Growing cannabis ‘just not worth it’

When police found a cannabis crop in an apparently unused building in Foxton, they thought they knew who owned the illicit cultivation.

They thought the cannabis was Darryl Turk’s but it turned out he had helped with a previous grow at the building, the Palmerston North District Court heard on Friday. Turk was sentenced to three months of community detention for cultivating cannabis early last year. He got involved when an associate needed an empty building to get a crop going in 2018. Police went to the property in May last year, after an anonymous tip, to find cannabis growing, and shortly after got in touch with Turk. He told them he had nothing to do with that crop but admitted to previously growing cannabis there. Defence lawyer Tony Thackery described the situation as ‘‘unusual’’. Turk was interested in cannabis because he knew the cannabis legalisation referendum was coming up, so wanted to learn how to grow the plant. ‘‘He was not looking to make money,’’ Thackery said.

Turk and the associate grew apart to the point Turk destroyed many of the 29 plants he was involved in growing.

Turk ran two busy automotive engineering businesses which had been extremely busy postcoronavirus lockdown. ‘‘At the end of the day, the work and effort in growing was just not worth it,’’ Thackery said.

Judge Stephanie Edwards said Turk had no cannabis consumption issues, so his involvement was purely driven by profit. Turk’s thinking around the referendum did not quite add up, as the vote will take place at September’s election but he got into growing in 2018, the judge said. ‘‘The logic of doing it in the way you did, rather than joining others who had been issued with licences to grow legally for medicinal purposes, is not clear to me,’’ the judge said.