Down on the Farm

Every so often I come across an urban property that has been used as a drug farm. 

In recent years these have mostly been large commercial buildings with a full scale cultivation mechanism in place but more recently there has been a scaling down into compact units within the four walls of someone's house. 

I should qualify that statement. 

It is not people doing it in their own homes but where a tenancy is taken out, ostensibly for legitimate occupation as cover for setting up the systems and paraphernalia by which to generate a quick profit.

This was the scenario in a street in my area of work coverage just a couple of days ago. 

It is a quiet place of older inner city terraced houses with a mixture of longstanding owner occupiers and a more recent trend for shared occupation of rooms under one roof, bedsits or flats. 

This particular property did not distinguish itself from its neighbours from the outside. Through the front bay window could be seen a living room but beyond that facade of ordinariness and rather boring conformity lay a semi wrecked interior. 

Drug cultivation takes a lot of heat and moisture. The City Police Force did for some time have a helicopter with a heat detecting camera and this was invaluable in spotting localised abnormal temperature signatures which made rather a beacon of the roof above where the illegal activity was taking place. 

However, for financial and political reasons the chopper was discontinued giving the go ahead for an escalation in this type of specialised horticulture with a much lower risk of giving itself away to the authorities with the usual tell tale signs.

Venting out the excess products of the process calls for the excavation of lots of holes. 

In the room behind the comfortable lounge, previously concealed by a heavy hanging curtain, was the first in a series of openings in the timber floors. Passing out warm and humidity laden air under the house and then out through the air bricks is an efficient and subtle exhaust system. 

I had to tread carefully in the back rooms on the ground floor to avoid falling through into the void and also to dodge a lot of dog excrement and discarded dry biscuit canine food. 

The largest of the holes were however upstairs which appeared to have been the most productive zone. 

The chimney flues had been opened up just below ceiling level as another means to vent the rooms. In the corners of all of the former bedrooms there were similarly sized apertures to use the roof void above as a further dissipation route. 

Maintaining the perfect cultivation environment from thermostatically controlled heat lamps in these rooms called for a lot of foil based insulation and this had been suspended and stretched out using the clips and ties that were now strewn everywhere. 

My visit had been on the instructions of the unfortunate landlord to check on the insurance cover. 

It was not clear whether the drug farm had just completed its quota, packed up and moved on or had been raided and its contents seized and impounded for evidential purposes. 

In all previous cases of my attendance at such properties there was anonymity and mystery about the perpetrators. It was if they had just evaporated in the same way as the fantastic volumes of energy used in their short period of occupation. 

This house was different in that on one of the upstairs doors there was a brown paper bag with a hand written note. 

The script was neat and tidy but it told the story of part of the operation that had gone on. 

The room was numbered 4 and had at the time of writing the 120 square feet of space had been the location of 218 cannabis plants at two feet height. This had been achieved by 12 lights and 12 transformers. 

The business had not closed but just relocated.