SURREY FIRE PLAN SMOKES OUT AREA GROW-OPS

As the small station wagon loaded with plastic water pipes sped around
the blind corner north of Mission recently, I didn't notice anything
unusual -- but the RCMP constable standing next to me certainly did.

We were waiting for a tow truck following my involvement in a minor
motor-vehicle accident and the officer immediately recognized the
station wagon's cargo as marijuana grow-op equipment.

His quick computer check showed the licence plate didn't belong on
that vehicle, but it wasn't quick enough and the nervous-looking young
driver escaped.

As the officer subsequently explained, I'd just witnessed a sign of
the times in the Fraser Valley, where grow-ops are arguably the
region's most valuable agricultural crop, as they likely are elsewhere
in B.C.

However, the Valley is also where Dr. Darryl Plecas is located. This
noted criminology professor at the University College of the Fraser
Valley and his team have gained considerable success in fighting the
prolific growth of B.C. grow-ops and the high public costs they
inflict -- far more than our courts.

In fact, the results that Plecas and his associates have achieved now
attract worldwide attention.

He recently returned from a prestigious conference on drugs at Oxford
in the U.K., where he was invited to present a paper on his team's new
ways of combating grow-ops.

In a nutshell, his research team works on the premise that because the
B.C. grow-op problem is so large, there's not nearly enough capacity
by police or the courts to deal with it.

So rather than attack grow-ops as a criminal offence -- which isn't
working anyway -- attack them where they're most vulnerable -- namely
as businesses that make huge profits.

And the Plecas group does this by approaching the problem from a
public-safety point of view.

When a suspected grow-op is identified, often through abnormally high
residential electricity consumption, civic bylaw, fire, police and
building-code authorities descend en masse on the property and, after
discovering the grow-op, they nail the occupant/owner with numerous
compliance orders which, in effect, shuts the property down or at
least burdens grow operators with massive remediation costs and fees.

Once on the list, grow-op culprits are continually checked, harassed,
etc., to the point where many of them simply move out of town.

"The justice system is inept at dealing with this problem so, instead,
we've created a system of major disruptions to a grow-operators'
business," Plecas explains. "That's the program I outlined at Oxford."

Officially it's known as the Electrical Fire Safety Initiative,
primarily because a house containing a grow-op is 29 times more likely
to catch fire than a regular house, Plecas says.

And since it began in Surrey on an experimental basis more than a year
ago, the initiative has achieved remarkable results. More than 1,000
in Surrey at the end of 2006 have been reduced to less than 100 a year
later, and Surrey's grow-op restart rate is now virtually zero.

"We're bringing the grow-op problem down to a manageable level," adds
Surrey Fire Chief Len Garis, one of the initiative's
co-founders.

The program is now expanding to other communities, including Richmond,
Coquitlam, Langley Township, Abbotsford, Chilliwack and Langley City..