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UK: The pot plants that are worth millions
John Steele The Telegraph
Thursday 16 Mar 2006 A network of cannabis factories run by Vietnamese gangsters and producing tens of millions of pounds' worth of drugs a year has been uncovered by police. The high-strength skunk cannabis is cultivated in hundreds of houses in London, with power diverted from the mains to heat and light the plants. Young Vietnamese men, smuggled into Britain as economic immigrants, are used as "gardeners". Scotland Yard regards the Vietnamese gangs as the latest illustration of the way criminals are moving into Britain among communities of economic migrants and start looking around for ways of making illicit money. Tarique Ghaffur, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, whose detectives raided one of the factories at a terrace house in a south-east London suburb yesterday, said that officers must improve relations with "new communities" to increase the flow of intelligence on criminals. He also urged the Government to consider taking fingerprints and copies of documents from people applying abroad for visas to travel to Britain. More and more people who were arrested had no documents, he said, and that made it difficult to establish their identities and background. The cannabis is cultivated under hydroponic conditions - in liquid fertiliser - and police are urging importers of hydroponic equipment and materials, which are widely used in agriculture, to be alert to suspicious customers. In yesterday's raid, about 600 cannabis plants were spread across four floors of the house in Woolwich and seven people were arrested. Police have found a network of similar factories operating across London, each capable of producing hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of cannabis a year. In the 12 months from June 2004 a total of 255 were identified and closed down but officers fear that many more are still operating. Det Sgt David Galbraith said: "These gangs accept us closing the factories down as an occupational hazard because the people who run them have five, six, or seven on the go at the same time and there is so much profit in those."
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