Can legal grow ops be a productive part of your neighbourhood?

 

The question came to my mind last year as I noticed a development permit for a series of greenhouses close to my street. Naively, I thought it was great to see some good home grown vegetable and flower production in the area and it would be great to see another entrepreneur contributing positively to society. A few friends of mine pointed out that it was probably a legal grow op. I thought that was a little negative of them, so I set about trying to prove them wrong.

 

Well, after some research, I found out that in fact it was a legal pot growing operation. In further discussions with several people in the area, I heard stories about the operator having been convicted on more than one occasion for illegal pot production. I have never done the research to establish if that is true, and in all honesty, work has not proceeded at a very fast clip to date, but it did make me wonder if, in fact, there could be a positive benefit to having a legal pot growing operation in my neighbourhood!

 

In BC alone, over 12,000 licenses have been granted to people to grow "medicinal" marijuana. The last number I heard is that there were around 300,000 medicinal marijuana users in BC.

 

The challenge may not be with the concept of allowing people access to another drug to reduce the impacts of their often hard to treat ailments but with the impact on the neighbourhood of having a grow op, legal or otherwise. Municipalities and their citizens are starting to complain about the abuse of the legal permitting system with a marked increase in home invasions, violence and black market dealings. The argument has been for many years to bring the problem into the mainstream and the criminal element will no longer be able to function. Hindsight might advise us that we are creating an easier opportunity for the criminal element to operate through using legal grow ops to supply additional amounts of marijuana over and above their stated limits according to their licenses.

 

Another dilemma for municipalities is that in smaller "pot growing" situations, Health Canada is not releasing the locations of the permit holders because of "protection of privacy" concerns. This has a multiple effect of neighbours not being prepared or aware of potential safety issues on their street, REALTORS® not being able to research the history of a home that has in fact been used for growing marijuana and of course making life more difficult for an already challenged police force.

 

We are all more than familiar with the challenges of an illegal grow op in a home in our neighbourhood, but I for one was not aware of or prepared for the larger scale "legal" grow op situation that municipalities are having to deal with.

 

There are however changes ahead. Health Canada under pressure from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities has researched tightening the controls on legal grow op production and distribution. I am not sure the problem will ever go away, but we need to be aware of the challenges, legal or otherwise of allowing pot to be grown in homes. Purely from a fire fighting perspective, the likelihood of a fire in a home increases from a one in 525 chance on a normal home to a one in 22 chance in a home with a grow op. At that point, our firefighters lives are also put at stake needlessly.  I hope that serious change is ahead, not a band aid.