SUBURBS ARE FERTILE FIELDS FOR POT FARMERS

LAWRENCEVILLE, GA. - In Coldwater Creek, a middle-class housing
development outside Atlanta, the neighbors mind their own business and
respect each other's privacy - ideal conditions, it turns out, for
growing marijuana in the suburbs.

Police this month raided an utterly ordinary-looking, redbrick house
on the block and broke up a pot-growing operation with 680 plants
arrayed under bright lights.

"You'd never know from the outside. I guess that's the idea," said
Doug Augis, who lives with his pregnant wife and a toddler in
Coldwater Creek. "That doesn't give you a really good feeling."

Around the country, investigators are increasingly seeing suburban
homes in middle-class and well-to-do neighborhoods turned into indoor
marijuana farms. Typically, investigators find an empty home, save a
mattress, a couple of chairs, some snacks in the fridge and an
elaborate setup of soil-free growing trays.

Grow houses have been a problem for years in California and Canada,
but investigators are now seeing scores of them in the South and New
England. In the past six weeks alone, more than 70 have been uncovered
in northern Georgia - nearly 10 times last year's total for the entire
state. Only one was busted in 2005.

Indoor pot farms also have been discovered in recent months in
residential areas of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New York, North
Carolina and Florida.

Crackdowns in Canada and elsewhere have apparently led some operators
to move into parts of the United States where the public and police
are not as familiar with the operations and are less likely to detect
them, authorities say.

"They can go in and basically fly under the radar," said Ruth
Porter-Whipple, spokeswoman for the Atlanta field division of the Drug
Enforcement Administration. "These aren't neighborhoods where they
would stand out."

In Georgia, the latest busts averaged about 200 plants per house. With
each plant yielding $4,000 on average per harvest, that works out to
about $3.2 million a year, considering the plants can be harvested
every three months.

The DEA said more than 400,000 plants with a potential annual value of
$6.4 billion were seized from grow houses in the United States last
year - up from about 270,000 the year before. That is less than 10
percent of the marijuana plant seizures in the United States; most pot
is grown outdoors on farms and in ditches, backyards and gardens.

Grow houses typically grow marijuana hydroponically - that is, using a
nutrient solution instead of soil. They also use 24-hour-a-day
lighting to produce plants more rapidly. Typically, the windows are
covered, and the electrical system is rigged to conceal its usage.