Pubdate: Sat, 28 Oct 2006
Source: Woolwich Observer (CN ON)
Copyright: 2006 Woolwich Observer
Contact:  http://www.woolwichobserver.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1867
Author: Marc Miquel Helsen

LOOKING TO HARVEST MORE THAN ILLICIT CROPS

As You Sow So Shall You Reap. Unless, of Course, You're One of the 
Many Area Farmers Who Find a Little Something Extra in Their Fields: 
Marijuana Plants.

For police departments, seizures of such plants are a regular 
occurrence, as farmers continually discover the illicit crops growing 
in among their cornfields. Last month, for instance, a three-day 
blitz by a special drug unit made up of officers from the RCMP, the 
OPP and the Waterloo Regional Police Service netted 5,000 plants in 
Waterloo, Wellington and Perth counties. Half of the plants came from 
this region.

"We have an ideal area for growing the marijuana so [grow operations] 
could virtually be anywhere within our region and the rural areas," 
Sgt. Andy Harrington, head of the WRPS drug unit, told the Observer.

The three-day blitz came as a result of months of gathering anonymous 
tips and analyzing historical and topographic data.

"Certainly outdoor grows are very common   the majority of the 
locations that we identified are all rural because the majority of it 
is in corn or near watering sources," said Harrington.

The red flags of an indoor grow-op in a residential neighborhood -- 
i.e. little but periodic activity, windows blacked out or covered in 
foil, spiking hydro levels -- are often easily identifiable. The same 
cannot be said, however, of the outdoor grow-op. Locating marijuana 
plants in a field of corn is much like finding a needle in a haystack.

"People who grow marijuana are pretty clever and the first thing 
they're going to do is get far enough off the road onto private 
property," said Sgt. Merv Knechtel, who heads the regional police's 
Elmira detachment.

"It could happen and maybe it has happened where an officer has seen 
a vehicle sort of abandoned at the side of the road, and as he's been 
inquiring about the vehicle some people come walking out of a 
cornfield and then that's certainly good evidence   but it doesn't 
happen on a regular basis."

In such grow operations a marijuana plant is generally earthed as a 
seedling or clone shortly after the corn is planted. Before the corn 
stalks get too high they are ripped out and replaced with their 
marijuana counterparts. Surrounded by forest buffers and located away 
from public areas, outdoor grow-ops are intended to avoid detection.

Depending on the size and caliber of the operation, an outdoor grow 
can yield anywhere from 10 to 50 plants in one cornfield to 1,000 in 
a forest clearing. With an approximate yield per plant of $1,500 to 
$3,000 -- depending on the quality of the product and the technical 
know-how of the grower -- an outdoor marijuana crop can be a 
lucrative business venture with a limited risk factor.

"It's difficult to link them (growers) to the certain locations 
because of the staffing requirements to do surveillance; sometimes 
we'll get tips that there are persons that are going to harvest or 
that they are growing so in that respect we can target those people 
specifically, but then it's staffing intensive to conduct the 
surveillance to take them to the locations," Harrington explained.

Often, even corn farmers themselves have no idea their fields are 
being used for marijuana plants until they complete the final harvest.

"It's very difficult from the ground to find the plants in the corn. 
The corn is six-to eight-feet high, if not more, so you just can't 
see it," he said, noting aerial assistance is usually required.

While marijuana plants are difficult to detect from the ground the 
reverse is true from the air. As a result, when searching for plants, 
eradication squads are divided into a two-part unit: ground officers 
are guided by overhead flight crews conducting random fly-overs. The 
spotters in these fixed-wing planes or helicopters keep their eyes 
peeled for suspicious patches in the middle of cornfields or 
homogenous, low-lying foliage in the middle of a forest clearing.

Because plantation stakeouts are so expensive, they're often reserved 
for the larger, commercial operations; when plant numbers hit the 
thousands, police are typically dealing with organized crime. 
Fortunately for drug squads, such operations are easily detected from 
an overhead view and from this vantage point the process of weeding 
out grow-ops becomes something of a domino effect.

"In between flying from specific location to specific location the 
pilots and the spotters that were in the plane were identifying other 
areas which we didn't have information on," said Harrington.

Once the marijuana plants are located by ground teams they are 
uprooted and piled into a one-ton truck. Whereas, typically, small 
quantities of marijuana are sent for incineration, the massive yields 
of a major eradication mission are carted off and land-filled.

"When it's buried properly at these landfill sites it's virtually 
useless. We're confident that at the land fill sites holes are dug 
deep enough, and it's covered enough that someone would be hard 
pressed to locate it in the landfill sites. Not only that but in very 
short order, because it's still green and it hasn't been dried into a 
usable product or harvested it would mold very quickly and become 
unusable very quickly," said Harrington.

While a drug unit's eradication efforts might end with the 
destruction of thousands of plants, they don't always lead to 
criminal convictions. Still, officers take pride in knowing they 
cleared marijuana from the fields and consequently the streets.

"The primary objective is to disrupt the flow of marijuana from 
fields to the streets, that's number one," said Sgt. Cam Croal of the 
RCMP's Kitchener detachment.

"If we gather sufficient evidence to secure charges, then we'll 
certainly do that. But if we don't, then we don't, but we do take 
satisfaction in getting the marijuana off the street."

Eradication of grow-ops translates into less time-consuming street 
level investigations that often yield little results: from a police 
perspective it's better to nip it in the bud.

"When we talk about in excess of four tons of marijuana, that's 
significant and there's satisfaction that goes along with that, 
because, again, it's additional investigations that we don't have to 
conduct at the street level and to detect it in the community. That's 
where the best bang for the buck is," said Croal.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine