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Canada: 'Growing like weeds', indeed!
Keeble McFarlane The Jamaica Observer
Saturday 17 Jan 2004 If you think ganja production is a growth industry" limited only to places like Jamaica, think again. Just last weekend, a police team drawn from several forces in the Canadian province of Ontario raided a former brewery about an hour's drive north of Toronto and uncovered the biggest ganja operation anyone has ever heard of. Acting on a tip, the police swooped down on the huge building, right adjacent to one of the busiest highways in Canada and found an extremely sophisticated operation they estimate could produce Cdn$100-million a year. The discovery shocked many people, especially the 100,000 citizens of the pleasant lakeside city of Barrie. Television and newspaper reports featured police pictures of row upon row of healthy plants growing under powerful lights. For many years the brewing giant, Molson, operated the huge brewery which is a kind of landmark for those driving along Highway 400 from Toronto towards their homes in Barrie or to points further north. In a consolidation of its business, the beer company shut down the brewery about four years ago, and sold it to a firm which has rented out the premises to several businesses. But for more than a year, the police say, no one driving past the well-known site suspected what was going on inside the plant. Neither did any of the other tenants. It was ideal for this kind of operation: the site has the highway on one side and parkland and trees around the rest of it, so there was very little risk that someone would detect the unusual odours the operation produced. And since the building had indoor as well as outdoor loading docks, shipping supplies and the end product in and out of the plant by truck was no problem. One of the other tenants in the building had a coffee-roasting business, which would further cover up any tell-tale smells. Inside the windowless building, the police found a computer-controlled hydroponic system which allowed the operators to fine-tune the growth of the rows of plants inside 25 enormous vats once used to age beer. The vats, which once produced some of Canada's most popular brands of beer, were rigged up with heating vents, rows of lights, fans, thermostats and computer controls, connected by many kilometres of wire. The vats provided an ideal environment for the plants, as the operators could precisely control the temperature, humidity, amount of light as well as the chemical medium feeding the plants. The Barrie police chief said the wiring and ventilation system was so sophisticated it must have been designed by engineers. There were areas to nurture plants to flower and produce seed, which would be started in nursery beds and then transferred to the growing areas for finishing. The chemical bath was fine-tuned to allow the plants to produce the maximum amount of THC, or tetra-hydra-cannabinol, the ingredient that gives the weed its potent kick. A typical crop would take about three months, after which the plants were dried on racks in rooms where the temperature and humidity could also be closely controlled. The growing operation was monitored round the clock, 365 days a year, and this meant people had to be there all the time. To facilitate this, they had fixed up a dormitory which could sleep as many as 50, and a cafeteria with refrigerators, cooking facilities, and even television. This operation is only the largest and most sophisticated the police have found, but it's by no means unusual. In recent years, police across Canada have raided similar operations in old factories, warehouses and industrial buildings. But there are still seasonal farms growing plants outside, and many people are also growing ganja in houses both in inner cities and in the suburbs. In those cases, police usually find out from unusual increases in the amount of water and electricity used, as well as the lack of activities normal to dwellings. In some cases, the operators use timers to switch the lights on and off in random patterns, as well as to open and close drapes; they remove mail and newspapers in order to camouflage the activities. Police have even found a few instances in which people have engaged in the dangerous practice of bypassing the electric meters by tapping into power lines to avoid detection because of the large amount of power used to feed the powerful lights as well as the pumps and fans. Call it marijuana, pot, weed, ganja or any of the other popular descriptions, the weed has become a very lucrative business in Canada, which has become one of the world's leading exporters. Growing the weed used to be an amateur activity, pursued originally by hippies and others outside the mainstream of society. The city of Vancouver, and other parts of forested British Columbia, used to be the centre of ganja-growing in Canada. Small growers favoured clear-cut patches left behind by the timber companies on Crown land, since it would be impossible for the police to trace the grower through ownership, and anyone suspected could easily deny knowledge of the crop. In years gone past, car dealers on Vancouver Island, just off the west coast, used to credit four-wheel-drive vehicles to people in the spring, knowing that in the autumn the owners would come in and pay off their debts in cash. Vancouver was also where the practice of breeding the plants to increase the THC content took off. Naturally-occurring ganja would contain perhaps three per cent THC, but even 15 years ago ganja sold on the street in Vancouver would easily top 15% THC! Although much is still grown there, marijuana growing has spread right across Canada. A senior office of the Ontario Provincial Police says growing the weed has become a billion-dollar business in Ontario. According to the official, it has taken on "epidemic proportions", and there just aren't enough people in the province to consume all the ganja grown here. A lot of it goes to the United States, and the Customs people along the border have heightened their vigilance. Apart from the fact that this business provides enormous profits for relatively modest outlays, the leniency of the courts in Canada also makes it attractive. Police say most people arrested for growing ganja get off with a fine, while the same offense would draw sentences of three to seven years in the US. Of course, we'll never stamp out ganja smoking, and the best the authorities can expect is to conduct raids such as this big one from time to time, as well as seize shipments crossing the border. The 19th century American philosopher and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, once described a weed as a plant whose virtues have not been discovered. However, based on what's happening in this field, it seems that, for some people at least, we can no longer describe the plant known to scientists as cannabis a 'weed'. --=======14654C67=======--
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