As pot trade moves indoors, cops adjust to weed them out
JEFFERSON - Like any business faced with changing times, marijuana growers adapted.
Producing marijuana used to be as simple as finding some remote countryside to plant. But, as investigators grew more skilled at spotting pot from the air, outdoor cultivation developed a distinct down side.
"It's so easy for them to be detected," said Fayette County sheriff's Capt. Mike Pruitt. "You can't put a clump of plants together anymore because it's easy to spot from the air, so they try to spread it out. It's just not practical to do."
So, growers moved indoors.
"They started moving indoors because some of the bigger outdoor grows - they got caught year after year," said state Department of Natural Resources Cpl. Bill Bunch. "If they didn't get caught, they'd lose their marijuana crop. They changed their tactics."
Growers moved inside, and again, police caught on.
And now growers are moving on, trying to find a place where authorities haven't yet picked up on their techniques.
In recent weeks, more than a dozen agencies - mostly in a crescent across eastern metro Atlanta - have uncovered thousands of marijuana plants worth millions of dollars in more than 70 houses retrofitted with lighting systems to spur hydroponic, or soil-less, growing.
Until this year, indoor grow houses were "very uncommon for Georgia," said Ruth Porter-Whipple, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Compared to the dozens of raids on the eastside of metro Atlanta this year, authorities uncovered only nine indoor grow houses across the entire state in 2005 and 2006 combined.
"We have had them, but certainly not this quantity," Porter-Whipple said.
And lately, investigators are finding more suspected grow houses abandoned, a sign that growers know authorities are on to them.
"That's probably what we're going to start seeing," Walton County sheriff's Capt. Chris Cannon said.
Why inside?
While growers originally moved pot plants inside to avoid detection, they also found a side benefit.
"They can grow basically year round in the grow houses where outside they can't - just a few months of the year," Bunch said.
Marijuana cultivated indoors generally has a higher concentration of THC, the active ingredient, Pruitt said, and therefore generally higher quality than pot grown outside.
"A lot of the quality of the dope growing in the woods anymore is not that good," Bunch said. "The weather affects it. ... The guys that are growing it in the grow houses are a lot more up on the technology and have better gardening skills."
While pilots in the Governor's Task Force on Drug Suppression have made it more difficult to maintain large outdoor fields because they can spot it so easily, they haven't eliminated outdoor growing completely, investigators say.
"That cuts back on some of it, but (growers) just adapt their tactics," Bunch said. "Instead of having fields, they just start putting a plant here and there, where it's a lot harder to see."
Marijuana operations today are "kind of like when the moonshine era was going on," Bunch said. "If you find a moonshine still today, nine out of 10 times, it's going to be in a building."
Any significant outdoor growing probably happens in the north Georgia mountains or more rural southern Georgia, Pruitt said.
In the 1970s, 90 percent of the marijuana consumed in the United States was grown in Colombia, Mexico or Panama, said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).
Today, because the federal government has ratcheted up efforts to prevent drug imports, about 40 percent of marijuana consumed in the United States is grown here, St. Pierre said.
Inside an operation
The scenario was the same: A Hispanic couple moves into the house and maintains it. They tend to even the smallest details, such as keeping a well-maintained lawn.
"The places they live in, they do not attract attention because they do what everyone else does," said Darren Moloney, spokesman for the Gwinnett County Police Department. "The changes to the house are very, very subtle."
They install grow lights in the basement, but while the lights typically would sap more than $2,000 a month of electricity and tip off authorities that something suspicious was going on, the growers illegally tap into the electric line before it reaches the house's meter.
"It was wired to code - except for tapping into the main line," Jackson County Sheriff Stan Evans said of the grow houses authorities have found in his county. "I know a little about electrical wiring from when I was in high school, and of course over the years done a little wiring around the farm and all. Man, I'm telling you, I thought I was pretty good, but nothing like that."
Tapping into a power line is a dangerous proposition and requires more than a bit of experience, investigators say. But, authorities don't believe the cultivators had help from an electric company insider.
Investigators can subpoena power bills to confirm their suspicions about a particular house, but the Jackson Electric Membership Corp., for example, won't look at its customers' power bills unless they're approached by authorities, a spokeswoman said.
"We can't go out, look at a house and say, 'We think it's using too much power, let's call the police,' " Jackson EMC spokeswoman Bonnie Jones said, citing customers' privacy. "We really get into the act when law enforcement comes to us with a suspicion and legal documents."
Cinder-block walls don't let light in, but they do let heat out - radiating a clue that something unexpected is going on in the basement.
Following a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, authorities need a warrant before they can use thermal imaging to see whether a house holds more heat than normal. But, investigators rarely take that approach these days anyway.
Still, some cultivators figured out thermal imaging might give them away and now put extra insulation in their houses so investigators can't find the hot spots, Evans said.
Grow houses deputies raided in Jackson County all were lined with thermal insulation board, he said.
"It was all contained pretty well inside the house. I don't think it could have been detected with the heat sensing devices," he added.
Atlanta and beyond
The locations aren't random: The recently raided grow houses lay in a ring around the outskirts of metro Atlanta.
Most of them were operated by Cubans.
A few years ago, similar raids in south Florida netted more than 100 grow houses, which some investigators believe pushed the operations north.
The current series of marijuana raids began after authorities in Fayette County received a tip from DEA agents in Miami, Pruitt said. Soon after, investigators arrested Merquiades Martinez, who owns a hydroponics store in Fayetteville and whom Pruitt describes as the "master grower in Georgia."
From there, investigators followed a paper trail that led to grow houses scattered across metro Atlanta.
"They're coming in to smaller communities where there's not a strong police presence," Jefferson police Chief Joseph Wirthman said. "Quiet, sleepy communities without a crime problem."
But the locations had to be close to the capital of the Empire State of the South, which sits at the convergence of three major highways - Interstates 20, 75 and 85 - making it a hub for commercial activity ranging from retail to illicit drugs.
"You've got a lot of major thoroughfares that go east, west, north, south," Wirthman said.
Lawmen agree that the marijuana is being cultivated, at least in part, for distribution across the country, especially in New York City, where demand there brings a higher profit for growers. In Atlanta, a pound of the marijuana might sell for $3,800, but in New York City it could sell for $6,000, Pruitt said.
Police don't know how many more houses are out there.
"We could run up on 15 more tonight," Walton's Capt. Cannon said recently. "Who knows? It's just been that crazy."
The fallout
From the living room, the home is the picture of suburban life.
A child's toy truck sits idle in the front yard. The living room is decorated with couches and a television set; family portraits adorn all corners of the room.
But, in the basement, there are rows of pots, an irrigation system, reflective-covered walls and grow lights that have been on around the clock for days, if not months.
The marijuana - possibly more than 300 plants - is gone, but the smell still lingers, though only in the basement. The cultivators sealed the basement so the smell wouldn't waft.
Investigators aren't fooled by the house's facade. "I think we have enough evidence to say they were cultivating marijuana," Wirthman said.
A machete found nearby leads investigators to believe the growers cut their crop in anticipation of a raid, as recently as two days earlier. The crop may not have even been full-grown, but the producers harvested anyway, so as not to lose their entire yield.
They probably packed it in a van and hit the road. Most likely, they'll never return, taking a $25,000 or so loss - the cost of their growing equipment.
Jefferson police have raided three houses they suspected were grow houses. But when they arrived, all three were empty, except for lights, some frosted windows to keep outsiders from seeing in and some marijuana residue.
It could be that the residents harvested their crop, which can be done every 90 days or so, and left town. Or, they grew worried that authorities were on their trail.
Sheriffs deputies in Jackson County, where 10 grow houses have been discovered, recently came across some marijuana they believe a fleeing grower unloaded along the roadway, Evans said. That's perhaps the most tangible impact recent raids have had on the local drug operation.
"On the side of the road, we (recently) found some marijuana and some equipment ... dumped," Evans said. "We feel like probably there were some other houses around that we were unaware of. They're cleaning them out just in case we do find out about them.
"We're finding a lot of stuff dumped now and we feel like they're packing up and taking off before the law enforcement folks arrive," Evans said. "They're getting the hell out of Dodge, in other words."
Published March 18, 2007, in Athens Banner-Herald.