Pot nursery at mall
Feds busted a hydroponic marijuana garden in Miami's Mall of the Americas. Nobody has been arrested yet. There were 200 plants in the nursery. From the Associated Press:
The grow operation was found deep in a storeroom at the mall. Authorities say the growers used the mall's electricity to power their equipment, adding the flimsy wiring could have caused a fire.Marijuana garden at mall (Miami Herald)
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Dude... we totally have to go to Cinnabon, like, now!
But seriously, this is the best thing to come out of a mall, ever.
explains why it's so hard to find parking
"I'll have the organic salad please"
That explains the people lying in the message chairs in Sharper Image with a bag of Mrs.Fields in each hand.
Uh oh. Now they'll be looking. I may have to move my litho press, my rocketry lab, and my online casino...
the cops said the plants were worth like $5 million! that must be some serious shizzle!
I'm willing to forgive JGERSTENs misspelling of massage, but, even if they did have 'the message chair', The Sharper Image is still out of business. By the way, the mall is a much better place for a secret apartment. I prefer to grow my weed in the back of Ford SUVs on dealer lots (really - no pun intended with 'dealer lot').
Vern (WestSide VRips Alumni)
Regardless of quantity, the "street value" is invariably calculated at the price per gram charged in the Upper Haight.
This may be the coolest story I've seen on Boing Boing yet. I hope the growers pull a D.B. Cooper and never get caught.
hate to be FARKey here (who am I kidding, I grew up on the site and still visit it from time to time) but...
This. Thread. Is. Worthless. Without (links to). Pics.
"adding the flimsy wiring could have caused a fire."
Seriously. What were they using, coat hangers? Unsheathed copper wire? Probably just a few extension cords. Just sayin', enough of the overblown hyperbole - this case is pretty good as is.
"In addition, two of the suspects used what appeared to be DANGEROUS shoelace-tying methods, eschewing the traditional American square-knot for a radical, 'Eastern' variant. It is unknown how often the criminals lost their footing, due to all of the deviant lace-tying, flimsy wiring, and rampant drug use, but it is assumed that they fell over... and often."
your tax dollars at work.
What a waste of everyones time.
CNN.com has some good video of the running hydroponics system under their (flash based) video section. You can find it by clicking the video link on the top right of the site, then ordering the videos by "Most Popular".
they need to look for the guys that are giggling really hard and suffering from a bad case of the munchies.....follow the laughter and the crumbs!
#10: Barring the fact that there was marijuana involved, they've uncovered trespassing and theft. Don't you think those are both useful things for our police officers to be pursuing?
This is brilliant.
Malls are the perfect place for this, since they belong, in a sense, to nobody.
The centre owners never go there. That's what maintenance crews are for.
The maintenance crews don't care about anything but replacing broken lightbulbs. That's all they are paid to do.
The store workers don't care about anything outside their own store.
The police never goes there - that's what rent-a-cops are for.
The rent-a-cops don't care, they've only been working there for 3 weeks and will be fired pretty soon in any case.
So a bland mall store-room belonging to a disused shop would be the perfect place for a secret lair from which to plot world domination.
I saw this report on TV. The officer didn't say that the wiring could cause a "fire", he said that the "equipment and setup could have caused a massive explosion".
Must have been really good mind blowing pot.
Nobody else thinks this is a coincidence that this is also a major plot point in the current season of "Weeds" on showtime? Either the growers or the cops are watching that show!
Holy Smokes! This happened in Iowa City too, albeit back in '03. We've always been a leader in innovative agri-practices.
Sorry about the crummy link.
http://media.www.dailyiowan.com/
media/storage/
paper599
/news/2003/09/10/Metro/
Ceiling.Pot.Startles.Coral.Ridge-461087.shtml
Like they say, if only these pot farmers would apply all this skill, hard work, and ingenuity to a legitimate occupation they could be -- politicians --or lobbyists -- or telecom executives...
@ #12 and #17: No.
"Probably just a few extension cords."
It's ridiculously easy to start a fire with extension cords if you're not careful.
insert_comment(drug_war, prohibition, blah_blah);
I would be interested to know how much food they could grow with such a system. Understandably, the profit margin would not justify such a thing, but it would be pretty cool to be able to go to the mall and get fresh produce grown in the building. Locally sourced produce? Sure, let me go in the back and get some!
Imagine a huge lattice of corn, beans, squash, melons, etc rising up out of the food court atrium of an abandoned mall...
funniest one I ever heard was the huge, biker-run grow-op in the attic of an abandoned mental institution. Someone forgot to cut in or manage the rent-a-cop of the day and he went through the wrong door.
I've often wondered - pot is supposed to be really easy to grow - maybe not the high yield exotic stuff, but well, ditch weed, as we used to call it. It's a weed. It grows in ditches. Right? Or am I reading too much into that?
So couldn't some counter-culture johnny appleseed type scatter seeds all over public places? Public parks, scrubby areas around malls, that overgrown garden next to the library. What if they all started sprouting up random pot plants? It would probably take a while before someone started recognizing them out of context, and even longer before they recognized a pattern. It could be a pretty entertaining stunt.
swampdog, been there dun dat!
Pot can definitely grow in the wild, at least in Southeastern US climates. I've seen it growing around/on fences in a couple of overgrown suburban blocks in NC. Now, it was at best mediocre weed (we of course tried it) and I'm sure it started out as some amateur grower's secret spot, or accidental seed-drop, but it still grew on its own.
@24: When I went to central India, the sides of the roads were full of bushes of weed. Don't know what the quality was, though...
pot can grow damn near anywhere. Potency varies of course, but a lot of people would prefer the marijuana of years ago that didn't flatten you.
actually, ganj still grows 'wild' in many places in the us (left overs from hemp cultivation I imagine). when I was younger in wisconsin we tried it (more than once being kids...), and it NEVER got you high.
Drewstarr @8: What is this, National Forget How to Google Month? You can't find pictures or video on your own, much less come back here and post a link? You can't even thank Anonymous @12 for telling you where to find footage?
It took me about a minute to find a video of the original news story on CBS4.com. If that source is too arcane for you, you can watch it on YouTube.
Sheesh. I'd have thought that growing up on Fark would teach you more ingenuity.
Duffong @16, unless there's something they're not telling us about the setup, the line about possible explosions sounds pretty dubious.
Swampdog @24, it's been done. Trouble is, the plants tend to disappear long before they become an embarrassment. Pot smokers are much better at spotting marijuana seedlings than law enforcement officers or disapproving citizens.
@22: "I would be interested to know how much food they could grow with such a system."
...lots, but it would be cheaper to buy the same amount of (albeit inferior) food at the grocery store. Electricity cost of lighting + nutrient cost is far too high. The most earth-resource and cost-effective method is drip irrigation under a greenhouse.
FantasticPoison, food at the grocery uses fertilizers and transportation methods that are going to get more expensive. The lines on the graph may cross at some point in the future.
The mention of the wiring seems a little strange.
They've got a good little victory there interrupting an obvious crime and yet they for some reason add a comment about bad wiring as if making an excuse for doing so.
I know it surely isn't so, but it sounds enough like rationalizing feelings of guilt to be pretty funny.
Imagine police raiding a meth lab and adding in their mention of it to the press that they feared the odor might have annoyed nearby residents. Anticlimactic!