Canabis farms

[macca]

Whilst there are some great points for both sides and we all come to this conversation from different walks of life I must say most opinions ive read on the previous 4 pages seem fairly disconnected from the reality of contemporary uk drug culture.
I whole heartedly agree that cannabis is a gateway drug, not because of anything to with the drug besides its dosile nature, relatively safe persona and cultural dominance for the last 50-60 years. because of this young open minded or easily led people are highly likely to try it, maybe they enjoy it maybe they dont, problem is its a really easy way to get confortable with aquiring illegal substances. take this away and you will find it less likely to start young people down a path of deception and fear not of criminals but of the sytsems supposed to be in place to safegaurd and support them.

There is not very much money in weed, an oz of very high grade is likely £200 these days, yes if you want to run around selling it at 10 a G to kids, weighing it at .9 you can maybe make a couple hundred on an ounce if you buying half a key but thats alot of legwork and you be selling the majority in halves and quarters at a significant discount. If we ignore the meager attempt at policing, this side of the industry its deemed by most to be high risk for a very little reward, after all, its bulky, cheap and bloody stinks.

mdma and cocaine are absolutely rife and if you answer your phone you can pretty easily bring in £1000 a week, a few days ago an 'associate' revealed his income to be circa £3000 a week, during the past month for obvious resaons this was significantly higher. bare in mind this is the bottom of the ladder in terms of distribution, in a small town.
dealers have menus and pricelists now, magic mushrooms come in appealing chocolate bar wrappers.
I have friends who I have seen decline and die through a whole spectrum of drugs, ironically given the nature of the conversation the most poignant of which died from legal highs. This particular friend had the begginings of a deviated septum at 16.

I have friends working with the police in the north who have shown me the aftermath of raids on small scale grow houses, these raids arent police raids and ill tell you how sobering it is to see images of arterial spray, and machettes and to notice childrens shoes in a shoe rack in the background.

Maybe legalisation wont help, none of us can actually say but I know for damn sure know that the current system just urinates money down a well. The police cant keep up, if they do nothing gets done further down the line. the real change needed is to bring people with genuine issues out of the shadows, and to help them deal with the problems that manifest themselves into the destructive behaviours. Addiction can obviously be chemical but more often it is due to past traumas from a ****** up childhood. The way things are now the only people who realy bear the consequences are the victims, maybe im foolish but if you stopped spending money to fight a battle you cannot win but instead take some of the revenue stream and redirect it into some much needed public funding you may deal with some of the root causes and free up policing so that pledging to send an officer to every burglary isnt front page news.

Edit; i swore :s

 

[TRITON]

According to that more people die of Paracetamol abuse than Cannabis. Cannabis is very low on the scale and hardly a major issue at all.
Tobacco is the big one - and vapes are more risky than Cannabis as far as I can see.
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I think the cannabis deaths probably come from an overdose of mars bars.

 

[Scruples]

Can't argue with that! There's nothing wrong with wacky baccy.

Hmm. I doubt the NHS would agree with that assertion.

 

[Fergie 307]

You two gentlemen are SO uninformed. Jacob, I suspect you are up to your incendiary tricks again. Slap your own wrists; save me the trouble.

I first worked with analyses of cannabis back in 1979 and I regularly had to revise and update my knowledge of the variants ("skunk" et al) as the years went by, for the execution of my daily job. I've also seen the effects close up and achingly personal in some of the individuals for whom I have had a caring responsibility. My son is a first line responder; his experiences would "bring curls to the head of a bald man".

Cobbs, there is everything wrong with waccy baccy. Just ask any of the paranoid individuals who were long term users - if their long term memory is still intact enough for them to recall pre-hash times. Go comfort some of the R.T.C. victims who were crashed into by a drug driver. Or, the (usually pensionable-age) victims of high-street muggings that are carried out to finance the habit. Go swop places with a 'rent boy' for 24 hours.

Jacob, de-criminalising would simply put a false 'sheen' on, and 'legitimise' the callous, greedy, criminality who presently import and HUGELY profit from, the cannabis trade. (The Albanians and Vietnamese patsies that act as caretakers and gardeners are just exploited stooges). The shadowy boyos in Beamers, Jags and Mercs with 6-or-7-figure houses whoop with joy when such ignorant opinions are espoused by the chattering classes. "Get the rozzers off their backs", they just continue to make oodles of cash, but this time, Gov.Com is calling it "legit"??? Yippee!!

Publishing sweeping casual generalisms for the sake of hearing ones digital 'voice' are irritating at the best of times, but when its use continues to prop up a convenient urban myth - one actively pushed and provided for by the ungodly - the practice becomes a more serious and utterly unacceptable "accessory to criminality" Shame on you both.

Jacob and Cobbs you need to have a chat with some proper weed heads, who are very sad to behold. The really insidious thing is that they generally don't perceive that they have changed at all. Like any drug moderate use may have little ill effect, and Cannabis can have significant benefits to people with some conditions, over indulgence leads to serious problems.

 

[Cobbs]

Repeating the same statement is like trying to prove your point by shouting over the crowd, increased volume doesn't make any more convincing an argument, neither does repeating a false assumption!

My comment was about taxation, which I thought I'd addressed. Home brewed beer and home grown tobacco are not taxed, so why would homegrown cannabis be?

 

[Cobbs]

Jacob and Cobbs you need to have a chat with some proper weed heads, who are very sad to behold. The really insidious thing is that they generally don't perceive that they have changed at all. Like any drug moderate use may have little ill effect, and Cannabis can have significant benefits to people with some conditions, over indulgence leads to serious problems.

I've known my share, believe me. There will always be casualties in life and I stand by my assertion that the money spent on trying to control the uncontrollable would be better spent in helping those casualties, whether of "drugs" or alcohol.

 

[Ttrees]

I'm sure @Jacob and the "liberals" will like this one
Seems even old snoop dogg has got some cop on!

 

[Glitch]

Since 2017 we've had a problem property in our quiet residential street.
Unlicensed HMO, Anti-social behaviour, then a weed farm. Absent owner using a rogue letting agent under investigation by several London boroughs

Suspected weed farm (had all the classic signs) reported by myself and next door neighbour. Police knocked on door, saw someone inside but they didn't answer the door. Police went away.

Middle of the night a van pulls up. Men loading black bin bags. I call the police. Great opportunity to catch scrotes a bit further up the food chain than the gardeners. 'How do you know it's a weed farm?' 'How do you know it's not someone moving home?'

Police finally get warrant to raid property. It is a weed farm. They arrest one worker ant. Electric meter bypassed.

Couple of week later another van turns up in middle of the night and they load all the remaining cultivation equipment, presumably to reuse at another property. Video passed to police.

Rogue agents must have known what was going on. They were due to be in court before Christmas to effectively close the business down for continuing to let property without licence.
Apparently it's a difficult step for councils to take because it takes away their livelihood. Oh FFS

After a period of quiet, well behaved but still 'illegal' tenants the property is now empty but used occasionally at night by young lads as a gathering place until the early hours.

Yep, legalise weed. Control the amount of active ingredients. Main reason is it's pointless making it illegal if they can't actually catch the main criminals.

 

[Rodpr]

Alcohol, tobacco and many other drugs which clearly cause harm and cost the NHS huge amounts every year are legal because they provide tax revenue (and because they are organised into massive, highly profitable corporations which can afford to lobby governments and resist regulation). I have yet to hear any convincing argument as to why it is OK to legalise alcohol but all hell would break loose if cannabis were to be legalised.

I am sure there would be all sorts of undesirable activity around the mass production of cannabis if it was legalised (just as there has been and is around the production of tobacco and alcohol) but the point is that making it illegal just shifts the harms into different areas.

 

[Jacob]

Jacob and Cobbs you need to have a chat with some proper weed heads, who are very sad to behold.

I have known several over the years.
I've known a much greater number of alcoholics and heavy smokers, in fact old friends who have had their lives dominated by or even died as a result.
Not sure why cannabis is seen as a special case - statistically it is very low down the list in terms of cause of death. Opiates are worse but top of the list is tobacco.

 

[Jacob]

....

I am sure there would be all sorts of undesirable activity around the mass production of cannabis if it was legalised

The whole point of legalising it would be to stop the undesirable activities currently going on and bring it all out into the open and into control.

(just as there has been and is around the production of tobacco and alcohol)

Yes when it was illegal, not much at all when permitted. There's an indefinable point at which you get the best compromise between being permissive and the harm caused.

 

[mark w]

Time the made it legal and stopped all this criminality and waste of police time.

I live in Glastonbury Jacob, the cannabis centre of Somerset, your comment is one I hear a lot and it is an ignorant one, my wife works for a youth charity, they deal with young people who are going through difficult times, cannabis is a major factor in most of the cases she deals with along with class A drugs. Cannabis is a gateway drug and usually leads people to the stronger class A drugs. Apart from the usual effects of cannabis it can also induce paranoia which can lead to suicide attempts. Large cannabis operations usual fund other criminal activities, such as the purchase of class A drugs, illegal weapons, people trafficking and perhaps the most prolific problem young people have to deal with at the moment, county lines. Legalising cannabis will not solve any of these problems. What we should be doing is cracking down harder on the people involved. Your attitude is a defeatist one and I sincerely hope it never becomes accepted.

 

[mark w]

Can't argue with that! There's nothing wrong with wacky baccy.

Ignorant, wrong and completely stupid, you and your comment.

 

[Jacob]

..... Legalising cannabis will not solve any of these problems.

It almost certainly would help.

What we should be doing is cracking down harder on the people involved.

It's already happening but it doesn't work! Surely you have noticed this?
There are better ways of handling these things.

 

[mark w]

I think there's an awful lot of hypocrisy when it comes to drug laws, even allowing for the fact that most people have dabbled at some point in their past. Why is it that alcohol for instance, is perfectly legal when I would guess the vast majority of us have personal experience of losing friends or family members to its abuse, while cannabis, which is responsible for vanishingly few deaths, is still proscribed? Obviously, the government is happy to profit from alcohol taxes, as well as those from tobacco, vapes and caffeine.
Speaking for myself, I think it's long past time when ALL drugs should be legalised, with the money saved on enforcement going towards quality control, licensing and education. Probably a contentious viewpoint, I admit, but better to save lives and take the money away from the criminal networks. Let's not forget that the Mafia in the US only grew to serious proportions when prohibition provided lucrative returns for bootlegging and rum running.

How will it take money away from criminal networks? The criminal gangs will legitimately sell cannabis and then fund their other criminal activities with that money.

 

[Jacob]

How will it take money away from criminal networks? The criminal gangs will legitimately sell cannabis and then fund their other criminal activities with that money.

They would chose to go the legal way.
Obvious really. Just as there is there is little money to be made by illegal alcohol or tobacco production.
Illegality promotes criminality.

 

[Glitch]

All well and and good expecting enforcement of the law and stopping illegal drugs trade but there's way too many people trying to dismantle the police.
They seem to be succeeding. Criminals know the chances of being caught are slim and getting slimmer.

How long before we slip into complete anarchy?

 

[mark w]

It almost certainly would help.

It's already happening but it doesn't work! Surely you have noticed this?
There are better ways of handling these things.

Two statements from you with no qualification for either, how would it help? show me some peer reviewed research from a respected organisation which backs up your comment. As we all know Jacob the police are woefully underfunded, they don`t even scratch the surface when it comes to investigating drug gangs so you`re wrong again. I`m ducting out of this conversation now, it makes me aggressive when I read ******** statements like yours.

 

[Cobbs]

Ignorant, wrong and completely stupid, you and your comment.

Don't hold back there...

 

[Jacob]

Two statements from you with no qualification for either, how would it help? show me some peer reviewed research from a respected organisation which backs up your comment.

You have the whole history of prohibition to look at.