Growers Find Areas Make Easy Hide-Outs

LAWRENCEVILLE, GA - In Coldwater Creek, a middle-class housing development outside Atlanta, the neighbors mind their own business and respect one another'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 country, investigators increasingly are seeing suburban homes in middle-class and well-to-do neighborhoods turned into indoor marijuana farms.

Grow houses have been a problem for years in California and Canada, but investigators are starting to see scores of them in the South and New England.  In the past six weeks, more than 70 have been uncovered in northern Georgia-nearly 10 times last year's total for the 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, North Carolina and Florida.

Crackdowns in Canada and elsewhere apparently have led some operators to parts of the United States where the public and police are less likely to detect them, authorities say.

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

Billions Of Dollars Involved

In Georgia, the latest busts averaged about 200 plants per house.  With each plant yielding $4,000 on average per harvest, that works out to about $3.2 million per 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 United States last year - up from about 270,000 the year before.  That is less than 10 percent of the marijuana plant seizures in the United States; most pot is grown outdoors.

Grow houses typically grow marijuana hydroponically - that is, using a nutrient solution instead of soil.  They also use 24-hour-a-day lighting to produce plants more rapidly.  The marijuana is usually cut, dried and packaged on the premises.

Typically, the windows are covered, and the electrical system is rigged to hide how much juice is being used.

Nearly all of the grow houses busted in Georgia were connected, police say.  Fayetteville resident Merquiades Martinez - a Cuban immigrant - and his wife, a real estate agent, are accused of recruiting other Cubans to buy houses that cost $300,000 to $450,000.

Investigators employed tips, surveillance and information from the power company on electricity usage to find the Coldwater Creek grow house and other operations.

The Heat Is On

It was a string of electrical fires that led New Hampshire authorities to more than a dozen grow houses in December.  Marijuana grow houses often have rows of power strips and spaghetti clusters of extension cords and other power lines.

"They are very sophisticated, probably the highest quality of marijuana we've seen in years," said Lt Terry Kinneen,commander of the New Hampshire State Police narcotics unit.

In another elaborate scheme, more than 50 houses with thousands of plants recently found in Florida were traced to marijuana financiers in New Jersey who offered "relocation packages," with 100 percent financing for the homes.  Buyers would agree to operate a grow house for two years, after which they could sell the house and split the profit with their backers or keep growing pot. 

URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n423/a07.html
Newshawk: http://www.november.org
Pubdate: Sat, 31 Mar 2007
Source: Tampa Tribune (FL)
Webpage: Not online at Tampa Trib
Copyright: 2007 The Tribune Co.
Contact: http://www.tbo.com/news/opinion/submissionform.htm
Website: http://www.tampatrib.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/446
Author: Errin Haines, The Associated Press