Party Vibe

This is a long read but it explains whats happened to the weed that your buying in the UK nowadays. Why the prices have gone up and the quality dramatically down.

If you ignore the end of it its actually a very interesting article, for the Daily Mail.

Almost from the beginning, the new ‘neighbours’ in the cul-de-sac aroused suspicion.

Why, everyone wondered, had they sealed their windows with tape and black bin liners, and kept the boiler on full blast, come rain or shine, which resulted in condensation dripping down the outside walls?

Nor, residents observed, was the rubbish ever put out or the door answered during the day.

“It was only when it got dark that people would start to come and go,” said Peter Stevenson, 57, a design engineer, who lives here in Bricket Wood in the suburbs of St Albans.

In fact, no one really knew who was renting the smart, detached home in their midst.

In another part of the Home Counties, a similar picture (streaks of condensation, strange ‘comings and goings’ after dark) was unfolding at a recently leased £350,000 house in Orchard Drive, Standon, on the outskirts of Bishop’s Stortford.

Ditto Midway Avenue in the village of Thorpe, Surrey, after four ‘catering workers’ moved into a vacant bungalow.

“We couldn’t understand why on earth they always kept the lights on and the curtains drawn even in the height of summer,” said one pensioner in her 70s.

The lady next door to the property in question, on the other hand, was puzzled by the ‘funny smell’ coming through her daughter’s wardrobe.

Eventually, the police were called.

Inside, officers found row upon row of lamps hung from huge bolts in the walls in order to create subtropical conditions within.

The electricity meter had been bypassed. Furniture had been dismantled.

The space had been filled by a jungle of 500 cannabis plants which yielded two crops in six months.

Two crops equal an estimated £100,000 return.

Exact figures for the scale of the problem nationally are unavailable, but it is estimated that cannabis factories are now being raided at the rate of three a day across the country, and as soon as one closes another one opens.

Today, wherever you live, the chances are your home will not be far away from one.

Perhaps the most disturbing statistic, however, is that 75 per cent of cannabis production in the UK is now controlled by Vietnamese gangs involved in murders, kidnappings and child trafficking.

“These gangs are bringing organised crime to the suburbs and the problem is getting worse,” warned Chief Superintendent Jon House, of South Yorkshire Police.

Properties in the suburbs and shires are usually bigger than flats and terraces in the city and bigger properties result in bigger profits.

Apart from the examples described above, cannabis factories were recently operating in residential streets in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Northamptonshire, the Peak District, and Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire where, in July, a bloodstained crowbar was found in an upstairs bedroom along with a ‘considerable amount’ of blood.

Detectives believe the man — or ‘gardener’ — minding the crop was killed, although his body has never been found.

Many ‘factories’ are also boobytrapped to deter criminal rivals.

At one house, hidden behind plastic sheeting, ten-inch metal skewers had been concreted into window sills and connected directly to the mains electricity.

The vast majority of these factories produce ‘skunk’, the most powerful and harmful type of cannabis, which has been linked to psychosis, depression and anxiety.

These are the unsavoury facts about Cannabis UK.

The transformation from cottage industry, typically involving a few plants in a student bedsit, to multimillion pound business, began in earnest when, three years ago cannabis was reclassified from a Class B to a Class C drug.

Most users caught by police were given a formal caution but did not receive a criminal conviction.

Unofficially, prosecuting ‘suppliers’ also became less of a priority than combating the trade in hard drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine.

In other words, there was increased demand and less risk attached in meeting that demand.

The people who ruthlessly exploited the new economics of cannabis were the Vietnamese.

The analysis of nationwide police raids — 802 in London alone between 2005 and 2006 — showed around ‘two thirds to three quarters’ of cannabis factories run by Vietnamese gangs.

Yet, bizarrely, the crackdown on these operations has been hamstrung by political correctness.

The Mail has previously revealed how police planned to write to property landlords warning them to look out for suspicious tenancy applications, but it is understood at least one force has been found to be in breach of the Race Relations Act for specifically referring to Vietnamese in its letters.

It is the equivalent, many might think, of the security services being admonished for saying many al Qaeda terrorists come from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.

Even so, the criminal chain from, say, Bricket Wood (700 cannabis plants) or Orchard Drive, Standon (438 cannabis plants) invariably leads to Canada first, not Vietnam.

Many Vietnamese ‘Boat People’ arrived in Canada during the 70s and 80s with Vancouver and the surrounding province of British Columbia, which already had a large South East Asian population, the main destination because its position on Canada’s west coast made it the ‘Gateway to the Pacific’.

While cannabis or marijuana was illegal, the laws were less stringently enforced than in the U.S. and social attitudes towards the drug were more relaxed.

In Canada, cannabis factories are known as ‘grow-ups’ and it was a booming industry.

By 1991, ‘almost every single operation’ was run by the Vietnamese, according to a report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

Proceeds have been used to buy arms, hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, and to fund other criminal ventures. But over the past five years tougher legislation has been introduced in Canada, giving the authorities more powers to conduct raids and confiscate homes and contents as proceeds of crime.

This coincided with a more liberal approach to cannabis in the UK.

So it was that Vietnamese crime syndicates targeted Britain — and the methods used back in Canada are now being replicated here.

These methods are documented in a report by the RCMP which says: “Well-spoken individuals are usually hired to lease or buy a house.

“Once the lease or the purchase agreement is signed a team is sent to set up the necessary heating and ventilation systems.

“The crew also installs an electrical bypass so the local power company cannot detect any unusual increase in power consumption.

“Then a recent immigrant with little or no knowledge of the rest of the operation is offered the opportunity to live in the house with his family in return for watering the plants and keeping a low profile.

“A harvesting crew is sent in every few months to harvest the marijuana and prepare it for sale and distribution.

“This way, if one facility is taken down by police or the target of a drug rip-off, the loss is minimal and only has limited repercussions on the rest of the network.”

In Vancouver, or the village of Wroughton, near Swindon, the modus operandi is identical.

It was in July last year that police arrived in Edgar Row Close and raided a four-bedroom property in the culdesac of detached houses.

Rosemary Humphries, 59, who lives opposite, said: “When the police started bringing out these plants I was absolutely in shock that this could be going on in our street.

“They were enormous, and there were big bags of soil. They had basically moved the furniture out to grow cannabis everywhere.

“None of us had a clue it was happening. We are a close-knit street, where people know each other, but we had only ever seen one young man coming in and out of the house.

“It was really frightening. The police told us they had completely wrecked the place, drilled holes everywhere.”

Three Vietnamese men and a woman were arrested.

Tam Cao, 27, was the leader, the person who found private lettings for the ‘crew’ and was running a string of ‘factories’ from suburban homes in Wiltshire, which cultivated £2 million worth of cannabis.

Cao, who was jailed for three and a half years, produced a false French passport when he was picked up but later admitted entering Britain in the back of a lorry.

His ultimate criminal bosses were never identified — the gang’s system was working.

The ‘gardener’ for the Edgar Row Close cannabis ring, now serving two years, was 46-year-old Tan Troung.

More often than not, however, ‘human sprinklers’, as they are also known, are children illegally trafficked into the country from South East Asia and many fear reprisals against relatives if they try to escape.

At least one child a week is being found by police raiding cannabis factories.

Among them are two 15-year-old Vietnamese boys discovered behind the drawn blinds of that house near Bishops Stortford in 2006, and a Vietnamese boy, thought to be aged between 11 and 14, rescued from a semi in Greater Manchester in June.

He was placed in a care home but vanished last month. It isn’t clear whether he ran away or was snatched back by members of the gang who brought him to work in the cannabis factory.

To date, three murders have been linked with cannabis farming in the capital.

One victim was dumped on Barnes Common, west London, after being stabbed to death, another was fatally stabbed in a flat in New Cross, south east London, and a third was discovered with his throat cut at a house in the north-west suburbs of the city.

All were Vietnamese.

Hardly surprising, then, that police are now taking the threat posed by cannabis factories seriously and are privately furious that their efforts are being hampered by allegations of racism.

One statistic perhaps highlights the task now confronting forces across the country.

More than 60 per cent of cannabis is now produced here, compared to just 11 per cent a decade ago.

Det Sgt Bob Graham is in charge of Sheffield’s drug unit. “I have eight officers and we spend 40 per cent of our time tackling the factories,” he said.

“They are springing up all over the place, are kitted out with the latest equipment, and are almost always run by Vietnamese.”

On the day we spoke to him his team had just carried out two raids, among 70 in the past 18 months.

“We arrest the ‘gardeners’ but the people running the operation are almost impossible to trace,” explained Det Sgt Graham.

“The rewards are huge so they may think that even if they get caught and put away for a few years it is a price worth paying.”

In the space of four months in Hertfordshire recently 24 factories, were discovered — 13 in the suburban towns of Hemel Hampstead, Watford, Stevenage, Bishops Stortford and Waltham Cross.

Each included a sophisticated irrigation system, reflective foil on the walls, and ventilation ducts sliced into ceilings.

Electricity meters were bypassed, of course, to tap into the large amounts of energy that was needed to power the high intensity lamps without raising suspicion from suppliers.

“This is professional equipment, not something you can buy at B&Q,” said one officer. “It’s worth about £50,000.”

This is small change to the drugs gangs. Many ‘houses’ can yield four harvests a year together worth up to £576,000. Multiply that by … well, no one really knows the true figure for how many factories there are in Britain.

But scores, if not hundreds, of properties, many in respectable neighbourhoods, have been targeted; from the Ivy-covered semi in Jockey Road, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, to the farmhouse in Sevenhills Road, Iver Heath, Bucks, and the handsome, Victorian house in the exclusive Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales, where the imprint of a size ten boot is still clearly visible on the front door.

It belonged to the the police officer who kicked it down during a raid on the building.

“This is a lovely area,” said one resident. “Then early one morning police kicked down the front door and took four men and a woman off in handcuffs.”

Apart from anything else, the downgrading of cannabis three years ago was supposed to reduce the workload on our already overstretched police.

Instead it has resulted in cannabis factories springing up in what seems like every other street in the country, and organised crime spreading out of London and other major cities into the suburbs and shires.

What a triumph for the ‘softly, softly’ approach.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=488618&in_page_id=1770