Over £700,000 of cannabis has been recovered by a police force in Scotland who found 1300 cannabis plants in a series of raids after a tip off. The find has been added to the sixteen other cultivations which have been uncovered by the police in the last six months.
Stirling Police have appealed to all landlords in the area to carefully vet just who they are letting in to their properties and worried landlords who have fallen victim to the criminals are checking their property insurance policies to ensure the damage caused by the drug runners is covered. Many of the offenders have been only renting properties on short-term leases with the sole purpose of growing the plants. Typically properties are privately owned and will be rented out for around six months at a time. The tenants are causing thousands of pounds worth of damage during their short stay. Internal walls will be knocked down and large holes made in the ceilings to accommodate the equipment that is needed to grow the drugs on a large scale.
To create a large inside greenhouse, plastic sheeting will be used to cover the walls and windows. Industrial lights and heaters are also needed to produce ideal growing conditions. They are also putting the lives of neighbours at risk by tampering with the electricity supply. One of the properties which had cheap landlord insurance raided saw the tenant by-pass the electricity meter in such a dangerous way that police had to call in engineers who had no choice but to switch off part of the supply to the town to allow urgent work to be carried out.
Detective Superintendent Cameron Cavin said: “The cultivations have ranged in complexity from a small domestic enterprise with a handful of plants to a larger scale, where hundreds of plants have been grown. The most concerning we have uncovered, due to the size of the operation, have been found in rented properties. In the cases of the large-scale cultivations there has been significant damage caused to the structure of the houses.”