Pubdate: Mon, 03 Jan 2011
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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Website: http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: John W. Miller

Joint Effort: Dutch Utilities Help Police Smoke Out Pot Farmers

Personal Use Is OK; the Target Is Growers Who Steal
Power;Scratch-and-Sniff Cards

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands-Fire up a joint in the Netherlands? No big
deal. Grow marijuana? That's a crime. Getting smoked: the nation's
power companies. Volt-hungry pot farms have been stealing hundreds of
millions of dollars of electricity a year. The problem has gotten so
bad that one firm has blown a fuse. Stedin Netbeheer BV, a grid
operator with 1.8 million customers, is now sending employees on raids
with armed police officers, using sophisticated grid analysis to
unearth pot plantations.

Last month, it launched an anonymous hot line and mailed out 30,000
scratch-and-sniff cards that smell like fresh cannabis. "People have
this image of a nice hippie smoking," says Wolter Meijer, the
company's top antifraud official. "The reality is danger and crime."

Growing weed indoors requires water, carbon-dioxide generators and
intense light and heat, which leads to hundreds of accidental fires a
year. Heavy electricity use is big red flag for investigators, so
cultivators try to avoid detection by tapping into the grid before the
meter. That costs Stedin $15 million a year.

It's all part of the country's dissonant attitude toward marijuana. On
paper, it's illegal to smoke, buy, sell or grow pot. But the ban on
smoking hasn't been enforced since 1976, and coffee shops are licensed
to sell small quantities. The paradox puzzles even Dutch law
enforcement. "You can smoke it, but you can't grow it," says Erik de
Borst, the nation's top anticannabis official. "Where are you supposed
to get it?"

From all over Holland, it turns out. There are an estimated 40,000
marijuana plantations in the country. Every year, 5,000 are destroyed,
and 5,000 pop back up, police say.

The coffee shops are allowed to stock only 500 grams, so they need
frequent resupplies. "The authorities would love to know where we get
our weed," said Myriam Kobus, as she oversaw smokers lining up for
"White Widow," a popular strain, at the Game, a coffee shop she
manages in The Hague. "We don't tell them."

Police say most suppliers are gangs that carve up production, often
among lower-income citizens who get paid to turn their residences into
grow houses. A batch of 200 plants can be harvested five times a year,
with each crop generating $30,000.

Growers are supplying more than the home market. Dutch marijuana goes
out by ship and by highway all over Europe, says Peter Reuter, an
expert on drug policy at the University of Maryland. The Netherlands
produces $3 billion a year, 90% of which is exported, the police estimate.

Pot farms turn up in villas, tomato greenhouses and working-class
flats. One gang in Rotterdam has used six trucks as mobile farms, with
one batch always ready for selling and smoking, police say. Pot has
been found growing in shipping containers buried under swimming pools.

It keeps Mr. Meijer's team of 32 at Stedin busy. They're on the
lookout for eight-hour spikes in power use, corresponding to heat-lamp
patterns, and for outside air filters, convoluted wiring and roofs
that quickly melt snow.

The company first held talks with police in 2004 and has worked
increasingly closely with authorities since then.

This year, Mr. Meijer sent out the scented cards and asked customers
for help. "We wouldn't ask people to spy," he says. "Just sniff on
this card, and if you smell that in your neighborhood, give us a call,
and we'll do the rest."

Mr. de Borst, the antidrug official, helped make it happen. Police
petitioned the district attorney in Rotterdam for the right to distill
40 kilograms of hemp, seized during a raid, into 50 centiliters of
oil. Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active ingredient in marijuana,
was removed. They found a printer in France to make the cards and
secured exemptions from French and Belgian customs.

The 30,000 pamphlets were posted in early November. If the campaign
works, it will be rolled out for the whole country.

Loek de Lange, a spokesman for Enexis BV, another grid operator, says
his company also works with police, but not as closely as Stedin.
"It's a problem for all power companies, and we have to fight
together, with the police," he says.

Stedin's anonymous hot line receives one tip per day, on average. Each
is investigated, "even if we know it's probably somebody smoking or
neighbors who don't like each other," says Mr. Meijer.

On a recent day, two teams set out in unmarked cars from Stedin's
headquarters in this port city. Gangs frequently protect their
plantations with booby traps, including electrified doors, holes
covered by doormats and paint-ball grenades.

John Mulder, a safety inspector for the city, pointed a hand-held heat
camera at each suspect home. A dark concentration of heat in an attic
is a good clue, he said, "but it can also be a washing machine."

They knocked on doors, checking up on tips called in by neighbors who
thought they had smelled something. One middle-age occupant, Younes
Kamel, said simply: "I smoke joints." The investigators nodded and
left.

Just before noon, one of the teams struck gold at a three-story brick
row house. It was unoccupied, so police knocked down the door. Each
room on the second and third floors contained more than 100 flower
pots brimming with rich, black soil. Marijuana had just been
harvested. A trash bag stuffed with stems lay in the front room, near
a punching bag.

A panel in a side corridor held transformers and wires to run the
lamps. Stedin technicians dismantled it.

A new conservative government, which won elections on a law-and-order
platform, wants to shut many of the country's 700 coffee shops and 400
"grow" shops, which legally sell equipment needed to farm hemp.

Advocates are putting up a fight. "It's making marijuana illegal that
causes crime and violence," says Fredrick Polak, an Amsterdam
psychiatrist who says he smokes a joint every other day. "During
prohibition, people weren't killing each other because they were
drunk, it was because they had to become criminals."

"It's a good business," says Ms. Kobus, the coffee-shop manager, who
says her store takes in several thousand euros a day. "Pot is here to
stay."
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