But if something sounds too good to be true…
Criminal gangs are renting more and more homes in the quiet suburban streets of the United Kingdom. But within their walls aren’t cozy bedrooms, spacious living rooms or elegant dining rooms, but cannabis farms—mini manufacturing facilities where the illegal substance is grown, dried, packaged and readied for distribution, all with assembly-line precision and all neatly tucked under an unassuming roof in an innocent-looking home in an ordinary neighborhood.
“It infuriates me when we take action against these farms and people say, ‘it’s only cannabis.’”
Greater Manchester Police (GMP) identified over 400 of these cannabis farms masquerading as residences, often on low-trafficked, tranquil, tree-lined streets.
It’s a clever strategy: By blending cannabis farms in as “part of the neighborhood,” criminals make themselves harder to detect. Renting, rather than buying a residence—sometimes through landlords who are in on the racket—is another trick that makes the guilty parties difficult to trace. And gangs further cover their tracks by using low-level operatives—“gardeners”—to run their residential farms. When caught, the minions plead guilty to lesser drug offenses and accept punishment, thereby throwing law enforcement off the scent of the true perpetrators. Those “gardeners” likely feel safer behind bars anyway. (The consequences of ratting on their bosses make prison a comparatively attractive proposition.)
Such farms are wildly profitable. One police raid alone netted plants worth tens of thousands of pounds on the street.
But with high profits come high stakes—cannabis farms are deadly. Gangs don’t like other gangs, especially those they consider threats, prompting them to carry out raids on each other’s farms, wreaking “significant violence,” according to police.
And the danger extends far beyond the gangs themselves and into the neighborhoods they contaminate.
As but one example, crooks, being crooked, won’t pay for something if they can steal it and electrical power is no exception. Cannabis gangs bypass the electric meter with shoddy, slapped-together setups that steal electricity, avoiding the massive costs of powering lights, ventilation and heat for their illegal operations. This practice—known as “abstracting”—puts profit ahead of safety and turns every residential pot farm into a festering death trap of exposed wires and overloaded circuits.
As GMP Inspector Bree Lanyon put it, “We’ve seen a lot of fires recently in premises that have been set up as cannabis farms, because of the way the electricity is set up. It’s not safe and the neighboring residence could be at risk if that property is burning down.”
But to the gangs, the risk is worth it. Even when the price paid takes the form of a human life: Seven-year-old Archie York was killed in a cannabis farm’s chemical explosion last year because his family had the misfortune of living on the same block.
“It infuriates me when we take action against these farms and people say, ‘it’s only cannabis,’” said GMP Detective Inspector Paul Crompton.
“Horrific” was the word one landlord used when he discovered his property wrecked by the “tenants,” who turned out to be operators of a cannabis farm.
“Our members, when they’ve experienced the problem with the cannabis farm, they are shocked,” said Sajjad Ahmad, the chief executive of the British Landlords Association and himself an unwitting victim. “They didn’t know it could happen. They are not aware of the telltale signs.
“They have the same regrets as what I experienced—you need to carry out regular inspections and, if somebody is offering you a larger rent, then you should question that.”
“Make no bones about it, there’s massive amounts of money to make,” Crompton warns. “They’ll do significant violence against anybody that gets in the way.”
