Are YOU living next door to a cannabis farm?
It used to be the preserve of organised crime but now marijuana-growing has diversified... into Scottish suburbia. And even the middle class is dabbling in the illicit cottage industry
EDWARD Harkin grew his four plants in a secret void reached by a stepladder under his floorboards in Kilmarnock. Over in Renfrew, Kevin O’Rourke’s £35,000 crop grew in tents in back bedrooms of his flat until the place went up in flames as a result of his tampering with the electricity supply.
At the Kincardineshire home of teacher Shona Gray, meanwhile, the plants were to be found in her bath, although she insisted they were nothing to do with her.
Then there are the ‘unclaimed’ harvests – such as the seven floors of expertly cultivated vegetation found in an otherwise derelict building yards from Glasgow Sheriff Court or the 1,141 plants found flourishing a couple of months ago at a vacant store in Falkirk High Street. It used to be a Littlewoods.
Scotland, like the rest of the Britain, has long been known as a nation of gardeners. But these are not the type of gardens which can be visited or admired from the street. They are the secret gardens keeping Scotland awash with cannabis. And they have become so plentiful in villages, towns and cities across the country that imports of cannabis from overseas are said to have shrunk almost to nothing.
Such is the enormous scale of production here, says one expert involved in the war against drugs, that Scotland is now virtually cannabis self-sufficient.
Government figures issued this week give a stark illustration of the nation’s booming cannabis farm industry. They show that while police seized 13,022 plants in the year 2014-15, by the following year that had mushroomed to 31,398. The quantity of herbal cannabis seized rocketed from 165kg (364lb) to 413kg (910lb) in the same period.
But the story behind these figures is even more alarming. It is one involving organised crime gangs, people trafficking, theft of electricity, collusion by professionals and buildings being turned into fire hazards to facilitate the undetected production of the class B drug.
It is also a story about an illegal industry aided and abetted by the internet where both the equipment and the know-how needed to create highly profitable cannabis farms in lofts, spare rooms, bathrooms or basements is readily available.
AN activity which was once the preserve of a few criminal kingpins and a handful of sandal-wearing amateur growers has spread into every community in the country.
Experts believe most of us now live in streets where cannabis is grown and that many living in tenements or blocks of flats will have farms in their buildings.
Their crop is a widely seen as a ‘gateway’ drug, both to harder drugs and to crime. Only last month a study by Bristol University found teenagers using cannabis are 37 times more likely to become habitual smokers, problem drinkers and to move on to harder drugs.
Kenny Simpson, who runs Police Scotland’s Statement of Opinion (STOP) Unit which advises prosecutors on drugs found in raids, said: ‘There is definitely an increase in cannabis cultivations.’
He added: ‘The world has become a smaller place and there is much more knowledge because of the internet and the availability of equipment. The longer it goes on the more cultivating sites we’ll identify.’
The beginnings of Scotland’s cannabis farm boom came a decade ago when Vietnamese organised crime groups spread across Europe and used the UK as a key base. Some launched large-scale cannabis farms in rented business premises and staffed them with expendable dogsbodies – often trafficked from Vietnam – whose job was to guard the crop at all times.
That was the experience of Hai Van Vo, an orphan who was smuggled into Britain in a shipping container and installed in a cottage in Gollanfield, Inverness-shire, to run a cannabis farm worth £400,000 a year to the gang behind it.
Or at least he claimed it was. He also claimed he was 16 when he was arrested there in 2012 and he was really 22.
Vo said he was locked inside the spartan property and forced to sleep on a door because there was no bed. His only entertainment was a laptop and food arrived only once a week. Nevertheless, holes in his story resulted in him being jailed for 27 months.
Part of the challenge facing detectives in this period, said Mr Simpson, was figuring out who was genuinely trafficked and who was merely saying they were in the hope of more lenient treatment in court.
In any case, police were becoming increasingly adept at uncovering these crude, industrial-scale farms and the financial blow for the criminals of a raid on a factory of perhaps 5,000 plants was huge. Their solution was smaller scale farms but more of them – much more.
Mr Simpson said: ‘What the organised crime groups have done is they have realised that you can’t flush a huge commercial cultivation down the toilet when the police come to the door.
‘If you source large premises and have spent significant amounts of money kitting it out for cultivation purposes, if that is detected the whole investment is lost. So what we’ve tended to see is they’re being broken down into smaller cultivation sites – and we see a lot of satellite sites.’
The upshot was cannabis farms permeated communities, moving into people’s homes and, by necessity, bringing in ever greater numbers.
The Vietnamese gangs have never left, but joining them now were growers such as Kevin O’Rourke, who figured giving a bedroom or two of his Renfrew flat over to cannabis was an excellent get-rich-quick scheme – especially after tampering with his electricity supply to bypass the meter and disguise all the power going into providing heat and light for his crop.
All went well until his overloaded fuse-box went up in flames, resulting in 999 calls and fire crews and, ultimately, arrest.
But his case raises a deeply disturbing question. Are the homes of flat and tenement dwellers being turned into fire-hazards by reckless cannabis gardeners interfering with power supplies to steal electricity?
The answer is almost certainly yes.
A Scottish Fire and Rescue Service spokesman said: ‘Tampering with an electrical meter can be a fire risk and under no circumstances will we ever condone such actions as they have potentially lifethreatening consequences.’
For his part, Mr Simpson said: ‘Of course you can’t say it’s 100 per cent safe when non-professionals have bypassed the electricity, but the reality is many of the electrical bypasses have been done by people who are probably professionally qualified to do so. They are just paid.’
The cannabis boom has, then, become so mainstream that even some electrical engineers from the utility companies it is robbing are in on it. The illicit industry has also become considerably more adept at covering its tracks.
During winter, snow was the ‘best friend’ of the drug squad detective because the cannabis farm would surely be under the only roof-top not covered with it.
Such was the intensity of heat in the cultivation site that condensation was often to be found streaming down the interior walls of neighbouring homes – another tell-tale sign.
The distinctive, sweet, pungent whiff was probably the most obvious giveaway. Numerous operations have been nobbled by police work no more sophisticated than a beat bobby’s sense of smell.
BUT now it is just as likely that it will be the low hum of fans installed to disperse the smell that gives the game away. And hard lessons learned from the hundreds of cannabis farms discovered and shut down mean that the clues to identifying all the other ones are becoming much more subtle. Even thermal imaging cameras used in helicopters are being thwarted by the fact much of the heat is now contained in the tent – or the room within a room – in which the plants typically grow.
‘Often in flats there will be air fresheners at the door, incense burning and provisions in place to disguise the smell at the letter box,’ said Mr Simpson. ‘There might be a curtain in the hallway so that you can’t see all the way into the flat.
‘Bright lights are obviously an indication of cultivation but if they are inside growing tents and the blinds are pulled most of the way down, you wouldn’t necessarily notice much.’
Growing tents, lighting equipment, acoustic fans and carbon filters are all available online – along with complete hydroponic cultivation kits for those who wish to do their gardening without soil.
The internet is also awash with advice and chat groups for the novice grower, while specialist knowledge also spreads through communities by word of mouth.
The result is an escalating arms race between police and the enemy: as ever more sophisticated detection equipment is introduced, so the masking techniques advance.
One major problem is the enemy is no longer a handful of organised crime gangs. It is neighbours, students, middle-class professionals who go to work in the mornings. And the cultivations are not
necessarily to be found in dingy sink estates or derelict buildings with boarded-up windows but in desirable properties.
It was after reports of a break in that police officers found cannabis plants and specialist lights in the bathroom of 55-year-old Shona Gray’s home in Stonehaven, Kincardineshire.
The primary school teacher told them she had been ‘experimenting’ with growing the drug to avoid using local dealers and accepted a police caution.
Only when she was hauled before the General Teaching Council for Scotland did she change her story, claiming she took the rap for her son, Sam, whose friend Adam Milne was said to have put the plants there. ‘I was trying to protect my son,’ she said. ‘He’s my number one priority. I haven’t smoked cannabis since I was 21.’
She even tried to convince the hearing she did not know cannabis was being grown there, a claim a police officer at the hearing said was simply unfeasible.
‘You could not live at the house without knowing cannabis was being grown,’ said PC Paul Murphy. ‘You could smell the odour from the hallway area.’ Whatever the truth about her claims, the case clearly illustrated the extent to which cannabis growing had entered the mainstream.
The practice is so common even one Scottish police officer who rented out his property after being seconded elsewhere learned, to his horror, that his tenants had turned the place into a cannabis farm.
The expert ‘gardeners’ to which police once referred are now mostly householders – some growing for personal use, others to sell on, often at considerable profit.
Indeed, say Police Scotland, the dividing line between the personal use cultivations can be subtle. Those who embark on cannabis growing for their own consumption often succumb to the temptation to add a few more plants as their knowledge develops and yields increase.
‘A single plant will realise between £200 and £600 in terms of usable cannabis if it’s properly grown,’ said Mr Simpson.
‘It’s very tempting for people to grow that bit more and sell it on and make some money.
‘That’s where we get into this cottage industry type situation but what happens then is word gets out they’re supplying it and that’s another inroad for law enforcement to deal with that.’
The penalties may not be what everyone would wish. Following the discovery of Edward Harkin’s cannabis cultivation system under his floorboards – including hydroponic equipment and plant food – he was ordered to carry out community service.
Kevin O’Rourke, whose tampering with his electricity supply resulted in a blaze at his home, also escaped a jail sentence.
‘There’s a lot of debate about cannabis and undoubtedly some people will have the perception that it’s not the most serious of crimes,’ said Mr Simpson.
‘However it still remains an offence to cultivate, to possess, to sell and to offer for supply and as long as that remains the legal framework in which we operate that’s how we will operate.’
His STOP unit’s expertise means the Scottish courts have never been better informed about the mechanics and finances of cannabis farming.
Officers will visit a scene and compile video narratives of exactly what was taking place there and give detailed assessments of the equipment, the cultivation and its value.
But the reality is that no one now knows the full extent to which this undercover industry has taken root in Scotland.
And the clear concern underlying this week’s figures is the farms are multiplying faster than they are being closed down.