ASSESSING COLLATERAL DAMAGE FROM POT OPERATIONS

Mission RCMP officers dismantled a marijuana growing operation Monday night
in a residential neighbourhood south of Cherry Avenue and west of Stave Lake
Street.

Police went into the home, in the 33700 block of Blueberry Drive, and seized
more than 1,000 mature marijuana plants.

A man and a woman, both from Vancouver, were arrested inside the house and
they will appear in Abbotsford provincial court in late January. Police say
the operation was sophisticated with the entire basement and two main-floor
rooms being used to grow the pot and electricity was being stolen from B.C.
Hydro to run the growing equipment.

It was just one of an estimated 20,000 B.C. growing houses - 10,000 in the
Lower Mainland area - and the numbers are . . . growing.

But so are the instances of fires that are created by that electrical
growing equipment.

"There's a real concern with that," Mission RCMP Insp. Ted Upshaw said of
the increasing number of marijuana growing operations and their ancillary
problems.

"There's collateral damage [from the illegal industry]."

Upshaw noted that a large-scale growing operation that erupted in flames
last week north of Miracle Valley could easily have been a large-scale
disaster. The free-standing operation was in the back woods, running on
generators. Had the fire occurred three weeks earlier, Upshaw suggested,
Mission could have had a massive forest fire on its hands because of the
tinder-dry forest conditions.

Darryl Plecas is another person who talks about the ancillary problems of
community safety issues and residential fires caused by marijuana growing
houses. He was one of four people who authored an empirical data study,
released in May, on marijuana growing operations caught by police, in the
four-year period between 1997 and 2001.

"You've got almost one in 25 grows is a house fire," Plecas said this week.
"We've just been lucky no one has been killed."

The University College of the Fraser Valley criminology professor isn't
surprised to hear police describe growing houses as "sophisticated"
operations. He said that as growers expand their operations, with every
subsequent growing house "the size goes up and the sophistication goes up."

The obvious damage from such an overwhelming industry is the impact it has
on children who are being exposed to marijuana at younger ages.

"If there's a grow op, it's going to hit the streets somewhere," Upshaw said
this week when asked about the impact the B.C. bud industry is having on
Mission and the Fraser Valley.

"Is that going to get to you son or daughter?"

Plecas said drugs being produced for mass consumption should be a concern
for society as a whole and despite opinions expressed to the contrary, the
majority of his students believe marijuana is a gateway drug to other,
harder drugs.

But it is estimated that 80 per cent of the local produce is being exported.

"Right now B.C. bud is famous," Plecas said, adding most of it is exported
considering there's no way B.C. could consume the amount of marijuana it
produces.

But whether the bud stays here or is exported - many say in exchange for
cocaine - it is a huge concern for authorities.

He noted that taxpayers, he said, get less from their police department when
police officers and resources are focused on dismantling growing houses and
Canadians are being ripped off by "the economic crime" of a black market
economy that generates no revenue to offset costs it creates [firefighters,
police, health care, etc.].

"They're circulating money that's not being taxed," he said.

Moreover, he said, "The price of rents have gone up."

He said his group studied the issue of rental housing in Richmond when they
noticed rental prices rising by 50 and 100 per cent.

"It's because there's less [rental] houses available," he said.

More important than any of these, he said, is the fact that around 80 per
cent of the industry is controlled by organized crime.

The professor expects criminal gangs or factions will eventually start
fighting - similar to the battles that have occurred in Montreal - when
markets collide.

"That's what will happen. They'll start killing each other off. It's
inevitable," he said, adding innocent people will get caught in the
crossfire.

"We've got problems coming down the pipe that I don't know what we're going
to do."