POT GROWERS THRIVE IN MIDDLE-CLASS U.S.

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP) -- In Coldwater Creek, a middle-class housing
development outside Atlanta, the neighbours mind their own business
and respect each other's privacy -- ideal conditions, it turns out,
for growing marijuana in the suburbs.

Police this month raided an utterly ordinary-looking red-brick house
on the block and broke up a pot-growing operation with 680 plants
arrayed under bright lights.

"You'd never know from the outside. I guess that's the idea," said
Doug Augis, who lives with his pregnant wife and a toddler in
Coldwater Creek.

"That doesn't give you a really good feeling."

Across the United States, investigators are increasingly seeing
suburban homes in middle-class and well-to-do neighbourhoods turned
into indoor marijuana farms. Typically, investigators find an empty
home, save a mattress, a couple of chairs, some snacks in the fridge
and an elaborate setup of soil-free growing trays.

Grow houses have been a problem for years in California and Canada but
investigators are now seeing scores of them in the U.S. South and New
England. In the last six weeks, more than 70 have been uncovered in
northern Georgia -- nearly 10 times last year's total for the entire
state. Only one was busted in 2005.

Indoor pot farms also have been discovered in recent months in
residential areas of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New York state,
North Carolina and Florida.

In fact, the phenomenon has inspired a cable TV show, Weeds, starring
Mary-Louise Parker as a single mom who grows and deals pot out of her
suburban home.

Crackdowns in Canada and elsewhere have apparently led some operators
to move into parts of the United States where the public and police
are not as familiar with the operations and less likely to detect
them, authorities said.

"They can go in and basically fly under the radar," said Ruth
Porter-Whipple, spokeswoman for the Atlanta field division of the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Agency. "These aren't neighbourhoods where they would
stand out."

In Georgia, the latest busts averaged about 200 plants a house. With
each plant yielding $4,000 US on average a harvest, that works out to
about $3.2 million a year, considering the plants can be harvested
every three months.

The DEA said more than 400,000 plants with a potential annual value of
$6.4 billion were seized from grow houses in the U.S. last year -- up
from about 270,000 the year before. That is less than 10 per cent of
the marijuana plant seizures in the U.S.; most pot is grown outdoors
on farms and in ditches, backyards and gardens.