Column Joe Kane

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Column Weeding out the Bullshit By Joe Kane

Well, readers, this was going to be a column regaling you with more Iberian antics but a couple of things happened back here in Blighty that caught my eye and kinda seemed a bit more important.

I dunno if anyone caught the stories in the press lately, but there was a bust in County Durham in the north of England where the Dibble seized 1500 plants that apparently had a value of A MILLION AND A HALF POUNDS STERLING!

Now, while yours truly is definitely no mathematician, I can do basic arithmetic, and that makes each plant worth something like a thousand fucking notes each! That’s about 1,480 Euros, if I’m gonna be European about it. Are they made of gold or something? Or maybe they’re like those giant Redwood trees you get in America? I know they grow big fuck off leeks in the north of England but that’s just ridiculous. Jack and the Beanstalk, anyone?

Jesus H Christ on a bike! If that was me I’d sell the fucking plants and move to Spain.

Another story along the same lines from a week earlier says that 330 plants were grabbed but this time the value was £30,000 (about 44,400 Euros), which makes them worth about 90 quid (about 133 Euros) each. This was in Surrey in the Deep South, which is supposed to be the posh end of the country where every fucking thing you could think of costs, like, a zillion times more than anywhere else.

And in the north of England they still have keep pets so they can put meat on the table, send kids up chimneys and wear wooden shoes, for fucks’ sake! (NOTE: I gots to apologise for the crude stereotyping here readers, but it’s meant to be a laugh, right? And I mean, I’m Scottish, for fucks’ sake!) No, there’s definitely something wrong with this picture. Okay, I know what you’re probably thinking: giving the northern plants the same value as the southern-softy plants still works out at a total of 135K, which is a princely sum in anyone’s book. And it’s true, so I really have to fucking wonder where the bizzies pulled the million and a half number from.

I suppose it might have something to do with the people that got busted. Maybe they’re more than folks who are a bit naughty and are your actual fully-fledged pikey undesirables or something. So when it all comes to court they’re going to look like proper greedy bastards ready to swamp the whole of the north east of England with their mind-rotting drugs. Picture the scene:

Defence: “The plants were for personal use, m’lud”

M’lud: “What, a million and a half quid’s worth? You’re having a laugh and your clients can fuck off to jail for fifteen years each”

Yeah, the words “no fucking luck” spring to mind.

But there’s a serious point to be made here, and it comes back again to how the dibble do things when it comes to drug busts and particularly how they place a monetary value on the gear they lift. I know fuck all will change cos growing dope with the obvious intent to supply is illegal and this makes all of us who do it criminal scum in the eyes of the law, but it’s just fucking unfair. And especially when we all know that the polis aren’t above skimming the goods they nick for a bit of extra beer money. But fuck it, that’s another column.

And it almost makes you think seriously about moving down the road to Surrey.

Until the next time.

around, it needs to be as hard for them as possible to uncover what you’re up to. Make no mistake, once your house has been flagged by the police and the electricity company as ‘suspect’, suspect of being a source of illegal electric tapping, then they can request a search warrant and come and comb through your entire place. Now no grow op is likely to escape a really thorough search, but the authorities do not have the resources or the manpower and so when

the suspicion is slight, they’ll just make a superficial check up. In short: people of one kind or another are going to be making short visits through your home. As growers we can use this knowledge to our advantage by making sure that our grow room is as well-hidden as possible!

That the winter months also increase our chances of being busted is less well known among growers

Camouflage

The grow ops that I know of that have been around for ten years or more are mostly the grow rooms behind double walls and / or established in hidden rooms. For all these growers it has been a hell of a job to get their spaces as well camouflaged and hidden as they can, but eventually well worth the extra effort. So for example they might let the air leave the building via a flexible pipe secreted in the chimney, so that the warm air that rises will arouse very little suspicion. Another method that works really well is not to blow the warm air directly outside, but via another space (such as the cellar or an empty room). The air is thereby allowed to gradually come to a decent temperature. Of course, you do need to use very good filters, since the intention is not to fill your entire house with a strongly-reeking hemp odour.

Beyond suspicion

A large moveable cupboard (no, not a grow cupboard) for our grow space is perfect. It can prevent a whole load of problems, and almost everyone will be suspicious when they find themselves before a suspiciously closed and locked door. So bear this in mind. When we minimise the risks involved in growing marihuana, then our chances of a long life of growing are vastly improved!

See ya.

JK horribly_stoned_boy@hotmail.com

Only when we have minimised the risks of growing marihuana are we free to concentrate on raising a good crop of lovely buds!

Did you know that many growers still make the mistake of removing too many leaves from their plants? By doing so the plant can take up much less energy, which will reduce the eventual yield considerably. In the last few days, sure, you can take plenty of leaves off and it won’t do any harm, the lady will find this quite stressful and will pump up the buds even more as a response.