GOING TO POT

It's just after 9 a.m. on a Wednesday when four police cars roll up to an
old grey stucco bungalow on Charles Street.

The wide tree-lined boulevards, manicured lawns and well-kept houses in
this pocket of East Vancouver catch the attention of Sgt. Rollie Woods as
he steps from his unmarked cruiser.

"See," he says, as fellow cops draw their guns in the front yard of the
bungalow, "this is a nice neighbourhood and the house fits in with the rest
of them. Most people probably wouldn't suspect anything."

Nor should they-the lawn is cut, roses are growing in a garden below the
front window, the trim has recently been painted pink and the female
tenant, by all accounts from neighbours, is friendly.

That pleasant picture is quickly erased by the sound of a sturdy cop
driving a steel battering ram into the front door. It takes him four whacks
to knock the door down because of the two 2x4s braced against the back, a
precaution against intruders.

Nobody's inside but the lingering smell of incense overpowered by a strong
skunky odour from the basement lets police know they've hit upon another
one of the city's most infamous criminal enterprises: a marijuana grow-op.

Lined neatly in rows in two small basement rooms, 158 plants grow in
plastic pots of soil under the hum of fans and eye-squinting brightness of
tube-like lights that dangle from the six-foot ceiling.

With another 250 baby plants awaiting transfer from an upstairs bedroom
closet, Woods believes the illegal operation could be generating $80,000
every three months.

Police estimate this clandestine enterprise is one of up to 10,000 in the
city, which means the amount of money changing hands for the potent bud is
likely in the millions. As the country moves toward legalization of
marijuana-it's already permitted for medical purposes-some see growing pot
as a victimless crime, but the sheer volume of cash involved means growers
are often at risk of being beaten and having their money and plants ripped
off by other criminals.

Grow-ops also cause fires-38 in the past two years-because of the crude
electrical work running throughout them, and expose children to toxic
chemicals and gases used to grow the plants.

It all doesn't sit well with Woods, who runs the investigative unit of the
drug squad, and Sgt. Tom Cork, in charge of Grow Busters, a police team
that works with inspectors from city hall, the fire department and B.C.
Hydro to shut down grow-ops.

The two squads have worked together since the first of the year, although
the marriage didn't come without a controversial courtship, with drug squad
cops criticizing Grow Busters in internal police department memos and
e-mails for not pursuing charges against growers when they bust grow-ops.

Now, if Cork's team finds somebody in a grow house or discovers evidence to
support a charge, that information is forwarded to Woods' squad, which
investigates and recommends charges to the Crown prosecution office. That
strategy has shut down 200 grow-ops this year. Although the charge rate
remains a low 10 to 15 per cent, and the few growers who are convicted are
most likely to be fined or put on probation instead of jailed, Cork
maintains Grow Busters is having an impact.

Since the program started in July 2000, Grow Busters has busted more than
700 grow-ops. During the Courier's mid-June ride-along, the team shut down
five grow-ops in one day, which Cork says is more effective than spending a
day or week tracking down one grower on a charge that may not stick.

At the end of this month, city council is expected to decide whether to
extend the controversial Grow Busters program for another three years. It
still has its critics in the police department, and raises the ire of
marijuana advocates, who argue legalization of pot would prevent crime and
safety problems.

But for residents in the Charles Street area and other neighbourhoods, who
had little or no action from police until Grow Busters formed, turning a
grower's livelihood upside down for a day is better than doing nothing at all.

"Ask the neighbours. They'll tell you they're just glad to get them out of
their neighbourhoods," says Cork.

Joanne Pantelle grew up in this largely Italian neighbourhood, where most
residents know each other, and now lives with her two young sons in her
childhood home across the alley from the busted Charles Street grow-op.

The neighbourhood has changed over the years-the 43-year-old racetrack
worker said she's had a couple of break-ins in the last decade. Still, she
was shocked to learn her new neighbour is suspected of growing marijuana.

Only last summer, the 30-something Vietnamese woman stopped by Pantelle's
yard sale and bought some toys for what Pantelle believed were the woman's
two kids, a five-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy.

The woman seemed nice, but Pantelle never saw the kids again and wondered
if her neighbour actually lived in the house or whether it was occupied by
relatives.

"You'd never really see anybody around and that seemed kind of strange but
I had no idea what was really going on in there-I'm surprised," she says,
standing in her backyard a few metres from her neighbour's house.

Pantelle is also surprised to learn police found a long sword underneath a
mattress in one of the two bedrooms; the other bedroom was full of garbage
bags of used soil, fans, lights and other growing equipment.

There was no food in the cupboards, a few leftovers in the fridge and the
living room had only a television, VCR and a chair. The mattress in the one
bedroom was laid out next to a smaller one, probably for a child, since a
stuffed toy animal was resting on it when police arrived.

Downstairs, the walls were surrounded by a shiny tinfoil-like wrap to
reflect the light for rapid plant growth. Silver ventilation ducts ran in
and out of the rooms and were fed into a hole in the house's chimney and
sewer system, via the toilet, to mask the skunky smell of the weed.

Fans were used to cool and vent the operation which, in this case, was
powered illegally. The operator cut into the wires above the house's hydro
meter and fused it to the main cable running to the breaker panel,
effectively bypassing the meter and avoiding detection of increased power
use from B.C. Hydro.

Such heavy use of power made the kitchen stove inoperable, leaving the
tenant to cook inside on a propane stove. That danger, coupled with the
fact carbon dioxide exhaust from the furnace was being diverted into the
basement to help with plant growth, made the house not only a health risk
but a ticking time bomb.

Police believe the tenant was the caretaker of the operation and stayed
only long enough to maintain and harvest the plants before taking them to a
"transfer house" for packaging and distribution.

All this information is a little overwhelming for Pantelle but familiar.
About 16 years ago, Pantelle's dad decided to move out of the neighbourhood
and rent out the house. The prospective tenant told him he'd recently been
divorced and needed a place to look after his daughter.

When he moved in, he brought two rottweilers and soon after started a
grow-op. Joanne was suspicious and so were the neighbours, but her dad
wouldn't believe them, saying he trusted his tenant because he gave him his
word the place would be looked after.

"He'd go over to check the house and the guy would say, 'It's not a good
time to see the basement,' or, 'Everything's fine, no problems'-and my dad
believed him." Police eventually busted the grow-op, which left the
Pantelles' house in a mess. After a clean-up that cost thousands of
dollars, Joanne Pantelle moved in.

Now with another grow-op in the neighbourhood, Pantelle is considering
moving to a municipality where her 9 and 11-year-old sons might be safer.
"My kids play hockey in that alley and that house was just hell waiting to
happen," she says, shaking her head. "You think your neighbourhood is safe,
but then you find it isn't. I'm glad the police got rid of it, and now that
we know about it, we'll make sure it doesn't happen again."

In some cases, it has happened again. A recent city report indicated more
than 140 houses have been busted twice for grow-ops since last summer.

In fact, after leaving Charles Street, police shut down an operation in a
house on Rupert Street they busted two years ago. This time, they found
about 150 plants inside a bedroom but nobody home. Again, the caretaker is
believed to be a young Vietnamese woman, who was friendly and often said
hello to neighbour Russell Pelland.

"I wouldn't think she would have anything to do with something like that,"
says Pelland, standing on his porch as police remove the plants. "I sure
don't like it. I don't like to see all these police here, either."

The one-level stucco house resembles the one on Charles but is in worse
shape. It's owned by Angelo Antonio Iorio, a maintenance worker at the VPD
station at 312 Main St., and his wife Italia, who live in East Vancouver.
Italia Iorio claims she doesn't know how the house became a grow-op twice.
She said the couple is now considering whether to re-rent the house they've
owned since March 1993 or demolish it. "I can't believe [the tenant] would
do this. She invited me in, gave me coffee, gave me cookies, gave me
doughnuts. I was there twice a week, but I never asked to go into the bedroom."

The Iorios will now have to meet with Carlene Robbins, city hall's manager
of the bylaw administration branch, to make sure the house doesn't become a
grow-op for a third time. They'll have to show Robbins a proper rental
agreement, give the name of the prospective tenant, supply references for
the tenant and allow the city to inspect the property once the tenant has
moved in.

But before that, city hall will charge the Iorios a $750 inspection fee to
ensure the electrical, plumbing and other infrastructure is up to code.
They'll then have to upgrade deficiencies before applying for a $100
re-occupancy permit. Robbins admits the $850 fee-plus repair bills-is not
enough to dissuade anyone from setting up a grow-op, but notes only 20 per
cent of the 1,016 grow-ops busted by police since last summer were
owner-occupied. The rest involved renters.

"If we're a thorn in [landlords'] side long enough, they may decide it's
just not worth it," says Robbins, noting city hall has collected $695,000
in inspection revenue related to grow-ops since July 2000. "We know it's
kind of like David and Goliath, but what's the alternative-to say forget
it, it's too much, we're not going to do it? I don't think so."

In most cases, landlords deny knowledge of the grow-op and police rarely
investigate them further. The landlord of the Charles Street house is
listed on the city's tax rolls as Dung T. Nguyen, with an address in
Aldergrove.

The address is home to Garden Grow Nursery, where a man who answered the
phone denied knowing Nguyen but said an Asian woman sold the business about
six months ago.

Whether or not city hall is successful in locating Nguyen, she will
eventually have to contact Robbins' staff and go through a similar process
to Iorio if she wants to occupy or rent her house again-a likely scenario,
considering about 98 per cent of landlords of grow-ops apply to the city
for re-occupancy.

Robbins recalls an incident where a family of five had to be treated for
gas inhalation because of a furnace that had been tampered with in what
used to be a grow-op. "Even if marijuana was made legal, we would not want
people growing it in their homes because it is so unsafe."

Marc Emery, the Vancouver Marijuana Party's candidate for mayor in this
year's civic election, counters that people wouldn't be growing marijuana
in their homes if it was legal. "People would be growing it in a greenhouse
in some massive field somewhere. Nobody in their right mind would be
turning their bedroom into a grow-op."

Emery argues dismantling grow-ops only drives up the price of marijuana and
supports organized crime. "If the police stopped busting marijuana growers
for even just one year, the price would plummet so low that you would have
no financial incentive for people to be growing marijuana," says Emery, who
plans to protest the extension of the Grow Busters program when council
reviews it.

While the legalization debate rages on, the number of grow-ops in the city
continues to grow. Sgt. Rollie Woods with the drug squad says police
"dropped the ball" when the problem first increased sharply in the late 1990s.

"We didn't adapt when it started to become a problem, and when it started
to become a bigger problem, we didn't do anything to change our tactics,"
says Woods, who argues the approach should be a regional one. He'd like to
see all police departments and detachments establish programs similar to
Grow Busters, where city hall and the fire department work with police.

If there isn't an across-the-board strategy, he says, the grow-op problem
will only be pushed from municipality to municipality-which is happening
now. In recent months, the Organized Crime Agency has noticed more
Vancouver growers setting up operations in the Fraser Valley and even
moving to Ontario. Grow Busters is taking some of the credit for educating
neighbours on how to identify a grow-op and inform police-it gets 20 to 30
tips a week about grow-ops.

But as long as convicted growers avoid jail time and landlords continue to
look the other way, police will be busting down doors for years to
come-with or without the Grow Busters program.

Later in the week of the Charles Street bust, neighbours saw the suspected
grower driving slowly down the alley. Whether her life as a grower is over
or not, the police raid seems to have had an emotional effect. They say she
was crying as she drove by.

It's a stark contrast to the snapshot police found in the home of her
sitting in an RCMP cruiser, wearing a constable's hat and smiling for a
camera with the Parliament Buildings in the background.

How to recognize a grow-op house

* Windows covered to allow no light in.

* Condensation on windows indicating high humidity.

* A distinctive smell similar to skunk cabbage through a chimney or sewer

* Loud noises from fans and electrical equipment.

* Signs, fences and hedges to discourage the casual observer.

* The property is a rental-the preferred choice for growers.

* Equipment such as large fans, halogen lights, soil and plastic plant
containers being carried into the house at odd hours.

* Garbage bags containing used soil and plant matter frequently dumped in
lanes or nearby dumpsters.

If you suspect there's a grow-op in your neighbourhood, call Grow Busters'
tip line at 604-717-3456. Source: Collingwood Policing Centre