POLICE GROWING THEIR POT BUSTS

Rich neighbourhood or poor, on the Mountain or below it, Stoney Creek
to Ancaster, it matters little.

Somewhere close to you, Hamilton police have found a marijuana grow
operation at one time or another.

"It's all over," said Superintendent Glyn Wide of the Hamilton Police
Service. "There's no one part."

So far this year, Hamilton police have seized over $6 million worth of
marijuana from grow operations and executed about 50 search warrants
for marijuana -- an average of about two per week.

And it might surprise Hamilton residents to learn that marijuana grow
houses can frequently be found in suburban, well-to-do
neighbourhoods.

Twenty years or more ago, said Wide, growing marijuana was a less
sophisticated pursuit that might have involved a flower pot or two on
a window ledge out of sight.

"But with the proliferation of drugs coming from British Columbia, it
began to become more organized," he added.

Now, individuals or organized groups will rent houses and turn them
into indoor farms by cutting into the electrical supply to avoid the
meter and finding creative ways to vent the excessive heat generated
from intense lighting to the outdoors.

"You'll have one person who's the farmer who's paid by someone higher
in the organization to go from house to house to house to check on the
operations and make sure everything's running smoothly," said Wide.

"They will use every room available," he added. "They don't care
because it's not their house. Who cares about mould or spores in the
house or contamination in the air."

The goal is to get the plants harvested and skip off to a new location
before suspicions are raised in the neighbourhood. Then the cycle
starts anew.

The stakes are lucrative. One large plant can provide about $1,000
worth of marijuana, and a typical grow house might have hundreds of
plants.

"If you've got 200 plants, you've got $200,000 possibly," said
Wide.

Once police have received a tip about a possible grow house, they can
use an infrared device to produce an image of the house that can then
be put forward to help obtain a search warrant.