Pubdate: Thu, 03 Jun 2010
Source: Oakland Tribune, The (CA)
Copyright: 2010 Bay Area News Group
Contact: http://www.insidebayarea.com/feedback/tribune
Website: http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/314
Author: Cecily Burt

MEDICAL MARIJUANA BOOM A BOON FOR ILLEGAL, SOMETIMES DANGEROUS, CULTIVATION

OAKLAND - Buckingham Boulevard residents are hypervigilant about 
watching out for their neighborhood, quick to report anything 
suspicious. But a police detective's early morning knock at one 
neighbor's front door was the first clue that something illegal was 
happening inside the house across the street. The detective said 
there would be a raid, and suggested the neighbor might want to leave 
in case there was gunfire. When the man drove back up the canyon a 
few hours later, police were still hauling out marijuana plants, bags 
of buds, money and growing equipment from two expensive, hillside 
homes that had housed an extensive indoor pot farm.

"These people were growing $1 million worth of pot and I had no clue 
at all," said the resident, who asked that his name not be used 
because the ringleader escaped during the police raid and has never 
been caught. "They had two houses, one to grow the pot and another 
house where they packaged it for sale. The amazing thing is I talked 
to the people who lived in the house between the two, and they had no clue."

The luxury enclave in the Oakland hills may seem far removed from a 
Chinatown fortune cookie factory, a Hayward warehouse, or suburban 
tract homes in Brentwood or Antioch. But they all have one thing in 
common: they were used to illegally cultivate potent indoor varieties 
of marijuana, often right under the noses of their neighbors.

The lucrative and illegal indoor ganja market is growing, fueled by 
the demand for medical marijuana, experts say, and it's only a matter 
of time before someone is seriously hurt in a grow-house fire or by 
armed intruders trying to steal plants that can yield thousands or 
millions of dollars in sales.

Last month, a grower in Oakland was shot in the leg by two masked men 
who didn't want to bother cultivating their own weed. He survived, 
but others have not been as lucky. The same day, less than a 
quarter-mile away, a smoky fire broke out in a small house brimming 
with about 400 pungent, bud-rich plants. The next day, a small house 
fire in Antioch proved to be the undoing for the owner of a 500-plant crop.

Marijuana advocates believe that legalization of the herb will put a 
dent in the black-market dealers who are causing the biggest risk to 
public safety.

A statewide measure on the November ballot would, if approved, give 
cities the right to regulate and tax commercial production and sales 
of marijuana for recreational use. And Oakland Councilmembers Rebecca 
Kaplan and Larry Reid will soon introduce an ordinance to regulate 
marijuana cultivation by licensing a limited number of large 
commercial growers to supply dispensaries. The growers would be 
required to obtain a business license and building permit to make 
sure the operation is up to code. They would have to hire security 
and, like the dispensaries, pay taxes. Kaplan said the new oversight 
would clamp down on illegal growers, reduce the fire hazard and put a 
dent in the criminal element.

But El Cerrito Police Chief Scott Kirkland, a member of the 
California Police Chiefs Association who has written extensively on 
the topic and opposes efforts to legalize pot, said there is just too 
much money and gang activity in illegal cultivation to think that all 
the growers will melt away or go legit based on a few new laws.

"It's very dangerous, the new push for legalization," he said. "It's 
naive to think decriminalization will take care of the problem."

Nearly every week in the Bay Area, police or firefighters uncover 
large indoor crops. There were 28 in Oakland alone in 2009, but 
unlike certified medical marijuana patients or caregivers who are 
allowed to grow up to 72 plants each, these busts usually involve 
several hundred plants. Sometimes the grows are operated by 
professional crime rings across several cities and multiple homes or 
warehouses. More often, the indoor grows involve crops grown by 
individuals trying to cash in on the medical marijuana boom.

Improvements in indoor growing equipment, readily available at local 
stores, can turn someone with a brown thumb into a weed king, experts 
say, but it doesn't make a person smart.

"It's interesting, and also alarming from a community safety 
standpoint," Kirkland said. "It exists everywhere."

Fire: It's in the wiring

Many indoor grows are discovered only after a fire has started, 
usually sparked by overtaxed electrical systems that are not designed 
to carry the heavy load of lights, fans and automatic watering 
systems required for successful indoor cultivation.

Metal halide lamps or high-pressure sodium lights favored for growing 
have surface temperatures that can reach 1,000 degrees. Add exhaust 
fans and automatic irrigation systems and you've got a potent recipe 
for overloading a structure's electrical capacity.

"A lot of times people will set up a grow operation "... and not 
upgrade the electrical," said Oakland fire investigator Maria 
Sabatini. "A typical house in Oakland built in the 1940s might have 
15-amp circuits. Two or three (grow) lamps will take that up."

All that growing equipment can cause a spike in electrical usage. 
PG&E spokeswoman Tamar Sarkissian said the utility cooperates with 
law enforcement subpoenas or search warrants, but she said employees 
could be put at risk if they were required to report suspicious 
activity. She also said there are legitimate reasons why a home's 
power usage might go up.

Sometimes growers will hire an electrician to upgrade their 
electrical system to handle the industrial-sized load. But most seem 
to want to do it themselves, and that can lead to disastrous results. 
Illegal growers frequently pirate electrical power by hacking into 
the electrical source before it reaches the PG&E meter and then 
rerouting the wiring to provide electricity to the grow operation.

That practice creates a hazard for firefighters who think they are 
shutting off power at the meter only to discover once inside that the 
structure is still "hot" in more ways than one, Sabatini said.

That's what happened at the Mar Kee Fortune Cookie Factory in 
Oakland, where 1,000 leafy plants went up in smoke. The growers had 
accessed an underground PG&E vault under the front sidewalk and ran 
new power lines up the outside of the building and in through a hole 
near the roof. They added professional-looking circuitry to handle 
the demand, but the power pirates apparently didn't do as good a job 
with the wiring.

"Electrocutions are what worry me the most," Sabatini said. "At the 
cookie factory, the firefighters didn't have any idea that the system 
had been modified illegally. They were lucky."

Oakland police Sgt. Barry Donelan, a member of the department's arson 
and bomb squad, said many firefighters are apprehensive about 
fighting fires in marijuana grows for that very reason. He estimated 
that 30 to 40 of the cases he's handled over the past three years 
involved fires, 20 of which were sent to the district attorney for 
possible felony prosecution. His cases have a particular combination: 
illegal cultivation, a fire caused by reckless disregard that creates 
a threat to public safety, such as illegal wiring, and the fire's 
cause can't be reasonable.

That last part is straightforward, he said, because it's not 
reasonable to cultivate large crops of marijuana in a residential house.

"During interviews, they say they have (medical marijuana ID) cards 
and their grow is legal. But it's still a felony to cause a fire that 
puts public safety at risk," he said.

Magnets for crime

Overheated wiring is not the only concern for law enforcement. Police 
officers investigating other crimes or serving search warrants 
sometimes discover indoor pot crops and weapons the growers use to 
defend their lucrative operation. There have been several cases where 
medicinal marijuana clubs or personal pot growers have been robbed, 
assaulted and even killed:

In May, a grower was tied up, beaten and then shot in the leg by two 
men who invaded his upstairs apartment and tried to force him to give 
up the key to a large-scale cultivation operation he had set up 
downstairs in a commercial storefront on San Leandro Street in East Oakland.

In December, the owner of a downtown Oakland barber shop was wounded 
by an armed man who entered his shop. Police officers who arrived at 
the scene uncovered an indoor crop of pot.

In October, a 43-year-old Orinda man was shot four times while 
guarding his friend's medicinal marijuana crop in North Oakland. The 
woman who owned the plants told police it wasn't the first time a 
thief had attempted to steal her crop.

In January 2007, an editor for PC World Magazine was shot and killed 
by one of four masked men who broke into his Pittsburg home to steal 
marijuana plants.

In August 2007, an Oakland man was shot and killed while trying to 
break into a grow operation on Magnolia Street in West Oakland.

Innocent neighbors can become victims when crooks get their addresses 
crossed. Alameda County Chief deputy district attorney Tom Rogers 
said that six people were recently arrested for breaking into a condo 
in Oakland because they thought pot was grown there.

"The residents had only been there a month and they had guns held to 
their heads," he said. "It was very traumatic."

Under the radar

Sometimes those neighbors have their suspicions, but more often than 
not they are the last to know.

The sounds of hammering and sawing gave neighbors hope that the small 
white house on Angelo Street in East Oakland, vacant for months, was 
being fixed up and rented. They found out what was really going on 
last month when fire trucks roared up, lights and sirens flashing, 
just before 7 a.m. One whiff of the thick black smoke billowing down 
the street told them all they needed to know.

"We never expected it," said Salvador Mendoza, who lives a couple doors away.

The Buckingham Boulevard neighbor knows how they feel. The growers on 
his block were very good at flying under the radar. They were 
cultivating pot worth millions, but the people who visited the houses 
did not advertise their wealth with flashy cars and loud parties. 
They maintained the charade for about a year.

"I thought maybe they had a home business. "... If they had been 
driving BMWs or Mercedes, that would have been a tip," said the neighbor.

But that's not the only reason the illicit grow operation shook him up.

"The house where they were growing the marijuana was the exact spot 
where the fire started 19 years ago," he said, referring to the Oct. 
20, 1991 conflagration that killed 25 people and destroyed more than 
3,000 dwellings, including all the homes on his street. "If that 
house had gone up, it would have started another fire."
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart