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Arrested In Grow-op Bust.
By admin | October 15, 2004
by Matthew Ramsey
The Province
Oct 14 2004.
A 74-year-old mother and her 44-year-old son are the latest Coquitlam residents to be arrested for growing pot in the upscale Westwood Plateau neighbourhood.
RCMP executed a search warrant for theft of electricity and production of a controlled drug at the residence in the 1500-block Tanglewood Lane Tuesday night. Officers from Coquitlam and the detachment’s Marijuana Enforcement Team seized 587 plants from the basement of the large house and the power was shut down.
The septuagenarian mother and her son were arrested and released on a promise to appear. It’s not often that seniors are arrested in grow-op raids, noted Cpl. Jane Baptista.
“That’s not usually the age of the person you see.”
But, while the age of the woman is unusual, the business of marijuana is nothing new in Westwood Plateau. Police seized 1,900 plants from three homes on Windflower Place earlier this month, 900 plants from another two homes in the neighbourhood and in the last week of September, officers uprooted and carted away 1,200 pot plants from another two homes.
For Tanglewood resident Graham Scott, news of the marijuana mom and son came as no surprise.
“Believe me, the entire situation up here is very odd,” Scott said last night.
“You want grow-op capital, well here we are on Westwood Plateau . . . Just by sheer numbers up here, it’s quite incredible.”
Scott, a seven-year resident of the subdivision, says there is a groundswell of people like him who want to see the growers out of Westwood and who routinely meet to to ex-change information about suspicious homes.
Those suspicions are reported to police, whom Scott said are doing the best they can.
One of the key problems is absentee landlords and grow-op networks that sell homes to each other for the express purpose of cultivating pot, he noted.
Despite the frequency of the grow-op raids, Scott said he has no plans to leave Westwood Plateau. The community is diverse and interesting, the streets are safe and residents are now beginning to take an active role in keeping it that way.
“I’d rather not ship the problem out. I’d rather deal with it here,” Scott said.
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