POLICE NOSE OUT NZ'S MOST POTENT POT

The smell gave it away: strong wafts of marijuana that kept drifting past
the noses of the police search team.

It seemed they had searched everywhere, but all they had found was enough
dope for a few joints.

As they stood in the garden of the holiday retreat overlooking the Hauparua
inlet near Kerikeri, they noticed the smell coming out of a vent, hidden
beneath a flax bush, releasing air from an underground bunker.

Inside was the most potent marijuana ever tested in New Zealand.

This week, the High Court at Auckland was told scientists found the crop
contained levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive
ingredient of cannabis, of up to 19 per cent.

Environment Science and Research scientists said tests of hydroponically
grown cannabis before 1997 showed the most potent was 8.8 per cent.

James Stuart Fisher and wife Mary Fisher used their 4ha property, known as
Black Rocks Retreat on Inlet Rd, to grow cannabis in a sophisticated
underground operation.

Fisher was a man with a yen for scientific invention. He had introduced
ingenious methods of spearing snapper to preserve it for export and of
packaging oysters for the Southeast Asian market. He had spent three years
perfecting his crop, and knew it was "damn fine pot", growing in tunnels
and water tanks buried under his landscaped garden.

Fisher would enter through a 3m-long tunnel to tend his crop. Nicely
plastered and painted, it ran to the first of two 25,000 litre reinforced
concrete water tanks that contained the hydroponic operation. This tank
held a partitioned area for his three "mother plants".

In a separate area Fisher would do his cloning; clipping buds off the three
female plants that produce the best "heads", rubbing them with hormone
powder, then growing them in small bags to save time germinating seeds.

A cabinet held his knives, fertiliser and thermometers. Another tunnel led
to a second tank, the entire bunker plumbed for water and wired back to a
panel on the dining room wall that controlled its lights and fans.

In Fisher's growing areas, there were four banks of fourteen plants planted
in plastic bags of potting mix.

He had devised a staggered growing system that police said allowed up to 12
harvests a year, the plants growing healthily to no more than 2 1/2ft tall.
There had been flops - bugs destroyed his first crop - but Fisher started
producing a very strong strain of the drug.

Stashed in scrub nearby was a bucket of 2lb of the finished product,
plucked and graded dried heads that even police called "primo". It stuck
together like a big cake when tipped out due to its high oil content.

The ESR tests of 22 random samples taken from the bucket contained levels
of between 12 and 19 per cent THC.

Police said the bust showed the increasing sophistication of cannabis
growing in indoor or buried plots to escape surveillance. Last year, police
dealt with 21,034 cannabis offences - a slight decrease on previous years,
but methamphetamine offences increased.

"I've worked in Kaikohe for 10 years and cannabis is a day-to-day thing for
us," said the officer in charge, Detective Sergeant Russell Price. "But
this was the best stuff I've seen."

This week, Mary Fisher said: "It was good, there's no doubt about it. It
was damn fine pot but I would not call it the best ever found."

Mary Fisher was sentenced to two years' supervision after the couple
admitted police charges. James Stuart Fisher has just begun a two-year,
nine-month jail term on the Tongariro/Rangipo prison farm.

The test results were revealed this week after a High Court ruling in which
the couple escaped forfeiting their property under Proceeds of Crime
Legislation and were ordered to pay $75,000 instead.

Mary Fisher said her husband was surprised, rather than proud, on hearing
of his crop's potency. She said it was just his hobby. Although he admitted
selling it on to one person police said he could have made much more.

"My husband's a professional, a perfectionist. When he gets into something
he dissects it until he knows it inside out. That's all he did here. He
wasn't trying to be King Cannabis or anything."