Suetaz

The Pot Patrol: How spotters untangle web of B.C. bud

Jack Knox | Times Colonist | August 15, 2004

"See the dope down to our left?" says the voice in the headset.

Um, no.

Peering out the window of the RCMP helicopter, several hundred feet up, it just looks like Vancouver Island down there. Green on green on green. How can these guys see anything?

The seven-seat Bell Long Ranger 4 circles in lower over a patchy clearcut and the marijuana comes into view -- maybe 20 clumps scattered over an area the size of your backyard.

The plants whip in the wind as the pilot gently sets his machine among them. It's a tight spot, full of logging debris and surrounded by fir trees planted maybe 15 years ago.

Alighting from the helicopter, Dennis, the pilot, and Grant, the spotter -- no last names, please, we're dealing with organized crime here -- find what they saw from the air: Black plastic bags of professional growing soil, each cut open and planted with three or four waist-high marijuana plants.

A black three-quarter-inch water line leads into the tangled bush, where more plants nestle among the trees.

A dozen bags here, a few there. Twenty plants, barely up to the knees, are in the hollow of a dead cedar filled with grow mix. Others, by a cluster of four 45-gallon water drums, reach your chest.

Dennis and Grant sweat in the heat, clambering through salal and over logs, following the water line hundreds of metres until it ends at an empty bog.

"They sucked it dry," observes Grant. Along the way they find more plants, more bags, more barrels.

Gradually the picture emerges. What at first seemed to be a site with a few dozen plants actually has a thousand, scattered here and there.

Use the standard $1,000-a-plant formula and ...

They have found a million-dollar marijuana grow operation.

Not that this is anything new to them. Dennis and Grant do this full-time from May through October, flying the skies of Vancouver Island, looking for the outdoor grows that feed B.C.'s marijuana industry. Last year, 650 such sites were identified here.

"We find dope every day," says Grant. "Every day we go out, we find marijuana."

He's working on contract now, a recently retired 35-year Mountie brought back to be the eyes of the two-year-old, summer-long air program. (Previously, the choppers only looked for dope in late August.) Dennis, also in his fifties, has been an RCMP helicopter pilot for 20 years.

They don't usually land in the grow-ops they find. Standard practice for the pair -- let's call them the Pot Patrol -- is to take a Global Positioning System reading off each site and forward it to the local RCMP. The locals then use their own GPS -- every detachment on Vancouver Island now has its own -- to track down and chop up the marijuana. It's a big step up from the old process, in which police often relied on back-of-napkin maps and imprecise directions given to them by hikers who had stumbled into plantations.


CREDIT: Deddeda Stemler, Times Colonist
Dennis, a helicopter pilot for the RCMP, walks through an outdoor grow-op of marijuana plants: "Some people we wipe out, at least for the season."

The eradication effort gets particularly busy each August when the help of the military is enlisted in Operation Sabot. Canadian Forces helicopters winch Mounties into remote, hard-to-get-to sites, where the plants, almost ready for harvest, are hacked down and hauled off in nets slung under the choppers.

Last year, Sabot got derailed by B.C.'s forest fires. The military's resources were diverted, meaning police were only able to hit about half the sites they had identified. The rest, presumably, were harvested by growers who didn't know they were lucky to keep their crops.

It's impossible to tell how big a dent the Pot Patrol puts in the outdoor-growing industry. Some estimates say $6 billion worth of B.C. Bud is grown, inside and outdoors, in this province annually. That's roughly equal to the value of B.C.'s softwood lumber exports to the U.S.

Last year, 44,000 plants were cut down or ripped up on Vancouver Island alone.

The Pot Patrol located 3,500 plants at Qualicum within a couple of kilometres of the new highway. Near Port Hardy were 1,200 plants so huge, yielding a couple of pounds of bud apiece, that the police rented chainsaws to cut through the stalks. (They usually they use machetes; clippers get gummed up by resin.)

An outdoor operation yields just one crop a year, as opposed to three or four for an indoor site, but comes with little risk of arrest. After setting up on Crown land or remote forest company property, a grower who has put in an automated watering system need only visit the site a couple of times before harvest.

Police almost never charge anyone at an outdoor operation. Even if convicted, growers often regard the resulting fine as little more than a business licence. The real penalty is loss of income.

"Some people we wipe out, at least for the season," says Dennis. Sometimes, when police find a few sites planted in an identical manner, they know they've hurt one grower badly.

Someone will certainly regret this day's million-dollar discovery, up here in the mid-Island clearcut. "We just spoiled some guy's trip to Mexico this winter," says Grant as he climbs back in the helicopter. "Too bad."

Back in the air, over Texada Island, the Pot Patrol enjoys the equivalent of the best fishing trip you ever had, getting one hit after another.

"Oh, here's a hell of a nice grow," says one voice in the headset.

"This stuff has really come up in the last couple of days," says the other.

Within minutes, they take GPS readings on four grow operations in remote, mountainous terrain. They land to talk to a local Mountie, take off again, and find some more plantations. Twice, Dennis and Grant simultaneously spot separate sites.


CREDIT: Deddeda Stemler, Times Colonist
A pencil line encircles an outdoor grow camouflaged in a replanted clearcut. Last year, the Pot Patrol found 3,500 plants at Qualicum within a couple of kilometres of the Island Highway.

It has become an ongoing contest between them, the one who spots the most grow-ops winning a cup of coffee from the other. ("He cheats, always turns the helicopter on his side to get a better view," says Grant.)

Theirs is, relative to other police work, an enjoyable task. No messy domestic disputes. No highway carnage. Just cops and robbers, the cat-and-mouse game between police and those who knowingly break the law.

"When you're dealing with organized crime, it's fun to win," says Grant.

Their methodology isn't terribly high-tech. They'll cruise at a few hundred feet, paying particular attention to south-facing hills or areas near bogs or some source of water.

Growers rarely leave large numbers of plants in the open any more.

"They're pushing into the tree line now," says Dennis.

Typically, the Pot Patrol might see a handful of clumps at a time. The plants get easier to spot in August, when the forest turns brown and the well-watered marijuana stands out.


CREDIT: Deddeda Stemler, Times Colonist
Dennis looks at marijuana planted in bags of commercial growing soil.

The sight of the chopper does not always evoke unbridled enthusiasm. No point in rehashing the arguments for and against legalization, but suffice it to say that opinion is divided. As the Pot Patrol flies over Texada, one guy races out of his house and gazes up at the helicopter circling the plants at the edge of his property.

"Sorry, buddy, they're ours now," says Grant.

Buddy below doesn't appear to be the biggest fish in the pond, certainly nothing like the sharks who mix marijuana cultivation with heroin dealing, cocaine importation and prostitution. Some growers may be relatively benign, the modern equivalent of the hillbilly with the still in the woods, but others are big-time, big-money serious. They're the ones the police like to think about.

Large-scale growing is a considerable investment. (The RCMP busted one man near Campbell River recently who spent $320,000 to build a hidden bunker under a workshop. It had a secret door that looks like a shelving unit, had a sophisticated watering system, and was powered by two six-cylinder Volvo engines. The grower received a nine-month conditional sentence, to be served in the community.)

Outdoor sites may not take as much startup capital as indoor grow-ops, but they can still cost a lot. The marijuana starter plants alone can cost $10 or $20 apiece. Some growers hire excavators to dig water traps, others use helicopters to service remote locations.

"You have to have an organization of people who keep their mouths shut," says Grant.

Silence doesn't come cheap.

'If you've got a site with a thousand plants or 3,500 plants, who's got the kind of money to set that up?" asks Const. Gus Papagiannis, the RCMP drug awareness co-ordinator for north and central Vancouver Island. Who has the contacts across the border, the distribution network, the supposedly legitimate businesses through which to launder the cash? Organized crime, that's who.


CREDIT: Deddeda Stemler, Times Colonist
A helicopter flies over a denuded forest. Aboard the chopper, an RCMP spotter spies marijuana plants. He takes note of the GPS co-ordinates and passes them on to Mountie detachments.

Papagiannis will give growers this much credit: "They're not shy of work." They'll go up mountains, down cliffs and through swamps to set up in an off-the-radar location, hauling in starter plants, bags of growing mix, water pumps, pipes, valves, timers, fertilizer and solar panels. Like other gardeners, they use fishing net and chicken wire to fence out deer. All-terrain quads are the preferred method of carrying grow-gear into the bush. On Texada, some pack stuff in on horseback.

"The startup is just as much effort as the harvest," says Papagiannis.

Universally, the growers now plant sensimilla -- seedless pot. Big, bushy plants of the sativa strain have been cross-bred with shorter, stouter indica plants to create a product that is supposed to be less visible from the air. Clones are grown from clippings taken from a mother plant. Growers discard the relatively worthless males -- no comments, please -- and plant the rest.

"They only put in female clones," says Papagiannis.

A hot, dry summer like this doesn't mean an early harvest. It may make the plants grow like crazy, but they won't start flowering until triggered by the proper sun cycle. When hours of daylight decrease, plants realize they are about to die, so try to reproduce. Females produce buds -- the only parts of the plant in which growers are interested -- but they aren't ready to be harvested until September. That's why machete-wielding police want to get in by the end of August.

"There's a glut of pot on the market in October because of all the outdoor stuff," says Papagiannis.

Some say there's a glut on the market anyway, at least in Canada. Higher post 9/11 border security means more pot is staying in the Great Green North, with the price per pound reportedly dropping from $2,500 to $1,500 in consequence. The Drug Enforcement Agency says the cost of B.C. Bud has risen to $6,500 US in Los Angeles.

As long as there's money to be made, the growers will keep planting, and the helicopters will stay in the air.


CREDIT: Deddeda Stemler, Times Colonist
"The growers look for places that we can't get to, or are hard to get to," says pilot Dennis.

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Higher Logic

What exactly entails "organized crime?" I mean, it doesn't seem that unreasonable for someone, or maybe 3-5 people to go out and start that many plants. People do it in their homes all the time *shrug*

What a horrible job, not something I'd be proud of. Hey daddy, how do you support the family? Why, I search for and destroy marijuana. What's that daddy? A plant, dear. So you do all that for a plant? Yes, a very bad plant, it makes you step on white folk's shadows and dance to crazy jazz music

Cheers!

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Suetaz

All this money is wasted on helicoptors, spotters, pilots and eradicators just so they can wipe out someone's income. That income could have gone back into the Canadian economy. Now not only is that income not going back into the economy, our tax dollars have been wasted too.

Baaa Ked

This is hilarious! I can't believe my home newspaper Is that cool.

Ugo

Wow, that is alot, and for finding some everyday, there must be legions more. That's just on Vancouver Island too! Imagine what the whole of BC is like.

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Higher Logic

What are the ecological damages that occur from ripping up the ground like this? We all know cannabis is great for rejuvanating the soil