‘We’re going to need a bigger van’: Raids show it’s boom time for growers on his patch
POLICE joked they needed a ‘bigger van’ to remove cannabis plants after busting a massive drug factory.
Their vehicle was full to bursting with sacks of the drug following the discovery of 1,053 plants worth £1million.
Just an hour after that raid, another team from West Midlands Police raided a second massive drugs factory seven miles away, uncovering a £1.4million haul.
Pictures taken during the operations – last month in Birmingham city centre and in West Bromwich – show the scale of the drugs problem in the West Midlands.
On Monday, police in the Neachells area of Birmingham discovered 100 plants, worth £100,000, growing under lamps in an outbuilding of a house.
And in January, officers shut down a £500,000 cannabis factory spanning three floors of a derelict tower block in the middle of a housing estate.
The factory was protected by a steelbarred door, reinforced with a metal grille and industrial padlock.
Officers uncovered living quarters,
stocks of food and a loading winch fitted into an empty lift shaft. The 20-storey block, Warstone Tower, had been earmarked for demolition.
West Midlands Police’s cannabis team found plants growing on the 16th floor but equipment sprawled across the 15th and 1 th floors, covering 31 rooms.
Electricity was being used illegally and there was a room with a system to pump water. In February, a £250,000 cannabis farm was found hidden in a bunker in Wolverhampton.
Criminals had built a special chamber beneath an outhouse in a back garden. The operation – including lights, fans and heaters – was hidden behind false wooden panelling in the main building.
One of the force’s biggest successes came last August with the discovery of a
£2.5million cannabis factory covering 19 rooms in two separate industrial units in Brownhills.
Cannabis farms are often linked to modern slavery, with operatives forced to tend to the crops for little or no pay in squalid conditions.
Dave Thompson, chief constable of West Midlands Police, shared a picture that he said illustrated the ‘human slavery of cannabis farms’.
It showed a small, windowless room with a dirty mattress on the floor, where a ‘live-in grower’ was sleeping. More than 650 plants were seized.
Police across the country are discovering an increasing number of cannabis plants growing illegally, according to figures from the Home Office.
There was a 10 per cent increase in the number of seizures between 201 and 2018 – from 318,988 plants to 351,881 plants. This was driven by an 18 per cent increase in large drug busts where the factories or farms had more than 100 plants.
Plants can be worth £1,000 – based on them achieving a 100g yield, with each gram costing around £10 when sold on the street.