cannabisnews.com: Police Keep Lid On Pot Hunt Sites!





Police Keep Lid On Pot Hunt Sites!
Posted by FoM on August 13, 1999 at 13:00:28 PT
By John Herbert, Free Press Reporter
Source: London Free Press 
Outsmarted last year by some of Southwestern Ontario's devious pot growers, the joint forces police team blitzing farmers' fields around London this week won't be publicizing where they expect to find this year's crop.
Last year, growers sometimes beat the cops to the crops.Staff Sgt. Marty Van Doren, acting commander of the London detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and head of the detachment's drug unit, said the joint forces team from Ontario Provincial Police, RCMP and municipal forces frequently found empty holes where marijuana plants had been growing."We got burned,'' Van Doren said. "They (growers) were hauling the stuff out before we got there. We'd get there and all we'd find is empty holes -- lots of them.''Hush is the word this year, Van Doren said.As a result, police will only say where they've been so far in week two of their annual eradication blitz, which ends late in September. They finished up in Lambton County on Wednesday where they pulled an estimated 1,000 full-grown plants with a street value of $100,000.Yesterday, they were working in the Thorndale area, east of London, where they will be for the next several days.Police did not disclose information about what they found.RCMP Const. Bob Joseph, who is on site daily with a 10-officer team and helicopter to help locate harvest hot spots in cornfields, said he expects similar finds to last year and previous years. Last year, RCMP found 5,589 plants in Middlesex, Elgin and Oxford counties and 1,966 in Lambton, Essex and Kent counties.Another 12,525 plants were seized in Huron, Grey, Perth and Wellington counties.The total estimated street value of last year's seizures was about $21 million.While police say there is community support for their program, which costs about $200,000 over and above police salaries, critics in recent years have complained police could better focus resources on hard drug investigations which result in stiffer court sentences. They also say dollar figures announced by police in drug seizures are often debated in courtrooms and are much lower than police claim.Police say they are only enforcing the law. They also maintain there is a connection between marijuana and hard drug use.Van Doren said the eradication program makes a difference."Sure it has an effect, but there's no exact science on it,'' he said. "If we didn't do any eradication there'd be much more marijuana, hash and hash oil on our streets.The plants are grown in cornfields, along riverbeds and in dense bush.Joseph said the eradication team is finding more plants in brush areas than before because it is more difficult for a helicopter to spot them from overhead than in a cornfield.Friday, August 13, 1999 Copyright © 1999 The London Free Press a division of Sun Media Corporation. Related Article:Pot Crop Flourishing in New Brunswick - 8/10/99http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread2424.shtml
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Comment #2 posted by DARTMAN on May 18, 2000 at 11:04:02 PT:
POT USE
I think the RCMP OPP and other POLice forces should foucus their time and taxs payers money on crimes that hurt our communities I can,t beleive that 70 years of trying to elimate cannabis use is still drawing a blind eye to the fact that we need to try another form of control. The only crimes associated with pot are growing,selling,using. If we decrimalize pot we take away the crime save the taxs payers dollars and focus on other crimes that hurt us more. As for pot leading to other drug use that just like saying booze leads to pot use. So let give pot a chance and quit trying to pull the wool over everybodys eye. 
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Comment #1 posted by FoM on August 13, 1999 at 13:09:09 PT:
Related Article
Blaine, Washington Sunday August 08, 1999 On a typical evening near this small U.S. border town, Patrick Guimond can be found lying in the forest, in a camouflage uniform, armed with a handgun and staring into the darkness with a pair of night vision glasses. If he is lucky, the veteran U.S. customs officer might catch a glimpse of someone creeping over the border, a backpack full of Canada's latest high-grade export to the U.S.: British Columbia marijuana. But most of the time, Mr. Guimond spends his nights sitting in the bush in vain as there are too many forest and mountain paths along the border to monitor effectively. Click the link to read the whole article.
Tripping Down British Columbia's Ho Chi Minh Trail
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