Innocent neighbours at risk as gangs use rented houses and flats for cannabis farms
The gangs often use crude methods to bypass electricity meters to avoid paying for the high levels of energy the farms require, creating an increased fire risk.
Rival gangs also carry out raids on each other's farms - a practice known as 'taxing' - carrying out "significant violence" to anyone who gets in their way, police say.
Greater Manchester Police detected 402 cannabis farms between May 2024 and April 2025, and Sky News was given access to an operation by its officers at a semi-detached house in a quiet suburban street in Wythenshawe.
Bypassing electricity meters suggests weed farmers don't share Ed Miliband's enormous confidence in the value of solar panels.
7 comments:
A disused Working Man's Club near us was exposed as a marijuana factory just over a year ago. The police later published pictures from inside showing an awful lashup of plugboards to provide stolen power.
What surprised me was that the entrance road to the local supermarket runs down one side but I never detected the famous 'stink'.
Bypassing electricity meters suggests weed farmers don't share Ed Miliband's enormous confidence in the value of solar panels.
Good point. In fact, if we had enough sun to make the panels work efficiently, they could probably grow the weed in the back garden, like they do in California.
I imagine if you were living next to a weed farm, relaxed is probably what you’d be.
DJ - maybe nobody was trying it out. I don't know if the aroma would be there without that.
Sam - if Ed is right, a Californian climate is on the way unless we stop driving and heating our houses in winter. Maybe that's what Net Zero is really about.
Peter - like being retired on a sunny morning in June...
Near the end of my career I took a job which at one time included testing thermal imagers, the fancy cameras which show up warm objects such as people trying to hide. The final test was in open ground with in the near distance a row of tenements. Guess where this was.
Being of a curious bent I used some non test time to scan the tenement.
One of the flats was glowing like a steam engine. I bet the flat upstairs had a low heating bill.
This is what the officers should be using. Drones ( a black market Ukraine army surplus one would be cheap) flying over the suspect areas. It does not even have to be at night time.
As a 25 year old I went on holiday to the US, staying with a friend of my parents' in New Jersey. The son of the house, about my age and a junior newspaper journalist took me into their back garden where he chopped down several tall cannabis bushes which he had been growing, whilst singing ' Bringing in the sheeves'! Where would he dry them?
Hanging up in a row in the huge loft of course. His father a big industrial company owner director, had criticised the weed smoking, but his son had said, not to pronounce on it til he'd tried it. He tried some and related to me, shaking his head and laughing, '' I was high for 2 days! ". Those Americans, so relaxed about everything then.
Doonhamer - good idea and scanning during the day could even be more effective. I'd like to try a thermal imager on the house to see where heat losses are. Not that I'm likely to do much about it, but it would be interesting.
Tammly - tobacco leaves can be dried like that too, I once watched a video where there were still some leaves hanging in a Russian peasant's house which had been abandoned years before.
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