Browsing: Growing

Photo: LoveToKnow

​In another bizarre twist in the story of a British Columbia marijuana grow-op that was guarded by happy, mellow bears, thieves have stolen 10 kilograms of the seized pot from police and wired it up to dynamite in a booby trap.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers tracked the stolen cannabis, which had been pilfered from a Mountie evidence locker in Grand Forks, to a home in Greenwood, B.C., reports Bill Kaufmann at the Toronto Sun.
The Grand Forks RCMP responded last week to what turned out to be a phony emergency call, and while they were gone (did all of these Dudley Do-Rights respond to the call?) someone broke into their evidence room and made off with the marijuana, according to Sgt. Jim Harrison.

Photo: Project for the New American Century
Israeli Hermes 450 drones can be heavily armed, and they’ve been bought by the Mexican military for their Drug War. It doesn’t take much imagination to see what could happen next.

​Mexico has bought Israeli-made unmanned drone aircraft, the government said, which may be used to spot hidden marijuana fields as officials continue their bloody Drug War against powerful cartels.

But is that all the drones — which can be heavily armed — will be used for? After all, this is the Mexican military that has bought the drones, for use in their Drug War which has already claimed 28,000 lives in the past four years.
And these are the exact same drones that were responsible for at least 48 deaths during Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza.
With neither side in the Drug War — the Mexican military and the cartels — having shown any compunctions about bloodshed, it doesn’t take much imagination to see what could happen next.

Photo: RCMP
An RCMP officer poses with two of the bears found at a marijuana grow-op in British Columbia. The bears were quite friendly and wanted to lay on top of investigating officers’ patrol cars.

​Actor Jason Priestley has joined a growing global campaign to save more than a dozen docile, mellow black bears that were found protecting a marijuana crop in British Columbia, Canada.

Police discovered 14 bears — which they believed to have been lured there with dog food by the owners to protect the illegal crop from cannabis thieves — wandering happily around the property during a pot raid on July 30.
Officials originally said they planned to destroy the bears if they couldn’t fend for themselves and continued to depend upon human food.

Photo: AP
Chris Bartkowicz faces up to life in prison on federal charges for growing medical marijuana.

​A Colorado medical marijuana grower facing federal drug charges after he bragged about his cannabis business to a TV station may not be allowed to use the state’s medical marijuana law in his defense.

U.S. District Judge Philip Brimmer on Thursday morning was asked by federal prosecutors to block the medical marijuana defense in their case against Chris Bartkowicz of Denver, reports The Associated Press.
“The provisions of state law cited in the Government’s brief demonstrate the quagmire of Colorado state law and its medical marijuana provisions, and further demonstrates that none of those provisions have relevance to the federal prosecution of the Defendant,” said a motion filed Tuesday by prosecutors, reports Felisa Cardona at The Denver Post.
Prosecutors contended that Bartkowicz should not be allowed to use Colorado’s medical marijuana laws as a defense, or try to argue that he was singled out or didn’t know he would be subject to prosecution.

Graphic: Freaking News

​Looks like Smokey has a kushy new gig. Police in southeastern British Columbia, Canada have raided a marijuana grow operation that was reportedly guarded by black bears.

Officers raiding the operation two weeks ago at Christina Lake, B.C., about 160 miles east of Vancouver, found two residential buildings and a fenced-off growing operation. Police said Tuesday they found about 1,000 cannabis plants, reports CBC News.
They also found about 10 bears that the homeowner appeared to be using to discourage people from stealing any pot plants, according to Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Fred Mansveld.
​”[Officers] soon noticed the bears were docile and tame,” Mansveld said. “One of them jumped on our unmarked car for awhile. But it soon became apparent they were habituated to the grow operation.” I’ll bet they were!

Photo: Lewis Whyld/PA
PC Chloe Snell examines what the Brits like calling a “cannabis factory” in a house in East London, 2008

​More than 6,800 cannabis farms — or “factories,” as the sensationalist British press puts it — were discovered by police in the United Kingdom last year.

Almost 20 commercial cannabis growing operations were found by police every day in the past year by authorities, according to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), making the total for 2009/2010 6,886 — more than double the 3,032 discovered two years ago, and more than eight times the annual average of 800 between 2004 and 2007, reports the U.K. Press Association.

Photo: Offbeat News
It may look an awfully lot like a, well, garden-variety GARDEN to you. But to Christine Byers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis County Police, it’s a dangerous DRUG LAB — the kind for which you take away people’s kids. Oh, and get big Drug War grants, too!

​A marijuana “lab“?
Really, Christine Byers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch? REALLY??
“A North St. Louis County couple has been charged with four counts of endangering the welfare of a child after police found a marijuana growth lab in their basement,” Byers cluelessly reports Thursday.
“Todd, 43, and Angela Priest, 33… had four children between the ages of 2 and 4 living with them when St. Louis County Police found the active marijuana growth lab in their basement,” Christine gives us to believe. [Italics added.]

Photo: RCMP
High Prairie RCMP uncovered a 6,500-plant marijuana operation with a street value they claimed was $6.5 million.

​The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in High Prairie, Alberta, last Thursday seized 6,500 marijuana plants they claimed were worth $6.5 million and charged six men in the bust of large cannabis grow operation.

Investigators quaintly estimated the seizure “effectively removed the equivalent of more than two million marijuana joints from reaching the streets,” reports CTV News.

Plants in various stages of growth were found in 12 portable semi-circular huts, each about 200 feet (60 meters) long, 20 feet (six meters) wide and 10 feet (three meters) high, reports CBC News.

Photo: Cook County Sheriff’s Office
Here is one of the Zimmermans’ enviable grow operations. Since the photo is from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, this must have been the dad’s growroom. Nice!

​An old man and his middle-aged son have been arrested on marijuana charges for cultivating cannabis in their homes, the Cook County Sheriff’s office said Tuesday.

Sheriff’s police estimate the seizures at both homes totaled “about $3 million to $5 million” at those mythical “street prices” they keep promising us.
Jay Zimmerman, 69, and his son Alan Zimmerman, 42, owned homes in Skokie, Illinois and Chesterton, Indiana, reports Chicago Breaking News. The father was charged with manufacturing and delivery of marijuana, a felony. The son was charged with felony possession of marijuana and possession of “drug paraphernalia.”

Photo: Mother Jones

​The Royal Oak City Commission on Monday unanimously rejected a request to suspend the city’s moratorium on commercial businesses involving medical marijuana, blocking — at least for now — the attempt by a warehouse owner to turn his building into the state’s largest marijuana growing facility.

The 7-0 vote to keep in place a 180-day moratorium passed in May came near midnight after a packed, lengthy meeting at which dozens of citizens spoke for and against allowing medical marijuana businesses in the Michigan city, reports Bill Laitner of the Detroit Free Press.
Landlord James Canner met with city officials in May in hopes of avoiding foreclosure on his 23,000-square-foot warehouse by leasing it to a tenant who would convert it into roughly two dozen grow rooms for medical marijuana caregivers, reports Jonathan Oosting at MLive.com.
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