Pubdate: Sun, 16 Dec 2007
Source: Evening Standard (London, UK)
Copyright: 2007 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/914
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?207 (Cannabis - United Kingdom)

THE RISE OF THE SUBURBAN HIGH

Gangs Are Setting Up Cannabis Farms In Prosperous Neighbourhoods

The view over the detached houses off Nottingham Road on the 
outskirts of the Derbyshire town of Ripley takes in mature, well kept 
gardens with their brimming shrubberies and rows of clipped holly and fir.

Lying close to a golf course, these houses date from the Thirties and 
have been home to generations of stable, affluent families who have 
invested money and effort into preserving them, planning and tending 
the landscaped gardens, putting up ornamental shutters and paving the drives.

There is, though, an obvious exception - one house where the leaded 
windows have been blown out and the charred remains of furniture and 
timbers litter the conservatory and the rear garden.

All that is left of the roof are blackened beams and as time has 
passed, scavengers have added to the destruction, ripping out 
fireplaces and other period features.

This isn't an inner-city terrace, nor is it part of a neglected estate.

Yet the burned-out house is evidence of a new type of criminal 
activity taking place in the strangest of locations and on an almost 
unimaginable scale. Cannabis farming is sweeping Britain.

Almost every square foot from the attic to the hall in the Nottingham 
Road property had been turned over to plants.

The fire started when electricity, illegally siphoned from the mains 
to run heat lamps, came into contact with water from a sprinkler system.

As the flames spread, neighbours reported spotting two young 
Vietnamese men running away.

Commercial cannabis cultivation just like this is everywhere. An 
activity once linked with the darker corners of London or Manchester 
has taken root, literally, in comfortable suburbs and affluent market towns.

Vietnamese run "farms" have been found in 41 out of the 43 police 
force areas in England and Wales and five out of the eight forces in Scotland.

So vast is the production, it seems almost certain that the UK is now 
exporting the drug.

As Detective Chief Superintendent Stephen Whitelock, of Strathclyde 
Police, explained, the choice of a prosperous area is typical.

"Tons of cannabis are being produced in places with high-quality housing.

"They avoid the social exclusion areas which attract a lot of police 
attention and go for a quiet neighbourhood where people don't 
necessarily know a great deal about each other.

"These criminals can afford to set up in places where homes typically 
fetch between UKP500,000 and UKP750,000. It is such a cash-rich crop."

I have spent the past month on the drugs trail with police in 
Scotland, Derbyshire and Merseyside investigating the UK's cannabis 
supply for a documentary series on BBC Radio 4.

I had never spent much time thinking about a drug which, although 
illegal, attracts much less attention than heroin or cocaine.

But that changed earlier this year when I went back to Norris Green, 
the council estate in Liverpool where I grew up.I was shocked.

My family moved there in the Sixties when it was a showpiece estate, 
swapping a two-up, twodown terrace near the docks for a semi with a garden.

Back then, me, Mum, Dad and my three sisters thought Norris Green was paradise.

Residents were honest, hardworking and Godfearing, people who 
respected the forces of authority, from the parish priest to the local PC.

I went back because Norris Green is now notorious.

Cannabis farmer

Today in Norris Green pockets of the estate are dominated by 
criminals who sell drugs.

Their homes are easy to spot, with their lavish Grecian-style 
porticos, ornate walls and railings and rows of luxury cars parked outside.

They make life miserable for the lawabiding majority forced to live 
alongside them and who are terrorised into silence.

As I interviewed residents, we were menaced by a young man in an 
expensive 4x4 who drove past repeatedly, slowing to a crawl and 
glaring through the windows.

It is the recruitment by these drug dealers of young teenagers that 
has resulted in the reckless violence that killed Rhys, shot in the 
neck by a stray bullet as he walked home from football practice.

At an office in Liverpool city centre I met Bob Croxton, a 
43-year-old who served two prison terms for supplying drugs but who 
now runs an agency to rehabilitate offenders.

He said drug dealers in Norris Green and elsewhere were so keen to 
minimise their own risks of getting caught, "they are employing 
amoral, nihilistic kids to run their errands for them".

He added: "It might seem easy at first to give a teenager a pat on 
the back and to tell them what a big gangster they are but they have 
given them money and access to guns and now they can't control them.

"They are running amok and the laws that we have were never framed to 
cope with them."

Cannabis is the most popular drug in the UK, with one in ten people 
aged between 16 and 59 claiming to have used it in the past year.

It is particularly popular with problem youngsters who smoke it from 
the age of ten.

The drug was downgraded from Class B to Class C in 2004 by the then 
Home Secretary David Blunkett, and it meant that possession was no 
longer an arrestable offence.

Since then Youth Offending Teams claim they have seen cannabis use 
soar among young offenders.

In a national survey earlier this year, two-thirds of teams found 
that use of the drug had risen by between a quarter and threequarters.

In some areas nine out of ten young offenders were reported to be 
using cannabis.

At the Strand shopping centre in Norris Green, a 17-year-old boy 
described how he started smoking cannabis three years ago and moved 
on to selling it, partly because he was influenced by his sister's 
boyfriend, himself a dealer.

"I saw all the money he had for designer clothes and I thought I'll 
have a bit of that," he said.

The teenager confided he had moved on from street dealing to helping 
with occasional punishment beatings of people with drugs debts.

"You don't like doing it but that's the way it is."

We met professionals working with young offenders who believe that 
their violent behaviour is linked to cannabis use.

Declassification coincided with the introduction in the UK of strains 
of the drug which are more toxic and potent than the cannabis of old.

In particular the new-type drug can induce feelings of paranoia and 
some argue that it leads to a dangerous mindset where there is scant 
regard for life.

Radio 4 sent me to investigate the flow of this new and more 
dangerous drug on to the streets.

What I quickly discovered was that home-grown cannabis --cultivated 
by criminals who have often come to the UK from Vietnam --touches the 
lives of a whole range of people, from teenage criminals on estates 
such as Norris Green to the middle-class residents in the affluent 
suburbs of Glasgow and Derby.

Harry Shapiro, from the independent research charity DrugScope, who 
has collated figures from UK police forces, has no doubt that the 
number of cannabis farms is increasing.

"You can set up one of these in an otherwise respectable suburban 
street and that makes it particularly hard to trap," he said.

"It is a highly lucrative industry, well organised with huge demand.

"When you have that situation invariably you find the traffickers are 
four, five steps ahead of the enforcement agencies, not least because 
they have vast sums of money to spend.

"Even when police seize vast amounts of the drug, it is written off 
as a business risk that doesn't seem to make much of a dent in the 
operations overall."

Cannabis farming began in London about six years ago, sometimes in 
factory units but most often in houses bought or rented for that purpose.

Some farms hold in excess of 2,000 plants. Every drugs detective I 
spoke to was adamant that police are disrupting only a tiny fraction 
of a now rampant industry.

In London that "tiny fraction" amounted to more than 1,500 cannabis 
farms raided in the past two years.

In Derbyshire police detected 200 last year, while 61 were closed by 
Strathclyde Police in the past nine months.

So why are Vietnamese criminals targeting the UK? Some commentators 
date their arrival to the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 when 
the British Government agreed to take several thousand economic 
migrants held in detention camps.

An official at the United Nations in Hanoi told us that the 
Vietnamese have a long history of migration driven by war and 
poverty, they are entrepreneurial and are adept at spotting market gaps.

A gap in the market for cannabis opened up, according to the United 
Nations, when a crackdown in Morocco cut its export of cannabis resin by half.

According to DrugScope, home-grown cannabis now accounts for 60 per 
cent of the UK market.

Another factor which may be attracting the cannabis growers to our 
shores is that, by and large, they are getting away with it.

Declassification pushed cannabis down the list of police priorities 
just as politicians intended, giving officers time for tackling more 
serious offences.

As a result officers say they are sometimes slow to act against 
cannabis farms, if they act at all. And when houses are raided they 
usually house only a single "gardener", an illegal immigrant way down 
the criminal chain.

At the Home Office, where a review of cannabis classification is 
under way on the orders of Gordon Brown, officials who defend the 
downgrading of cannabis usually point out that despite the fact that 
use may be increasing among young offenders, overall there has been a 
recent slight decrease in the popularity of the drug.

Police agree that the cannabis being farmed is not all making its way 
into the UK market.

For Merseyside Detective Inspector Bill Stupples, it raises the 
disturbing possibility that we are becoming world exporters of this drug.

"I am quite convinced that it is centrally controlled and that the 
product is being exported, otherwise we would be up to our eyes in 
the stuff and we're not," he said.

"There is a market for it in the UK but when you think about the 
amount that is being grown there is too much,so it must be going 
somewhere else.

"I think they are using places such as Merseyside as the base for 
production and it wouldn't surprise me if it was being sent to 
France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands or wherever."

It is a puzzling set of circumstances for the elderly residents of 
the quiet spot in Derbyshire where the detached house fell victim to 
cannabis farmers.

A couple in their 80s who live nearby said they had been watching 
television when the roof exploded in a great roar of flames.

"It was such a shock," the woman told me. "The new owner had knocked 
on our door to introduce himself, and he seemed such a respectable 
oriental gentleman.

"We had no idea about any cannabis and we think it is a disgrace. It 
has lowered the tone of this neighbourhood. It is dragging us all down."
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