Hey, man, we just sell the lights
Gardening suppliers face increased scrutiny
as police try to curb urban pot production
By COLIN FREEZE
Saturday, March 26, 2005 Page M1
The 1,000 watts needed to power the Sunmaster metal-halide grow-light kit make it blindingly bright. So bright that when one focuses on Dominic Cramer after staring at the $450 device, little multihued spots dance in front of the shop owner as he explains how his other products work, including the Can-Fan charcoal filters that suck suspicious aromas out of a room.
But the soft whir of ventilation fans in his second-floor Yonge Street shop don't muffle the fulminations of the founder of the Toronto Hemp Company. The 31-year-old entrepreneur can go on at length about his wares, but frequently pauses to rant against "ignorant politicians," "police propaganda," "witch hunts," "Big Brother" and the general "lunacy" of this country's marijuana laws.
If he sounds alarmed, he has a reason. Two officers recently parked their cruiser outside Mr. Cramer's shop and spent a half hour checking out his perfectly legal goods.
Outraged at what they call a "scourge" of indoor marijuana grow operations in the Toronto area, police are looking more closely at the relationship between grow ops and the rising number of places that sell indoor growing equipment.
While indoor-gardening enthusiasts certainly exist, police don't think they're the ones driving demand.
"You know where they [marijuana growers] are getting the stuff from -- it's all hydroponic stores," says Don Cardwell, a detective with York Region's drug squad, which he says is contemplating greater scrutiny of such shops. "It's something we have to consider: Cut the supplier off," he says.
The fear of drawing too much attention may explain why equipment vendors were reluctant to be interviewed about their businesses, including Rexdale-based Homegrown Hydroponics, which has 25 locations and advertises on radio station Q107's Psychedelic Sundays show. And it's not only the little guys who fear being associated with illicit grow operations. Home Depot spokesman Nick Cowling says the chain has systems in place to monitor large purchases of items -- such as piping or lighting -- that may contribute to grow operations. "We're always going to help out the local authorities," he says.
Mr. Cramer, however, is more outspoken. While he sells all the equipment needed to grow marijuana indoors -- fans to circulate carbon dioxide and cool the high-wattage lights that boost yield, timers that control lights to simulate night and day, charcoal filters to clean up the smell -- he says his clientele are legitimate medicinal marijuana users or people who grow only a few plants in closets or small rooms. But he insists out-in-the-open vendors like him aren't supplying the GTA grow-op boom, which has seen busts in Toronto alone jump from 33 in 2001 to more than 250 last year.
"It's not a big cash-generating industry for little guys like us," he says, blaming the big-time profit-seeking syndicates of marijuana growers.
Pot activists such as Mr. Cramer differentiate themselves and their clients from the large-scale growers that police are now routinely taking down. They say that these gangs tend to have their own networks, set up dummy corporations to buy gear wholesale, or even send teams of people to purchase stuff from big-box hardware stores.
Police, however, say that crime gangs often have a hydroponic store at the centre of their operations. "We've sent undercover officers in," Det. Cardwell says. "But they have a selective clientele whom they know and trust, right? They have connections to get you the baby marijuana plants as well, usually off-location, but they won't give that information unless they really trust you."
Police also have to weigh whether intensive investigations pay off in court. Take Project Potluck. Three years ago, police in Peel Region circulated a news release announcing they, the RCMP, and even the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency teamed up for what was then described as a major bust. After a 10-month sting, police said they bought much more than equipment from four Mississauga stores: Marijuana plants and expertise in growing them were also for sale. Police arrested nearly 20 people on drug charges and seized $1.7-million worth of property.
But a funny thing happened on the way to court. In what was supposed to have been an open-and-shut case, most of the people charged received house-arrest terms less lengthy than the time it took police to investigate. One husband-and-wife team was forced to hand over $200,000 in money, two houses and four cars that were found to be the proceeds of crime, but only the wife was sentenced to jail time. And Mississauga's All Seasons Hydroponics, the focal point of Potluck, remains in business today.
Last September in Scarborough, Toronto Police made an even larger bust. More than 40 suspects were arrested as police focused on two indoor-gardening stores -- Caesar's Garden Centre and Jade Garden Trading. The case is still before the courts, but it's alleged people affiliated with the stores were selling equipment, expertise and baby marijuana plants -- and also taking back mature plants and selling them.
While Mr. Cramer says he sticks to selling legal goods, he wonders how deep the scrutiny might extend. A B.C.-based friend of his was recently arrested and Mr. Cramer believes the man was targeted after being spotted buying soil at Home Depot. As British Columbia tends to lead Canada on all marijuana-cultivation trends, Mr. Cramer fears that officials in Ontario may also pick up strange West Coast ideas -- such as "the insanity" of setting up registries for growing-equipment shops, as some politicians there are now proposing.
Politicos sniff out grow ops -- and votes
By John Barber
Saturday, March 26, 2005, Page M2
The crime scene: Scarborough. The investigating politicians: councillor Mike Del Grande and Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis. The target: votes.
Detective Del Grande slouches in the driver's seat of his battered, unmarked vehicle, nervously fingering the binoculars in his lap, steely eyes glinting as his street-smart partner creeps from house to house on the quiet suburban cul-de-sac, noting all suspicious activity and sniffing out the telltale odour of lurking votes.
Detective Krygiannis’s bold reconnoiter unsettles the veteran vote-hunter slumped in the car. He usually prefers to conduct operations more on the sly, using binoculars to peer through uncurtained windows and a camera to record any suspicious details that could be worked into an official-looking sign on the lawn of some house declaring it a “suspected” marijuana grow operation.
The Greek is more aggressive – knocking on every door, squinting inside and smelling, always smelling. But he has to be: A federal type facing the prospect of a snap election at any time, the heat’s on him. And partners is partners, right?
“I’ll do a drive-by,” the hard-boiled detective known as “Peeping Mike” told a television crew this week. “Then we’ll knock on a few more neighbours’ doors and just kind of ask general questions…. Do they know who their neighbour is? Anybody moved? Anybody move out? Anything unusual?”
“Smell anything?” Detective Karygiannis asks.
Recently the hard-charging Scarborough-Agincourt MP went so far as to confront suspected pot farmers in front of a whole block full of concerned voters, blocking their escape until police arrived to save him. It was a triumph.
But Peeping Mike still hangs back. Not because the real cops have politely advised the pair to butt out of the crime-busting business: Watch Your Neighbours – the Scarberians’ new spin on the Neighbourhood Watch of a more innocent suburbia – it’s good business. It just wears a guy down.
“I’ve got a wife and kids,” the big lug blubbed on TV. “What’s it worth to me at the end of the day, to end up on a slab?”
Dum, de dum dum, dumm!
It’s no wonder the police have a hard time getting people to take the grow-op plague seriously. “Tolerant societal attitudes toward marihuana in general” is one problem, according to a recent Toronto Police Service report that spells it with an “h,” as is “a serious lack of deterrent sentences” for convicted growers. Then there is the unspoken comedy factor: first the brewery-scale grow-op busted last year beside Highway 400, now the gruesome twosome of northeast Toronto.
Another problem is that, however reluctantly, the police themselves don’t treat grow ops seriously. Enforcement is solely “reactive,” the report acknowledges, and often occurs as the result of a related investigation. Plice say they lack the resources to pursue most Crime Stoppers tips about grow ops, and they complain that busting them is complicated, expensive and dangerous. They also warn that laissez-faire Toronto is becoming a magnet for growers chased out of more “pro-active” jurisdictions.
But the police are by no means negligent about suggesting a solution to this slack and slaphappy state of affairs. They call it a “dedicated marihuana grow team,” by which they do not mean a team of really enthusiastic growers determined to do the job safely and responsibly, but rather a specialized squad charged with suppressing the cultivation of “marihuana.” Running the new squad will cost $8-million in its first five years, according to the report.
The drug squad’s new grow teams would enable police “to respond in a more pro-active fashion” to the problem, according to the report, perhaps placating some of the concerned voters. It might even encourage the vigilantes to retire before something ugly happens.
Do we believe it will actually reduce the number of houses and apartments in Toronto that are used to grow pot? Of course not. But as the cunning vote-hunters of Scarborough have proven, futile gestures have their uses.
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