Transforming residential homes into elaborate marijuana grow operations

Elaborate conversions of homes into pot factories require sophisticated--but illegal and dangerous--electrical infrastructure.
Credit: Pueblo County Sheriff's Office
Daniel Halper reports in the Weekly Standard about Cuban nationals moving to Colorado and transforming residential homes into elaborate marijuana grow operations.

"It's across the entire state of Colorado," DEA assistant special agent in charge Kevin Merrill says. "It's just basically taken over the state, these residential grows."

Merrill likens the danger to that of meth labs in homes. Besides the criminal element, turning a house into a greenhouse invariably destroys the home. "The destruction of the homes and neighborhoods is even greater."

It is what Colorado Springs mayor John Suthers calls "the total nightmare" scenario, a byproduct of the state's recent legalization of first medicinal, and later recreational, marijuana.

People from out of town or even foreign countries move to Colorado and "buy or lease houses by the hundreds if not thousands," explains Suthers, who previously served 10 years as attorney general of the state.

The new residents then convert the residential homes to industrial grow operations. They're "basically trashing the houses because they're making so much freaking money they don't care, and growing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of plants in each house. And transporting it out of state to marijuana markets nationally and internationally. Literally. Marijuana is going back to Mexico from Colorado," asserts Suthers.

This criminal activity undermines a key argument used for legalizing marijuana in the first place. "One of the big arguments was, we're going to get the cartels out of the marijuana business. Because we're going to have all these legitimate businesses selling it. The Mexican cartels are going to dry up and go away," he says.

But now things are different. "Mexican cartels are no longer sending marijuana into Colorado, they're now growing it in Colorado and sending it back to Mexico and every place else."

With legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana came the ability for locals to grow up to six plants at home—and sometimes up to 99, if they are a designated caregiver under the state law that legalized medicinal marijuana. "That has created an enforcement nightmare for the police," the state's former top cop says. "But it's going beyond that. Because of that aura of no enforcement, organized crime has come to Colorado to grow the marijuana."

"The surprising element is Cuban—Cuban cartels," Suthers says.

The DEA official insists the international element is increasing. "It's not just Cubans. We have Vietnamese-based organizations, Russian organized people. But we have seen a large influx of Cubans coming here. And we believe that all the organizations are here because we have a perceived lack of enforcement."

Thanks to the ubiquity of marijuana in the state of Colorado, when they come, "they don't really have to hide," says the DEA official. "Their [main] risk of arrest or prosecution is when they move the marijuana outside the state."

Another reason the problem is particular to Colorado—and not in the other 22 states and the District of Columbia that have some form of legal marijuana—is that Colorado has uniquely loose medical marijuana laws, which are meant to allow the ailing to grow substantial crops at home. "In Colorado, if you go to a physician and you get a recommendation, you can grow 99 plants, so if you live with four others, you can grow almost 500," says Merrill, the DEA official. He has never seen any sort of mid- to large-scale home operation actually being used for medical marijuana. It is one of "the unintended consequences of the medical marijuana" law, Merrill contends.

The state's marijuana czar appears to agree with Merrill's contention—and has called for further regulation. "There has been evidence that people will abandon the black market for a regulated market, even at higher prices. However, as long as there is both an economic incentive to grow in Colorado and ship out of state, as well as legal loopholes to allow unlicensed individuals to grow large quantities of marijuana, it will be difficult for law enforcement to shut down the black and gray markets," says Andrew Freedman, the coordinator of marijuana policy for Colorado. "Interestingly, these loopholes are found in our medical marijuana laws, not in our recreational marijuana laws."

Which suggests John Suthers may find widespread support when he soon proposes to the legislature to eliminate the influx of foreign crime by outlawing home grows. That's a law even the legal growers and sellers of marijuana will likely support.

"A few more of these huge busts, and there will be lots of them over the next several months," Suthers predicts, and "I think they're going to say, give me a break, let's clean that problem out."

Read more here.