Officers Seek Help Stemming Pot Growing

Crack houses attract junkies, meth labs give off fumes, but how can you tell if you’re living next door to an indoor pot farm?

Believe it or not, there are some telltale signs that help lead law enforcement officers to the ever-widening trail of marijuana farms inside suburban homes.

Just last month Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators raided two Chatsworth houses where they found hundreds of marijuana plants growing indoors. One of the searches netted 1,669 plants.

“What we’re seeing more and more of is people turning entire houses into indoor marijuana grows,” said Lt. Dan Reidder of the sheriff’s narcotics bureau. “People will come in and tend to the crops, bring in grow lights, fertilizer and do a lot of electrical work around the house.”

In July, sheriff’s detectives seized 4,116 marijuana plants worth an estimated $20 million growing in the Bel-Air mansion of a medical marijuana activist. In the Sept. 17 search in Chatsworth, sheriff’s detectives found each room in the six-bedroom house packed with marijuana plants, which were grown under lights, watered by hoses and cooled by fans.

Neighbors told investigators that they had seen people driving to and from the house, but that they never seemed to stay long. A check of the home’s electrical bill by sheriff’s detectives also revealed that the house was using large amounts of electricity--$1,500 to $1,700 worth a month. About a dozen electrical transformers boosted the house’s electrical power supply.

Other possible clues include darkened windows to obscure outsiders’ views and bad landscaping because the owners are more concerned about what’s growing inside than out, said Reidder, who is in charge of the northern county area. If Reidder seems to know a lot about indoor pot farms, it’s because their proliferation in Los Angeles County has by necessity educated sheriff’s detectives to the tricks of the trade.

Currently, a special marijuana enforcement team is at work since the harvest season for outdoor growing is in progress, said Reidder. Of course, the harvest season for indoor marijuana farms is year-round, he added.

“We have some of the best experts in California on indoor marijuana growth,” Reidder said. “But our best source of information are neighbors, because they know what is normal in their neighborhoods and what is suspicious.”

If you suspect that a home in your neighborhood is being used to harvest indoor marijuana plants, contact your local sheriff’s or police station, Reidder said.

“Without the public, we’re dead in the water,” he said.

Another source of information for sheriff’s detectives are street informants and the marijuana growers themselves, who sometimes talk about their growing techniques and other aspects of their operations once caught.

“More and more people are growing marijuana indoors because it’s a lucrative business,” Reidder said. “And this is not the marijuana that kids smoked in the 1960s. Today’s crops are much stronger. . . . It’s powerful stuff.”

The trend toward growing stronger marijuana started in the early 1990s, Reidder said. The new, stronger weed can sell for big bucks, with its producers facing softer penalties than their counterparts who deal in other types of drugs such as methamphetamines.

“An indoor grow of 500 plants could make its distributors millions of dollars in tax-free money,” Reidder said. “The real tragedy of all this is that we see people who are involved in much more dangerous drugs and find out that they were involved in marijuana first.”