MEDICAL MARIJUANA BOOM A BOON FOR ILLEGAL, SOMETIMES DANGEROUS, CULTIVATION

OAKLAND - Buckingham Boulevard residents are hypervigilant about
watching out for their neighborhood, quick to report anything
suspicious. But a police detective's early morning knock at one
neighbor's front door was the first clue that something illegal was
happening inside the house across the street. The detective said
there would be a raid, and suggested the neighbor might want to leave
in case there was gunfire. When the man drove back up the canyon a
few hours later, police were still hauling out marijuana plants, bags
of buds, money and growing equipment from two expensive, hillside
homes that had housed an extensive indoor pot farm.

"These people were growing $1 million worth of pot and I had no clue
at all," said the resident, who asked that his name not be used
because the ringleader escaped during the police raid and has never
been caught. "They had two houses, one to grow the pot and another
house where they packaged it for sale. The amazing thing is I talked
to the people who lived in the house between the two, and they had no clue."

The luxury enclave in the Oakland hills may seem far removed from a
Chinatown fortune cookie factory, a Hayward warehouse, or suburban
tract homes in Brentwood or Antioch. But they all have one thing in
common: they were used to illegally cultivate potent indoor varieties
of marijuana, often right under the noses of their neighbors.

The lucrative and illegal indoor ganja market is growing, fueled by
the demand for medical marijuana, experts say, and it's only a matter
of time before someone is seriously hurt in a grow-house fire or by
armed intruders trying to steal plants that can yield thousands or
millions of dollars in sales.

Last month, a grower in Oakland was shot in the leg by two masked men
who didn't want to bother cultivating their own weed. He survived,
but others have not been as lucky. The same day, less than a
quarter-mile away, a smoky fire broke out in a small house brimming
with about 400 pungent, bud-rich plants. The next day, a small house
fire in Antioch proved to be the undoing for the owner of a 500-plant crop.

Marijuana advocates believe that legalization of the herb will put a
dent in the black-market dealers who are causing the biggest risk to
public safety.

A statewide measure on the November ballot would, if approved, give
cities the right to regulate and tax commercial production and sales
of marijuana for recreational use. And Oakland Councilmembers Rebecca
Kaplan and Larry Reid will soon introduce an ordinance to regulate
marijuana cultivation by licensing a limited number of large
commercial growers to supply dispensaries. The growers would be
required to obtain a business license and building permit to make
sure the operation is up to code. They would have to hire security
and, like the dispensaries, pay taxes. Kaplan said the new oversight
would clamp down on illegal growers, reduce the fire hazard and put a
dent in the criminal element.

But El Cerrito Police Chief Scott Kirkland, a member of the
California Police Chiefs Association who has written extensively on
the topic and opposes efforts to legalize pot, said there is just too
much money and gang activity in illegal cultivation to think that all
the growers will melt away or go legit based on a few new laws.

"It's very dangerous, the new push for legalization," he said. "It's
naive to think decriminalization will take care of the problem."

Nearly every week in the Bay Area, police or firefighters uncover
large indoor crops. There were 28 in Oakland alone in 2009, but
unlike certified medical marijuana patients or caregivers who are
allowed to grow up to 72 plants each, these busts usually involve
several hundred plants. Sometimes the grows are operated by
professional crime rings across several cities and multiple homes or
warehouses. More often, the indoor grows involve crops grown by
individuals trying to cash in on the medical marijuana boom.

Improvements in indoor growing equipment, readily available at local
stores, can turn someone with a brown thumb into a weed king, experts
say, but it doesn't make a person smart.

"It's interesting, and also alarming from a community safety
standpoint," Kirkland said. "It exists everywhere."

Fire: It's in the wiring

Many indoor grows are discovered only after a fire has started,
usually sparked by overtaxed electrical systems that are not designed
to carry the heavy load of lights, fans and automatic watering
systems required for successful indoor cultivation.

Metal halide lamps or high-pressure sodium lights favored for growing
have surface temperatures that can reach 1,000 degrees. Add exhaust
fans and automatic irrigation systems and you've got a potent recipe
for overloading a structure's electrical capacity.

"A lot of times people will set up a grow operation "... and not
upgrade the electrical," said Oakland fire investigator Maria
Sabatini. "A typical house in Oakland built in the 1940s might have
15-amp circuits. Two or three (grow) lamps will take that up."

All that growing equipment can cause a spike in electrical usage.
PG&E spokeswoman Tamar Sarkissian said the utility cooperates with
law enforcement subpoenas or search warrants, but she said employees
could be put at risk if they were required to report suspicious
activity. She also said there are legitimate reasons why a home's
power usage might go up.

Sometimes growers will hire an electrician to upgrade their
electrical system to handle the industrial-sized load. But most seem
to want to do it themselves, and that can lead to disastrous results.
Illegal growers frequently pirate electrical power by hacking into
the electrical source before it reaches the PG&E meter and then
rerouting the wiring to provide electricity to the grow operation.

That practice creates a hazard for firefighters who think they are
shutting off power at the meter only to discover once inside that the
structure is still "hot" in more ways than one, Sabatini said.

That's what happened at the Mar Kee Fortune Cookie Factory in
Oakland, where 1,000 leafy plants went up in smoke. The growers had
accessed an underground PG&E vault under the front sidewalk and ran
new power lines up the outside of the building and in through a hole
near the roof. They added professional-looking circuitry to handle
the demand, but the power pirates apparently didn't do as good a job
with the wiring.

"Electrocutions are what worry me the most," Sabatini said. "At the
cookie factory, the firefighters didn't have any idea that the system
had been modified illegally. They were lucky."

Oakland police Sgt. Barry Donelan, a member of the department's arson
and bomb squad, said many firefighters are apprehensive about
fighting fires in marijuana grows for that very reason. He estimated
that 30 to 40 of the cases he's handled over the past three years
involved fires, 20 of which were sent to the district attorney for
possible felony prosecution. His cases have a particular combination:
illegal cultivation, a fire caused by reckless disregard that creates
a threat to public safety, such as illegal wiring, and the fire's
cause can't be reasonable.

That last part is straightforward, he said, because it's not
reasonable to cultivate large crops of marijuana in a residential house.

"During interviews, they say they have (medical marijuana ID) cards
and their grow is legal. But it's still a felony to cause a fire that
puts public safety at risk," he said.

Magnets for crime

Overheated wiring is not the only concern for law enforcement. Police
officers investigating other crimes or serving search warrants
sometimes discover indoor pot crops and weapons the growers use to
defend their lucrative operation. There have been several cases where
medicinal marijuana clubs or personal pot growers have been robbed,
assaulted and even killed:

In May, a grower was tied up, beaten and then shot in the leg by two
men who invaded his upstairs apartment and tried to force him to give
up the key to a large-scale cultivation operation he had set up
downstairs in a commercial storefront on San Leandro Street in East Oakland.

In December, the owner of a downtown Oakland barber shop was wounded
by an armed man who entered his shop. Police officers who arrived at
the scene uncovered an indoor crop of pot.

In October, a 43-year-old Orinda man was shot four times while
guarding his friend's medicinal marijuana crop in North Oakland. The
woman who owned the plants told police it wasn't the first time a
thief had attempted to steal her crop.

In January 2007, an editor for PC World Magazine was shot and killed
by one of four masked men who broke into his Pittsburg home to steal
marijuana plants.

In August 2007, an Oakland man was shot and killed while trying to
break into a grow operation on Magnolia Street in West Oakland.

Innocent neighbors can become victims when crooks get their addresses
crossed. Alameda County Chief deputy district attorney Tom Rogers
said that six people were recently arrested for breaking into a condo
in Oakland because they thought pot was grown there.

"The residents had only been there a month and they had guns held to
their heads," he said. "It was very traumatic."

Under the radar

Sometimes those neighbors have their suspicions, but more often than
not they are the last to know.

The sounds of hammering and sawing gave neighbors hope that the small
white house on Angelo Street in East Oakland, vacant for months, was
being fixed up and rented. They found out what was really going on
last month when fire trucks roared up, lights and sirens flashing,
just before 7 a.m. One whiff of the thick black smoke billowing down
the street told them all they needed to know.

"We never expected it," said Salvador Mendoza, who lives a couple doors away.

The Buckingham Boulevard neighbor knows how they feel. The growers on
his block were very good at flying under the radar. They were
cultivating pot worth millions, but the people who visited the houses
did not advertise their wealth with flashy cars and loud parties.
They maintained the charade for about a year.

"I thought maybe they had a home business. "... If they had been
driving BMWs or Mercedes, that would have been a tip," said the neighbor.

But that's not the only reason the illicit grow operation shook him up.

"The house where they were growing the marijuana was the exact spot
where the fire started 19 years ago," he said, referring to the Oct.
20, 1991 conflagration that killed 25 people and destroyed more than
3,000 dwellings, including all the homes on his street. "If that
house had gone up, it would have started another fire."