pot growers.

Last week alone, city police and RCMP drug busts took $2-million worth of
drugs off the streets.

"That's $2 million in one day in the city of Calgary," said Det. Gord
Renke, who is in charge of the four-man marijuana "green team" within the
drug unit.

"People we've arrested in organized crime tell us what effect we're
having," Renke said. "The response I've been getting is our current
campaign is making a lot of people nervous."

But police know they're fighting a huge uphill battle.

Crime intelligence suggests wiping out even $12-million worth of marijuana
in the next year may hardly make a dent in the quantities being grown.

Even crime intelligence doesn't know the total amount of pot being grown in
the multi-million-dollar industry flourishing in Calgary's basements.
"That's what we call the dark figure," Renke said. "That's the unknown
amount that's actually out there.

"We never actually know the full extent of the effect we're having."

Police believe there's at least $20 million worth of pot under lights in
city basements, but the figure could be much more.

At least 200 potential drug-growing houses have been reported to police,
but no one knows how many more are unreported.

The drug unit's four-man, marijuana-busting "green team" spearheads the
uphill fight, but even their $1-million-a-month quota can only take out 120
operations in a year.

Some may be as small as $70,000 busts, but many will rival two huge busts
last week, when $500,000-pot-growing operations were dismantled.

Some criminals at the lower end of the organized crime scale keep their
growing operations smaller so they won't get hit so hard by the courts when
they're caught.

And a few pot growers are set up to start a new operation as soon as their
existing one is wiped out by police.

One grower had a fake wall in his basement with equipment for a
marijuana-growing operation hidden behind it, aiming to start growing again
immediately police cleared out his first operation.

Eagle-eyed police saw the fake wall and took away both grows.

Calgary's growers have a high reputation in the drug world, with one pound
of Calgary marijuana worth one pound of California cocaine on the U.S.
black market.

"It's because they've got so much coke down there and we've got so much pot
up here," Renke said.