THE CROOK NEXT DOOR

In your seemingly serene suburb, you could live beside a major pot-growing
operation and not know it

In a nondescript, low-rise warehouse on the outskirts of downtown St.
Catharines sit the spoils of 44 marijuana raids.

Boxes of brand-new light-bulbs, shiny lamps, industrial-strength fans,
glare shields, electrical ballasts, televisions and VCRs worth thousands of
dollars fill the 278 square metres (3,000 square feet) of storage space in
the building. Most is headed for destruction.

The debris is the remnant of multimillion-dollar production facilities,
established in normal-looking homes in regular residential neighbourhoods.
The final product is usually destined for the United States.

Standing amidst the remains is Tom MacLean, head of the Niagara Regional
Police morality unit. He's asked what happens to the people who once owned
all this stuff, used in the cultivation of marijuana.

"Jail time is very rare and only in exceptional circumstances," he said.
"That's why they're in Canada."

Over the past two years, marijuana growers have spread their operations
from the West Coast across the Prairies and to Ontario, a movement some
lawmakers are calling a national epidemic.

Niagara police have raided 30 homes in the last 12 months, seizing more
than $7 million worth of plants and the equipment needed to grow them.

And while there are still a few mom-and-pop "grow houses," increasingly
it's members of highly-organized crime groups who are running full-scale
operations in new homes converted solely for the purpose of marijuana
production.

The conversions have firefighters citing safety issues because of shoddy
wiring and chemical usage. Hydro companies are faced with huge losses.
Police struggle to uphold the law and shut down the operations.

But marijuana advocates say they wouldn't be hiding it if the crops were
legalized.

The houses can range from smaller bungalows to estate mansions in upscale
neighbourhoods. In almost every case, they appear unoccupied; the owners or
renters rarely seen, coming and going in the early hours of the morning.

Intelligence services in Canada and the United States say more and more of
the large-scale operations popping up in Ontario are run by Asian organized
crime groups. The phenomena surfaced over the last two years, when
operators spread east from British Columbia, where it is estimated there
are 10,000 operations in Vancouver alone.

The 2001 Criminal Intelligence Service Canada annual report says there has
been an increase in Asian-run marijuana growing operations across the
country, especially in Calgary and southern Ontario, and it forecasts
expanded involvement of Asian gangs in the growing and exporting of marijuana.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is keeping tabs on the expanding
Canadian marijuana trade, noting the majority of operations are run by
Vietnamese organized crime groups or associates of the Hells Angels
Motorcycle Club.

While the DEA notes there is little evidence of the two groups working
together, there has been one reported case of a Hells Angels associate
smuggling marijuana across the border for a Vietnamese organization in Canada.

Niagara police Chief Gary Nicholls said police are seeing greater
co-operation among organized crime groups that used to work independently.
The "blurring of lines" may mean one group grows the product, another
distributes it and a third acts as the enforcement arm.

"As groups in Niagara become more entrenched in the community, I think
you'll see these alliances," he said. "You'll see them co-operating for the
huge dollars that are available for what appear to be, by virtue of
penalty, minimal risk."

Not all marijuana operations raided in Niagara belong to Asian gangs, but
they are becoming more prevalent. And big.

Inside the houses, the growing conditions of summer are replicated.
High-powered lights, including 1,000-watt bulbs valued at $120 apiece, and
$350 electrical ballasts fed with stolen electricity provide the artificial
sunlight. The windows are often blacked out. In the basement, rows of
plants are nurtured until they grow to the size of Christmas trees.

Inside, the heat is intense, creating condensation on the windows and
causing structural damage to the home. The high levels of moisture and heat
cause floors to warp, creating a perfect environment for the proliferation
of mould spores.

"It's humid," said Sergeant Michael Klimm of York Regional Police. "They're
like greenhouses, these places. I've been in houses where the drywall is
falling off the ceiling, it's so damp in there."

York police headed Operation Green Sweep, a nationwide crackdown on grow
houses at the end of January. The effort produced $56.2 million in seized
marijuana, $4 million in equipment and $75,000 cash. Of the 189 homes
raided, a little more than half had by-passed hydro lines.

St. Catharines Hydro estimates the average grow house steals about $2,000
worth of electricity a month. It's become such a huge problem, the hydro
company is setting up an internal committee within the next few weeks to
try and combat it.

"We're starting to dig into this ourselves," said Frank Fabiano,
vice-president of customer service. "It's getting a lot worse than we
originally thought it was, so we need to really put our minds together on
this and try to beat this thing."

A typical homeowner pays about $80 a month for hydro, Fabiano said,
compared to the $2,000 in electricity stolen by a marijuana operator.
Growers use 14,000 to 15,000 kilowatt hours of power a month --19 times
more than the average consumer.

They do it by tapping into underground wires before the power reaches the
meter so the company has no way of knowing the energy is being diverted.
St. Catharines Hydro, Niagara Falls Hydro and the Ontario Energy Board have
no way of estimating how much money they are losing.

Any known losses are passed on to the consumer.

"The rest of the city picks up the tab," Fabiano said. "You may have an
increase in rate; it's minimal, mind you, but it is an increase in rate
that shouldn't be borne on the rest of the community. It should be borne by
those people that created this mess, committed the crime."

Besides the loss of hydro, rewiring a home into an industrial greenhouse
without going through the proper channels is dangerous. Niagara has seen 13
hydroponic operations go up in smoke in the last three years, putting
residents, neighbours and emergency personnel at risk.

In the worst cases, firefighters, believing power has been shut off, are
spraying water on blazes while wires are still being fed from alternative
sources.

"It's a public safety issue for sure," said MacLean.

Bypassed hydro also means the ground could be charged if the wires are not
taped up properly, putting anyone who trespasses, including children, at
risk of electrocution.

And if the grower closes up shop, any of these problems could be covered up
with paint, York's Klimm said.

"You're buying a house and you have no idea there was a grow in there," he
said. "So you could be getting dry rot setting in, the wires could still
start a fire. You're buying a death trap if you don't know it was a hydro
grow before you bought it."

Despite the dangers, penalties for operators who have been busted haven't
caught up with the scale of the marijuana operations. The problem, say law
enforcement officials, is penalties handed out by the courts are not acting
as a deterrent.

"These particular offences seem to have been viewed by the courts not as
seriously as we would have hoped they would be," said Nicholls. "We believe
this is a very active criminal organization nationally and the appreciation
of the judicial system is not such that it deters these individuals."

In the United States, production of a 100 plants or more brings a maximum
sentence of 40 years. If 1,000 plants are produced, the maximum is life in
prision. But under the Criminal Code, production of marijuana carries a
maximum sentence of seven years -- punishment usually ranges from a fine to
a conditional sentence.

"It is a nationwide epidemic," MacLean said. "There is no general deterrent
in Canada."

Nicholls will be asking the Niagara police services board to call for
legislative changes and more effective deterrents, as Waterloo Region's
police board did recently. He said the police community is generally not
satisfied with the penalties, given the high profit margins of marijuana
production.

Things may be changing. Earlier this month, a Guelph man was sentenced to
10 months in jail for producing a controlled substance and stealing
electricity. A judge in Kitchener sentenced a city man to 12 months in jail
for operating a marijuana grow house in January -- a crime that up until
then in that region brought conditional sentences to be served at home.

Welland federal prosecutor Gordon McNab said he will be asking for jail
terms in the larger cases he is currently handling.

"What we have now is an epidemic of very large-scale and high-quality
hydroponic marijuana growing," he said. "This is major crime. This is not
some guy growing 15 plants upstairs because he and his buddy smoke it."

But more jail time and tougher fines are not the answer, said Marc-Boris
St-Maurice, leader of the Marijuana Party of Canada. In keeping with the
raison d'etre of the party, he is pushing for the end of marijuana
prohibition. Once legalized, many of the ills associated with the drug,
including the grow-house operations, would cease to be an issue, he said.

"No one is stealing hydro to grow tomatoes or tobacco," said St-Maurice.
"All of this stems from prohibition. The day marijuana is legalized, people
are not going to bypass hydro, people are not going to feel the need to
camouflage what they're doing."

He added the primary reason for the covert nature of the grow houses is not
financial. Rather, the darkened windows, bypassed hydro and empty houses
are part of the scheme to avoid detection.

"In a legitimate context, people would be more than happy to pay their
bills," he said. "If people wanted to grow inside their home, they could
get a certified electrician and other security standards put in.

"They're not doing it now because who is going to call a certified
electrician to come check out their pot plantation?"

But even as he fights to have the drug legalized, St-Maurice admits the
current laws are not meeting their desired purpose.

"Current prohibition is serving nothing," he said. "It's not serving as a
deterrent to use, that's most obvious. It's a flawed policy.

"In the past 50 years of prohibition, all we've seen is an increase in use.
Obviously, this policy is not achieving the desired goals."

The House of Commons will be voting on a private member's bill to
decriminalize marijuana. Introduced by Dr. Keith Martin, Canadian Alliance
MP for Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca near Victoria, B.C., the proposal would not
make marijuana legal, but would reduce the severity of a simple possession
charge.

Instead of court time and punishment, possession would result in a ticket
and fine, not unlike a traffic infraction.

"We can save many millions of dollars by decriminalizing, not legalizing,
simple marijuana possession," Martin said. "You don't have to go through
the court system. We save money in policing costs, court costs, judicial
costs, lawyers' fees."

But Martin's efforts face an uphill climb. Private member's bills rarely
make it into law, and there is stiff opposition from the ruling Liberals,
including St. Catharines MP Walt Lastewka.

"I come from the school where if you open it an inch, people will want a
mile," Lastewka said. "I am so against drugs. I have seen the damage drugs
do to individuals and families and businesses."

Instead of decriminalizing, Lastewka said tougher penalties should be
enacted, especially for production and trafficking.

"We should be penalizing more," he said. "They're breaking the law and
they're hurting our kids with the stuff they're growing."

Of the $400 million spent annually on drug enforcement, Martin predicts
decriminalization would redirect $150 million of it from arresting
teenagers and others for simple possession to fighting organized crime and
the traffickers of illicit drugs.

"Growing is still illegal, trafficking is still illegal, but simple
possession is not," he said. "The savings would enable police to go after
the real criminals, which are the organized crime gangs."

But Nicholls said Niagara police are already dedicating significant
resources to the larger operations, because that's where they can make the
biggest difference.

"This is a very, very profitable criminal enterprise with implications that
are serious and significant in our communities," Nicholls said. "We have to
be there to render safe to the extent our resources allow and we have to
dedicate resources to putting a stop to these things."

Since January, the force has shut down 15 marijuana operations, and
Nicholls said they are preparing warrants for several more.

"Potentially, there are many, many more of them out there than we have any
idea of at this particular point in time," he said. "We are busy and taxed
to the limit just dealing with the ones we are becoming aware of."

Marijuana plants seized in a raid are destroyed by police within hours. The
equipment is kept as evidence until the cases are cleared through the
courts. Last month, equipment in the St. Catharines warehouse, seized in
raids dating back to 1997, was loaded into a dumpster and shipped to
Hamilton for crushing. The drug unit needed the space.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," MacLean said. "It is going to be an
ongoing effort."