The cannabis factory with a f leet of Tesco delivery vans
Police find drug farm in vast warehouse on industrial estate
IT is a familiar sight up and down the country – an anonymous-looking warehouse on a nondescript industrial estate with a fleet of delivery vans waiting to dispatch goods to customers.
only this was a business with a difference. Inside the warehouse was a cannabis farm, supplying the drug to a network of dealers. It is the latest demonstration of drug gangs’ brazen contempt for the law. Just last month a cannabis farm was found at a former police station, and at the weekend another was found in a disused church. In what was described as one of the most sophisticated illegal drug operations yet discovered, the dealers took over a warehouse linked to a legitimate company.
Hidden in plain sight, it sat on an unremarkable estate in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, used by a mixture of distribution and manufacturing companies and small car repair units.
But unbeknown to passers-by or neighbouring workers, inside were industrial-sized heat lamps, powered by electricity re-routed from an underground mains cable.
When it was finally raided, police found an indoor field of cannabis. It appeared several earlier crops had been grown, harvested and dried before being divided into shipments. A fleet of four former Tesco home delivery vans was used to distribute the drugs to and from the factory on the Foxhills Industrial Estate.
The crop of around 15,000 plants was estimated to be worth £4million – but is likely to have yielded at least double that because the farm is understood to have been operating for months.
Five men, all vietnamese, were found inside. Effectively slave labour, they were suspected of growing and tending the crops.
Three were caught, while another two fled as officers poured in on July 28 and are still being hunted by police. The conditions in which the men were living, cooped up inside the unit with no natural light, basic food and the overwhelming stench of cannabis, were described as ‘pitiful’.
officers are still trying to trace the main players who organised and funded the farm, which is likely to have produced drugs to be distributed by county lines gangs.
Local dealers told news website Scunthorpe Live they had heard rumours about what they called ‘the motherlode’ but had no idea where it was. one, who gave his name as Cassius, said: ‘I’ve seen hundreds of farms, but I have never seen anything that big. I knew that all of our product came from one place, obviously it was there.’
But he said that anyone who thought the seizure would affect the availability of cannabis in the area was ‘ hilariously ignorant’, adding: ‘ Weed is everywhere, it’s very, very easy for us to get a hold of and it always will be.’
Detective Inspector John Cram, of Humberside Police, agreed, saying he feared that disruption would be ‘short-lived’.
He said: ‘This is part of a wider network and we believe it will only slow down the movement and cause disruption before other suppliers come in.’
Last month officers in Greater Manchester were embarrassed to discover the remains of a cannabis farm on the first floor of Failsworth police station, which closed three years ago. The growers are believed to have harvested their crop and vanished just hours earlier.
It comes as cannabis seizures by police almost halved in eight years – fresh evidence, critics said, that the authorities are turning a blind eye to the Class B drug.