Growing pains Tag along on a recent raid on an illegal basement marijuana grow-op -- then compare that operation to the Delta 9 medical marijuana production, and to a legal, one-man operation licensed to grow for medical use By: Kevin Rollason  Posted: 4:30 PM CDT Friday, Oct. 20, 2017 Last Modified: 12:40 PM CST Friday, Nov. 17, 2017

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/10/2017 (2373 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s the odour that hits you first. Standing 100 metres away from a small, white bungalow surrounded by trees, the smell fills your nostrils.

It’s dense and musky; it seems like it is being funnelled down the driveway.

Tucked away on a quiet street with dozens of metres between each house on the outskirts of Winnipeg, the smell is from an illegal marijuana grow operation; it’s often the calling card of the drug trade.

But not always; it is also, increasingly, the scent of marijuana growing legally in homes all over the city by people who use it medicinally.

And, with the federal government getting set to legalize marijuana sales for recreational use next summer, it is a smell that will become even more prevalent across Winnipeg.

Recently, a Free Press reporter and photographer were given unprecedented access to accompany Winnipeg police officers taking down an illegal grow-op to see first-hand what one looks like before it is carefully dismantled and carted away to be used as evidence.

That’s why we were standing on a gravel road in the sparsely populated neighbourhood near the edge of the city.

Police surveillance in the hours before the takedown concluded there was likely only one person inside. The police tactical team always has a plan on how to enter the house, but they hope a knock on the door and identifying shout — “Police!” — will suffice. They’ll ignore the no-soliciting sign nailed to one of the trees.

Officers wearing protective gear carrying high-powered weapons scatter through the woods surrounding the home just before the sun comes up. They’re ready to move as soon as they get the signal.

They don’t receive it; the man inside the house, unaware of the activity outside, surprises everyone by opening the door and walking to the end of his driveway to get the day’s Winnipeg Free Press out of the mailbox. Right into the waiting arms of police.

Within minutes, the back door opens, we walk inside and get hit by the aroma as we follow a couple of officers down the stairs to the basement. There are several makeshift rooms constructed of two-by-fours and plastic sheeting.

We’re also greeted with a bit of whimsy. Below a sign warning “Danger High Voltage” is a flat piece of fake rock with flower artwork on it and the words “My Secret Garden.”

The loud hum of fans is constant and, while the hallways between these rooms are in shadows, bright light can be seen through the opaque plastic and around the makeshift doors.

An officer opens a door so we can see inside.

The plants are in the same large, black plastic pots for sale at local greenhouses. Each plant, with the distinctive jagged-edged leaves, is surrounded by a tomato cage to make sure it grows vertically and doesn’t fall over. They are jammed together so tightly that it’s difficult to count how many are in this “room,” but there are at least two dozen, all almost a metre high.

That’s one room. Others house plants in various stages of development — from little seedlings or clones, to junior plants, to the mature plants with the buds — or “flowers” — ready to harvest.

“Every grow-op will have plants in three stages,” says an officer who can’t be identified because he works undercover.

“They will create walls to separate the stages. During the clone state they get 24 hours of fluorescent lights. They used 600-watt high-wattage bulbs here.”

In the next room, there are plants in the “veg,” or vegetative stage; where the plants grow to the size the grower wants before the number of hours of lighting is reduced to encourage the plant to enter the flowering stage, creating the buds. This final step produces the marijuana that people use.

“This guy, I don’t know why, but he put clones with his veg plants,” the officer says. “Maybe he ran out of room?”

There isn’t a discoloured leaf in the place. They’re all a vibrant green. The grower clearly has a green thumb.

This is a relatively sophisticated operation. The ventilation system and the lights are mounted inside the piping system that runs from the rooms out the side of the house and the chimney.

“He was taking fresh air in through this window and then he is exhausting out of the chimney,” another undercover officer says, pointing to the large piece of wood covering what was the window and the pipe running in through it.

“He has a light system in the tubes so, if used properly, it keeps the rooms cooler and less smell goes outside.”

Sgt. Carrol MacDonald, the head of the WPS marijuana grow-operation unit, says the search warrant obtained in this case had to be executed within 14 days. Once police are inside and find illegal activity, the restrictions change.

“Now that we have executed it and crossed the threshold, we are good now,” she says. “We can be here for a month.”

MacDonald has seen many busts during her 15 years with the unit and doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary with this one.

“I would say this is about average in size,” she says. “We’ve had everything from one plant to 3,000 plants. But we don’t see as many of the large ones now as in the past. They’re keeping them smaller now to fly under the radar. And they put them in three or four houses instead of having one big grow.”

The house is a little more than 1,000 square feet in size, but rang up a whopping electrical bill, registering 7,197 kilowatts used in the last month.

“His hydro bill would be $1,000 per month, I would estimate,” an officer says. “A house this size could be (normally be) $200 per month.”

A metal contraption called a stripping machine sits at one end of the basement.

“They clip the bud off the plant and then put the plant into this,” a cop explains. “It takes the leaves off and is easier than just clipping off all the leaves. There are bags below for the ‘shake.’ This shake — the leaves and left-over stems — they use it to produce oil and ‘shatter.’”

Shatter is created by forcing a solvent — most often butane — through the plant material to extract the oil. When the solvent evaporates, producers are left with a brittle, translucent, usually amber coloured concentrate containing more than 80 per cent THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the primary psychoactive compound in cannabis, compared to average concentrations of 15 to 30 per cent THC in marijuana buds.

Shatter is a particular concern to police across the country because of the highly flammable solvents used in its manufacturing, leading to the possibility of accidental explosions.

There aren’t any plants hanging to dry before being processed in the basement.

“(The grower) has already packaged dry marijuana,” an officer says.

There are a few different strains of cannabis growing here, including Girl Scout Cookies, Purple Kush and Sweet Blue.

There’s a High Times magazine on the coffee table upstairs. This month’s edition —  the Indoor Grow Special — features articles such as Big Buds — Grow Pros Tell All; Best Bulbs and Ballasts; and —likely troubling for people in this business — Pot Prices Plummet.

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How do police usually find grow-ops?

“They hide in plain sight,” MacDonald says. “They set up in middle-class neighbourhoods. But they go in and out through the backyard. No one goes to the front.

“Most of the tips we get are from people who smell it.”

There are times when a resident reports the distinctive smell and police fail to act — they can’t — and are unable to tell the complainant why.

“When we get a tip we first call Health Canada. That’s when we are told there is a medical licence there… our hands are tied,” MacDonald says. “But I have a really hard time not telling a citizen of Winnipeg the truth because I’m not allowed to. They just wonder why police aren’t doing their job.

“But we still want people — even after legalization — to call us even if a neighbour tells them they have a medical permit to grow marijuana. They may be lying.”

Sometimes a marijuana grow-op drug bust is simply that, a bust.

In one instance during the summer, neighbours and officers smelled marijuana. Hydro records showed an inordinate amount of electrical usage for a house that size.

Police discovered some marijuana when they got inside. But instead of a grow-op, they found numerous aquariums containing lizards and fish — all plugged into wall outlets.

● ● ●

In an undisclosed location in east Winnipeg, hundreds of marijuana plants are in various stages of legal growth.

Shortly before John Arbuthnot, co-founder and CEO of Delta 9 Bio-Tech, a Health Canada-approved medical marijuana producer, puts a Blue Bombers baseball cap on his head — backwards — and leaves for a meeting, he offers a tour of the facility. 

They grow medical weed here, but when recreational use becomes legal July 1, they will also be selling their product to other customers.

“We came here in July 2013, so it has been over four years for us now,” Arbuthnot says. “Initially, we were 13,000 square feet, but now we cover the (building’s) entire 80,000 square feet.

“We’re taking it from people’s basements and putting it into a manufacturing plant.”

The genesis of the company was a proposal Arbuthnot came up for a class project at the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business. Since then, he and his father have turned the project into a business.

Arbuthnot says their plants started with seeds purchased from the Netherlands and it has grown from there. Delta 9 is currently transitioning from its original growing rooms to new ones, which are repurposed container-ship boxes spray-painted white inside and out.

The first growing rooms don’t look much different than the ones in the busted grower’s basement. Which isn’t surprising, Arbuthnot says.

“A lot of the experience in our sector, as it becomes commercialized, comes from the original black-market producers,” he says. “We’ve taken what people have done illegally in their own home and are ramping it up. It’s like, it’s easy to bake a batch of 12 cookies, but it is more difficult to bake 12,000 cookies.”

Every step of production at Delta 9 is monitored closely to ensure the company is complying with Health Canada guidelines and producing a quality product for the people who rely on medical marijuana, he says.

“Marijuana is very difficult to cultivate,” he says. “There’s quality of air, air circulation, lighting.

“It’s very much an annual plant. It seeds in the spring and harvests in the fall. But here we are able to achieve five crops per year… and when Health Canada comes in they can find they are produced in a clean environment.”

Once a roomful of marijuana is harvested, the space is sanitized before the process begins again.

Beneficial insects are used to thwart destructive bugs instead of harmful chemicals, he says, adding customers have no idea what, if any, chemicals illegal growers are using.

“They may use something on the plants which is not approved for sale here,” he says. “The real danger is if you put it on a plant, and it is a harmful pesticide, then it can be released in peoples’ lungs.”

Each room at Delta 9 contains enough plants to produce eight to 10 kilograms of usable marijuana, worth between $80,000 to $100,000, in each crop cycle. Going from seedling to harvest takes about 17 weeks.

“A lot of the bigger producers have 100 kilos in a room, but we want to keep our batch sizes small to keep better control,” Arbuthnot says, adding smaller crop size translates to an easier decision to destroy a batch if a problem occurs at some point in the growth cycle.

Once the marijuana is dried, it is divided into the quantities individual users are allowed to have by Health Canada, and then mailed off in plain envelopes.

 Each package is labelled with the particular strain of the plant. “We’ve left the names of (some of) the products the same as the black-market names, but others we have come up with ourselves,” he says.

One package contains Super Lemon Haze, a well-known strain. But then there is Delta 9’s own MBHIGHDRO, as well as the tongue-in-cheek Rona Ambrosia.

“She was very against marijuana so we named a strain after her,” a laughing Arbuthnot says of the former federal interim Progressive Conservative leader. “I don’t know if she even knows about it.”

Arbuthnot enters a large, mostly open, area of the warehouse where shipping containers at one end are being converted into stackable grow pods.

“We’re getting rid of all the rooms you’ve seen so far,” he says. “(The containers) will be compliant with Health Canada regulations… each container has hydroponic circulating systems.

“They told us to build something that would last for 30 years. We have 15 pods installed and in production; we will have another 56 by the end of the year.

“Ultimately we will have 600 of these grow pods in the next two years… we will get 17,000 kilos per year and about $120 million to $150 million per year.”

Arbuthnot says he’s not worried the federal government’s legalization of marijuana will lead to more people growing it on their own, cutting into company sales.

“We equate it to beer and wine. We all have that uncle who comes to a dinner with wine and everyone says, ‘That’s awful,’ and you use it for cooking.”

Arbuthnot says he knows his company’s marijuana is better and healthier than any being sold on the black market because Delta 9 has tested more than a dozen samples provided to them by Winnipeg police.

“None of these products have ever passed what we have to pass,” he says. “They have E. coli, salmonella, mould.

“We have never found a product on the street safe for human consumption.”

In 2015, police began providing Delta 9 with samples seized from raids to determine whether there were any contaminants in them.

The first three samples, tested in 2015, found the THC content ranged from 16.4 per cent to 21.3 per cent, levels at the high end of the marijuana Delta 9 produces.

But all three samples had micro-organisms in them, including E. coli and salmonella. Tests also found evidence of heavy metals in one of the samples.

Police submitted eight more dried marijuana samples and the results were released in 2016. All of them not only tested positive for heavy metals, but the analyst also noted the samples were “a fairly bright yellow colouration where a normal colouration is a dark brown.”

Two of the samples had failing grades for pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that can cause bronchial infections. Another contained E. coli.

All of the samples had “incredibly large amounts” of salmonella when none should have been present, so “none would have been considered acceptable for sale,” according to the lab report.

 

Even before legalization, police are already experiencing headaches from medically approved grow-ops.

MacDonald acknowledges cannabis helps people with various illnesses. Health Canada allows individuals to produce plants for their own medical purposes based on how much they need.

She said police keep track of the medical grow-ops they learn about, which now number in the hundreds.

But she has questions about the quantity people are allowed to grow in their homes, pointing to one example — an individual in a small apartment building authorized to grow 195 plants and store more than eight kilos for personal use.

Two other people who live together have permits to grow a total of 342 plants and store 15 kilos.

Another address, with four medical permits listed, is allowed a total of 609 plants and 27 kilos of harvested marijuana. 

In the latter example, one of the permit holders lives in British Columbia and two of the other licensees have been connected to illegal grow-ops in the past, MacDonald says.

The numbers appear to run counter to limitations available on Health Canada’s website, which indicates someone with permission to use six grams of dried marijuana a day, as an example, can possess a maximum 150 grams at one time.

Health Canada provides a cannabis calculator on the website. Type in six grams of dried marijuana per day and choose the indoor-growing option and the result is an allowable 30 plants and 1,350 grams in storage.

Choosing the outdoor-growing option yields an allowable 12 plants and 4,500 grams in storage.

With the tell-tale smell in the air, criminals are adept at sniffing out legal plants, MacDonald says.

“Home invasions concern me,” she says. “There were two home invasions in a week in the North End because (the suspects) knew they were medical grow-ops. The bad guys smell it and they wait until the homeowners are not home and break in. Or they go in with their guns pointed.”

On Sept. 11 shortly before midnight, two men armed with a long-barrel rifle and a bayonet affixed and a knife broke down a front door and forced their way into a home in which two people are licensed by Health Canada to have 292 plants.

“They had their faces covered,” MacDonald says. “One held a knife to the neck and another held the firearm and threatened to shoot them.”

While the armed men stood guard over the residents, a third person went down to the basement and cut down 56 mature plants with a total street value of $67,000. Police have made one arrest.

“(Legal medical grow-ops are) easy to find because legal ones don’t mask the smell like illegal ones do,” she says.

“If there’s a need for marijuana (for cancer patients), I’m all for it. But while 10 plants would do no harm, 292 plants is outrageous. I’d like somebody to give me a sensible explanation. If I get one as to why somebody is that sick (that) they need 292 plants, I’d accept it.

“But 292 plants? That’s lunacy.”

Real estate agents and potential buyers quickly find out about a home’s history when it goes on the market after an illegal grow-op bust.

The asking price plunges because of the potential for — and sometimes presence of — moisture damage and mould.

But MacDonald says buyers don’t have the benefit of the same information when licensed medical weed growers sell; because of legislation protecting privacy there’s never any disclosure.

As well, she’s concerned about impaired driving because of legalization.

Bottom line, the longtime cop says legalization won’t accomplish what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly cited as the reason for changing the law.

“It won’t stop organized crime,” she says. “It won’t stop the black market. I see increases in everything criminal.”

● ● ●

Steven Stairs has glaucoma, cataracts and retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a condition that changes how the retina responds to light. He is legally blind.

Stairs also has two pop-up tents in his basement housing 49 marijuana plants. He’s not a criminal; he has been growing it legally for seven years with Health Canada’s approval.

“It helps me with the glaucoma and there is research that it helps with the RP too,” he says. “With glaucoma, there is intraocular pressure. When I smoke or consume marijuana it reduces the pressure. It works in tandem with my (eye) drops.”

But Stairs — who says nobody from Health Canada or the police have dropped in on him through the years he has had his permit — is skeptical about the people who are growing hundreds of plants with Health Canada licences.

“I’ve got 10 grams per day permission and I’m allowed to grow 49 plants,” he says.

“Having 195 plants in a small apartment suite doesn’t sound safe. And I don’t need 500 plants — that’s ludicrous. That’s the problem when Health Canada never does inspections. You have problems like this of people abusing the system.

“They have a golden ticket to grow pot, and some abuse it.”

There are currently more than 210,000 Canadians registered to use marijuana for medical purposes, a federal government spokeswoman said in an email to the Free Press.

Of that number, 11,681 are permitted to grow marijuana at home or to allow someone to grow it for them. The rest — nearly 200,000 people — are getting their medical cannabis from federally licensed producers such as Delta-9.

“The regulations establish clear rules and prescribe strict limits on whether and how individuals can access cannabis for medical purposes,” the spokeswoman wrote. “These individuals must provide a medical document from their health-care practitioner that indicates the amount authorized and they must attest that they, or the designated person, do not have a cannabis-related drug offence while licensed by Health Canada.”

 The yardstick Health Canada uses is, in general, for every gram of dried marijuana authorized per day, an individual would have to grow five plants indoors or two outside.

“It is illegal for them to share with, or provide or sell to anyone else the cannabis they have produced,” the email said.

To aid police, Health Canada has a dedicated hotline officers can call 24/7 to check whether an individual has been authorized to grow medical marijuana.

As for police concerns about the possibility of medical marijuana growers being targeted by criminals, Stairs says he installed a home security system when he began growing, but he’s not worried he’ll be a victim.

“I’m too small,” he says. “I don’t grow enough.

“The home invasions police told you about, clearly that’s an inside job. Someone was knowledgeable about it and knew what to do with it. You have to dry it, trim it, bag it. You have to know what you’re doing.”

To avoid potential damage to his home, Stairs said he grows the plants in the tents and has direct ventilation to the outside.

“No self-respecting patient would trash a house just for their medicine,” he says. “Gangsters just overlook this when they have grow-ops. They don’t care if the house gets mould. My plants are enclosed, and even back when I grew them in a garage, even the garage was fine.”

● ● ●

The total haul from the early morning raid: 

• 271 plants (with a potential street value of $303,520);
• grow equipment valued at $13,500;
• 289 grams (just over a half-pound) of harvested weed (potential street value of $1,250);
• 63 grams of cannabis resin (potential street value of $945); and
• $3,920 in cash designated as proceeds of crime.

It didn’t take long, from start to finish. Waiting for a court appearance, however, is painfully slow.

The man who went out to grab his newspaper and ended up being charged with possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking is scheduled to appear in court May 3 — almost a year after his arrest. 

Two months later, legal pot will be a reality.

And it likely won’t be long before the smoke begins to clear and Canadians growers — legal or not — get a sense of the law’s impact.

That a law — not just the odour — will linger a long time.

 

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kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca