POT 'FARM' BUSTS BAD OMEN FOR N.H.

Key Points

Background: Law enforcement agencies last week seized 11 expensive
houses in New Hampshire that were being used to grow marijuana.

Conclusion: These pot growing operations are disturbing because they
show that organized crime has managed to gain a foothold in the
Granite State.

Until now, marijuana growing in New Hampshire has largely been a
garden variety crime.

The weather just isn't conducive to the high-intensity illegal
agriculture that has drawn drug gangs to the national forests and
parks of warmer states. But last week people woke up, and what they
smelled wasn't roses.

Law enforcement agencies seized 11 expensive homes in Andover,
Pembroke, Concord, Canterbury, Hopkinton, Weare and other communities
and confiscated 7,000 high-quality marijuana plants. The police called
it the biggest drug bust in state history.

The homes appear to be what are called grow-ops. Their basements are
lit by lamps like those used to illuminate the interstate and powered
with electricity stolen from utilities. If the New Hampshire
operations were being run like those discovered elsewhere, organized
crime finances the enterprise and farmers are paid a share of the profits.

Most of the people arrested so far are apparently recent Massachusetts
residents of Vietnamese ancestry. According to the Drug Enforcement
Administration, grow-ops are often run by groups of Vietnamese or
Hispanic people or by motorcycle gangs, but freelancers operate them
as well.

The confiscated plants, whose leaves and buds would sell for $3,000 to
$4,000 per pound, would be worth millions at maturity, authorities
said.

Money like that means there's a likelihood that more grow-ops exist
and that more will follow.

The discovery of big marijuana farms in small-town New Hampshire
raises a host of issues.

Does law enforcement have the resources to combat the problem and keep
it from growing worse? The answer is: Probably not.

Staff shortages are a fact of life in most departments. They've been
caused not so much by the public's unwillingness to spend on its own
protection as by the enormous diversion of federal resources away from
local law enforcement in favor of homeland security.

Time magazine recently reported that federal grants to local law
enforcement have dropped 45 percent since the 9/11 attacks.

The magazine also found that, driven by drugs and made worse by a lack
of law enforcement, crime has risen rapidly in midsize American
cities. Milwaukee is now one of the murder capitals of the nation.

It's time for the federal government to turn some of its attention to
hometown security, as Milwaukee's mayor said.

New Hampshire is safer than almost anywhere else, but that doesn't
mean it will stay that way without help.

Law enforcement has shut down more clandestine methamphetamine labs in
the state in the past two years than it had in the previous five.
Demand for drugs remains high, and drug-fueled crimes are increasing.

Mortgages are forfeited when property is seized, so lenders lose and
taxpayers win. Lenders lose, that is, unless they're in cahoots with
the growers and write the bad debt off as a cost of engaging in a
lucrative business.

At a minimum, illegal enterprises on the scale just uncovered in New
Hampshire mean that landlords and the real estate and banking
industries, as well as neighbors, the police and utilities, need to be
more alert to suspicious activity.

As long as an enormous amount of money can be made by manufacturing
illegal substances, greedy or desperate people will make them.

Last week's arrests put a dent in the supply and let organized crime
know that New Hampshire's on the lookout. But the drug busts were more
frightening than consoling because they suggest that not only can
organized crime operate here, but that it does.