GROW-YOUR-OWN POT IS BIG BUSINESS

It's all here for the taking: hydroponic equipment, grow lamps and seeds.
Everything you need to start your own indoor marijuana growing operation
can be had at the High Grow store on a rundown stretch of Monk Blvd in
Ville Emard.

Heck, they'll even throw in some friendly advice on how to make your garden
a success. And just next door is its sister store, the Hemp-Quebec head
shop. There you can get every conceivable bit of paraphernalia you'll need
to help you consume the fruits of your labour.

Worries about drug laws? Not in this small piece of Montreal real estate.

Upstairs the mastermind of the operation, Alain Berthiaume, sits fielding
telephone calls and dispensing packets of marijuana seeds from a converted
pop cooler to staffers who take them to waiting customers. It all seems to
please Bob Marley, the late king of reggae and ganja, who looks down
beatifically from a picture on the wall.

"Everything we sell is legal. It's what the people do with it ...,"
Berthiaume says between phone calls.

There is a steady stream of customers to the Monk Blvd. operation. Together
with sales over the Internet it brings in almost $1 million a year, its
owner says.

The growth of indoor marijuana cultivation over the past few years has been
incredible, Berthiaume enthuses.

"It's everywhere now. Everywhere," says the 48-year-old with gray hair
parted down the middle.

"We calculate that 17 per cent of population smokes. More one million
people smoke in Quebec. Can you imagine what kind of volume of merchandise
it takes just to meet the demand every day?"

The last time a survey was taken to assess how many Canadians smoke
cannabis was in 1994 when 7.4 per cent of the population over 15 years old
was found to indulge, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.

Whatever the exact number of users, there's no doubt Berthiaume is right
when he asserts that marijuana cultivation is a runaway growth industry.
Pot cultivation ranges from a plant growing in a smoker's closet to large,
automated hydroponic operations housing thousands of plants.

Statistics Canada reports criminal charges for cultivation of marijuana
have rocketed over the last 10 years (see graphic on page B3).

Criminal charges for production of marijuana in Canada jumped to 3,264 in
2000 from 93 in 1990.

The RCMP says a conservative estimate of Canadian marijuana production is
about 800 tonnes annually - further evidence the crop has become one of
Canada's most valuable agricultural commodities. More than 1.1 million
plants were seized by Canadian police forces in 2000.

Police say their investigations show plantations are increasingly moving
indoors and employing sophisticated growing techniques that produce
multiple crops of pot with mind-bending levels of THC, the psychoactive
drug in marijuana.

Busts of grow ops have become such a frequent occurrence they barely rate
more than a brief mention in newspapers except when they involve especially
large plantations. In Deux Montagnes before Christmas, for example, police
found $17 million worth of pot and hydroponic equipment in 17 unoccupied
homes in a new housing development called Mon Reve.

Catering to indoor pot growers is itself a huge industry. Certainly,
there's no shortage of places to buy equipment that can be used to grow
marijuana indoors in Montreal. The telephone book lists 18 companies
specializing in hydroponic supplies. Likewise, mail-order marijuana seed
suppliers abound on the Internet.

There's nothing illegal about selling hydroponic gear since, obviously, it
can be used just as easily to grow indoor tomatoes or zucchinis as pot.

The sale of seeds appears to be more of a gray zone.

A Surete du Quebec officer said it's definitely illegal. But Montreal
police commander Luc Rondeau said the sale of marijuana seeds isn't illegal
because they do not contain THC, the substance that is controlled by the
law. But both agree that using seeds to grow marijuana plants is definitely
illegal.

In the High Grow store, a clerk readily admits he's been growing for his
own consumption for 10 years. He currently is growing one plant that he
says will produce about 8 ounces of pot every two months - an option he
much prefers to paying over $200 an ounce for indoor-grown marijuana on the
black market. He maintains that for most of his customers, growing pot is a
hobby he likens to being a wine connoisseur.

A young customer who wanders in to buy some soil says he tends a larger
operation he says will produce about a pound of pot in two months.

He claims the production is for his personal use. After he leaves, the
clerk explains the customer is using a liberal definition of "personal use."

What he really means, the clerk explains, is he grows for his consumption
and that of a small circle of friends and acquaintances. Selling the pot
covers his growing expenses and earns some money to make ends meet.

"The best roommate is a 1,000-watt grow light (for a home grow op)," the
clerk says with a laugh. "It doesn't bring any friends home late at night.
It doesn't make noise. It provides you with weed and a little extra money."

But police aren't laughing and they aren't buying the idea that
grow-your-own hobbyists are driving the indoor pot industry.

Rather, they say its hard-eyed organized criminals, including outlaw biker
gangs, who are financing big pot-growing operations.

"We take away truckloads of equipment, worth tens of thousands of dollars
from these places," Rondeau said. "This isn't Joe Blow growing for himself,
his brother and his cousin."

"Increasingly, we find criminal organizations linked to marijuana
production operations," agreed Sgt. Jean Audette, co-ordinator of the
Surete du Quebec's program to eradicate pot cultivation. "It's funny to say
but there are people who have no link to the criminal world who are
involved in it."

Such cultivators say: "I don't know who I'm selling to and I don't want to
know," Audette maintains. But "it's like your grandmother's old clothes
wringer. Once you put your fingers into it, your whole arm goes through."

Audette insists the easy availability of pot is increasing usage. As
evidence, he referred to a report by a provincial anti-drug-addiction task
force estimating the number of Quebecers age 15 to 24 who consume marijuana
to the exclusion of other illicit drugs. Between 1992 and 1998, the figure
rose to 26 per cent from 15.

Despite appearances to the contrary, Audette maintains police are making
headway against pot growing.

"Police efforts are raising the iceberg from under water," he says. "The
increase in seizures is greater than the increase in production."

Still, chance often plays a bigger role than detective work in leading
police to marijuana plantations.

Police stumble on marijuana growing operations in the course of their work
on other matters. Several grow ops were discovered, for example, by police
making rounds of blacked out houses during the 1998 ice storm.

As well, the circulating water and high-voltage lamps of hydroponic
operations can sometimes cause water damage or fires that alert authorities
to the presence of a marijuana plantation.

Hydro-Quebec is another important source of tips: its meter readers
occasionally come across tampering by marijuana growers who steal
electricity for their high-intensity lamps.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Web site states its efforts to
halt indoor growing have gone so far as to include thermal imaging, a
process that identifies indoor marijuana grows by detecting the signature
heat from lighting used to grow the plants.

Marijuana advocates contend authorities exaggerate both the involvement of
organized crime in marijuana growing and police success in combating the
phenomenon.

"I think it's a cottage industry," said Marc-Boris St. Maurice, leader of
the federal Marijuana Party, which was founded in 2000 to push for the
legalization of cannabis.

He conceded there are large organizations involved in pot cultivation but
added the trade can't be controlled by a criminal organization the way
imported drugs like cocaine and heroin are.

"Anyone can grow marijuana and they don't necessarily have to sell it to
any specific circuit or group of people."

With millions of Canadians regularly smoking pot, police enforcement
efforts are futile, he said.

Marc Emery, a Vancouver activist who's been billed Canada's prince of pot,
said he believes police action against marijuana grow-ops across the
country is the most aggressive it's been in 15 years. But crackdowns have
the perverse effect of encouraging more growing, not less, said Emery,
president of the Marijuana Party of British Columbia and publisher of
Cannabis Culture magazine among other marijuana-focused business activities.

"This constant busting of people is keeping prices very high for a typical
Canadian to afford. You need $3,000 a year to supply a one-ounce a month
habit," he said. "That's a lot of money. So people are going to start
growing it on their own."

Back in the High Grow store, the friendly clerk says proof of the spread of
pot cultivation can be found in the thriving business at stores like his.

"They're growing like mushrooms, the hydroponic companies," he says. "If
you calculated the number of lighting systems we and other companies have
sold in the last two years and put a pin on the map for each one, it would
be totally covered with pins."