POT BUSTS NET OVER $430,000 IN SEIZED PLANTS

Tantallon RCMP's weed-control patrol has shut down three outdoor and one
indoor marijuana patches over the last week that could have netted up to
$434,000 on the street.

Acting on a tip, the detachment's street-crime unit last Thursday
discovered 130 potted marijuana plants growing in a wooded area near Hubley.

The plants, about a week from cultivation, were found on Crown land between
exits 4 and 5 on Highway 103, not far from Highway 3.

Using a search warrant, officers went to a nearby home looking for the
plants' owners and discovered another 20 potted marijuana plants inside, an
investigator said.

A man and a woman in their 20s who lived in the house were arrested.
They're expected to be charged with cultivation, drug possession,
possession for trafficking, possession of a restricted 9-mm semi-automatic
Luger handgun, unsafe storage of the gun, unsafe storage of ammunition for
a .38-calibre revolver and obliterating the handgun's serial number.

The RCMP's Halifax crime lab is checking to see if the gun may have been
used in other crimes.

The suspects were released on a promise to appear in Halifax provincial
court in November.

The raided home was near Sir John A. Macdonald High School in Hubley but
police said it doesn't appear the drugs were being sold to students.

Ironically, none of the marijuana plants found Thursday were the ones the
officers were tipped about.

Street-crime officers went back to the same area Monday and found another
12 marijuana plants less than 500 metres from their first discovery.

No one has been charged in the second find, but RCMP believe the
inexperienced grower lives nearby.

"It was another grow site altogether," the investigator said. "The ones
that we found on Monday, someone had planted them right in the ground and
they weren't as nice a quality as the ones . . . we found Thursday."

Two Halifax RCMP drug officers helped Tantallon Mounties with the last
discovery.

The Halifax officers found an outdoor operation in a wooded area about a
kilometre from Tantallon detachment.

Fifty-four plants were found near two cellphone towers not far from Exit 5
on Highway 103.

"They were very high quality. The plants that we got . . . on Thursday were
all about six feet (two metres) tall. . . . The plants that we got
yesterday were probably only about four feet (1 1/2 metres) tall. But they
were like bushels. . . . Each plant probably had three to four big stalks
off it and each stalk had what you would find on one (normal) plant," an
investigator said Wednesday. The plants were grown in garbage bags.
Officers seized other evidence, including water cans and harvesting equipment.

The RCMP has recently refused to put a street value on its drug seizures.

But sources pegged the maximum potential street value of marijuana seized
over the last week at up to $434,000.

More conservative estimates for prior seizures - when police have provided
estimated street values - would seem to put the recent seizures in the
$300,000 range.