Where did your last bit of weed come from? This is a long read but it explains whats happened to the weed that your buying in the UK nowadays. Why the prices have gone up and the quality dramatically down.
If you ignore the end of it its actually a very interesting article, for the Daily Mail.
Almost from the beginning, the new 'neighbours' in the cul-de-sac aroused suspicion.
Why, everyone wondered, had they sealed their windows with tape and black bin liners, and kept the boiler on full blast, come rain or shine, which resulted in condensation dripping down the outside walls?
Nor, residents observed, was the rubbish ever put out or the door answered during the day.
"It was only when it got dark that people would start to come and go," said Peter Stevenson, 57, a design engineer, who lives here in Bricket Wood in the suburbs of St Albans.
In fact, no one really knew who was renting the smart, detached home in their midst.
In another part of the Home Counties, a similar picture (streaks of condensation, strange 'comings and goings' after dark) was unfolding at a recently leased £350,000 house in Orchard Drive, Standon, on the outskirts of Bishop's Stortford.
Ditto Midway Avenue in the village of Thorpe, Surrey, after four 'catering workers' moved into a vacant bungalow.
"We couldn't understand why on earth they always kept the lights on and the curtains drawn even in the height of summer," said one pensioner in her 70s.
The lady next door to the property in question, on the other hand, was puzzled by the 'funny smell' coming through her daughter's wardrobe.
Eventually, the police were called.
Inside, officers found row upon row of lamps hung from huge bolts in the walls in order to create subtropical conditions within.
The electricity meter had been bypassed. Furniture had been dismantled.
The space had been filled by a jungle of 500 cannabis plants which yielded two crops in six months.
Two crops equal an estimated £100,000 return.
Exact figures for the scale of the problem nationally are unavailable, but it is estimated that cannabis factories are now being raided at the rate of three a day across the country, and as soon as one closes another one opens.
Today, wherever you live, the chances are your home will not be far away from one.
Perhaps the most disturbing statistic, however, is that 75 per cent of cannabis production in the UK is now controlled by Vietnamese gangs involved in murders, kidnappings and child trafficking.
"These gangs are bringing organised crime to the suburbs and the problem is getting worse," warned Chief Superintendent Jon House, of South Yorkshire Police.
Properties in the suburbs and shires are usually bigger than flats and terraces in the city and bigger properties result in bigger profits.
Apart from the examples described above, cannabis factories were recently operating in residential streets in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Northamptonshire, the Peak District, and Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire where, in July, a bloodstained crowbar was found in an upstairs bedroom along with a 'considerable amount' of blood.
Detectives believe the man — or 'gardener' — minding the crop was killed, although his body has never been found.
Many 'factories' are also boobytrapped to deter criminal rivals.
At one house, hidden behind plastic sheeting, ten-inch metal skewers had been concreted into window sills and connected directly to the mains electricity.
The vast majority of these factories produce 'skunk', the most powerful and harmful type of cannabis, which has been linked to psychosis, depression and anxiety.
These are the unsavoury facts about Cannabis UK.
The transformation from cottage industry, typically involving a few plants in a student bedsit, to multimillion pound business, began in earnest when, three years ago cannabis was reclassified from a Class B to a Class C drug.
Most users caught by police were given a formal caution but did not receive a criminal conviction.
Unofficially, prosecuting 'suppliers' also became less of a priority than combating the trade in hard drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine.
In other words, there was increased demand and less risk attached in meeting that demand.
The people who ruthlessly exploited the new economics of cannabis were the Vietnamese.
The analysis of nationwide police raids — 802 in London alone between 2005 and 2006 — showed around 'two thirds to three quarters' of cannabis factories run by Vietnamese gangs.
Yet, bizarrely, the crackdown on these operations has been hamstrung by political correctness.
The Mail has previously revealed how police planned to write to property landlords warning them to look out for suspicious tenancy applications, but it is understood at least one force has been found to be in breach of the Race Relations Act for specifically referring to Vietnamese in its letters.
It is the equivalent, many might think, of the security services being admonished for saying many al Qaeda terrorists come from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
Even so, the criminal chain from, say, Bricket Wood (700 cannabis plants) or Orchard Drive, Standon (438 cannabis plants) invariably leads to Canada first, not Vietnam.
Many Vietnamese 'Boat People' arrived in Canada during the 70s and 80s with Vancouver and the surrounding province of British Columbia, which already had a large South East Asian population, the main destination because its position on Canada's west coast made it the 'Gateway to the Pacific'.
While cannabis or marijuana was illegal, the laws were less stringently enforced than in the U.S. and social attitudes towards the drug were more relaxed.
In Canada, cannabis factories are known as 'grow-ups' and it was a booming industry.
By 1991, 'almost every single operation' was run by the Vietnamese, according to a report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
Proceeds have been used to buy arms, hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, and to fund other criminal ventures. But over the past five years tougher legislation has been introduced in Canada, giving the authorities more powers to conduct raids and confiscate homes and contents as proceeds of crime.
This coincided with a more liberal approach to cannabis in the UK.
So it was that Vietnamese crime syndicates targeted Britain — and the methods used back in Canada are now being replicated here.
These methods are documented in a report by the RCMP which says: "Well-spoken individuals are usually hired to lease or buy a house.
"Once the lease or the purchase agreement is signed a team is sent to set up the necessary heating and ventilation systems.
"The crew also installs an electrical bypass so the local power company cannot detect any unusual increase in power consumption.
"Then a recent immigrant with little or no knowledge of the rest of the operation is offered the opportunity to live in the house with his family in return for watering the plants and keeping a low profile.
"A harvesting crew is sent in every few months to harvest the marijuana and prepare it for sale and distribution.
"This way, if one facility is taken down by police or the target of a drug rip-off, the loss is minimal and only has limited repercussions on the rest of the network."
In Vancouver, or the village of Wroughton, near Swindon, the modus operandi is identical.
It was in July last year that police arrived in Edgar Row Close and raided a four-bedroom property in the culdesac of detached houses.
Rosemary Humphries, 59, who lives opposite, said: "When the police started bringing out these plants I was absolutely in shock that this could be going on in our street.
"They were enormous, and there were big bags of soil. They had basically moved the furniture out to grow cannabis everywhere.
"None of us had a clue it was happening. We are a close-knit street, where people know each other, but we had only ever seen one young man coming in and out of the house.
"It was really frightening. The police told us they had completely wrecked the place, drilled holes everywhere."
Three Vietnamese men and a woman were arrested.
Tam Cao, 27, was the leader, the person who found private lettings for the 'crew' and was running a string of 'factories' from suburban homes in Wiltshire, which cultivated £2 million worth of cannabis.
Cao, who was jailed for three and a half years, produced a false French passport when he was picked up but later admitted entering Britain in the back of a lorry.
His ultimate criminal bosses were never identified — the gang's system was working.
The 'gardener' for the Edgar Row Close cannabis ring, now serving two years, was 46-year-old Tan Troung.
More often than not, however, 'human sprinklers', as they are also known, are children illegally trafficked into the country from South East Asia and many fear reprisals against relatives if they try to escape.
At least one child a week is being found by police raiding cannabis factories.
Among them are two 15-year-old Vietnamese boys discovered behind the drawn blinds of that house near Bishops Stortford in 2006, and a Vietnamese boy, thought to be aged between 11 and 14, rescued from a semi in Greater Manchester in June.
He was placed in a care home but vanished last month. It isn't clear whether he ran away or was snatched back by members of the gang who brought him to work in the cannabis factory.
To date, three murders have been linked with cannabis farming in the capital.
One victim was dumped on Barnes Common, west London, after being stabbed to death, another was fatally stabbed in a flat in New Cross, south east London, and a third was discovered with his throat cut at a house in the north-west suburbs of the city.
All were Vietnamese.
Hardly surprising, then, that police are now taking the threat posed by cannabis factories seriously and are privately furious that their efforts are being hampered by allegations of racism.
One statistic perhaps highlights the task now confronting forces across the country.
More than 60 per cent of cannabis is now produced here, compared to just 11 per cent a decade ago.
Det Sgt Bob Graham is in charge of Sheffield's drug unit. "I have eight officers and we spend 40 per cent of our time tackling the factories," he said.
"They are springing up all over the place, are kitted out with the latest equipment, and are almost always run by Vietnamese."
On the day we spoke to him his team had just carried out two raids, among 70 in the past 18 months.
"We arrest the 'gardeners' but the people running the operation are almost impossible to trace," explained Det Sgt Graham.
"The rewards are huge so they may think that even if they get caught and put away for a few years it is a price worth paying."
In the space of four months in Hertfordshire recently 24 factories, were discovered — 13 in the suburban towns of Hemel Hampstead, Watford, Stevenage, Bishops Stortford and Waltham Cross.
Each included a sophisticated irrigation system, reflective foil on the walls, and ventilation ducts sliced into ceilings.
Electricity meters were bypassed, of course, to tap into the large amounts of energy that was needed to power the high intensity lamps without raising suspicion from suppliers.
"This is professional equipment, not something you can buy at B&Q," said one officer. "It's worth about £50,000."
This is small change to the drugs gangs. Many 'houses' can yield four harvests a year together worth up to £576,000. Multiply that by … well, no one really knows the true figure for how many factories there are in Britain.
But scores, if not hundreds, of properties, many in respectable neighbourhoods, have been targeted; from the Ivy-covered semi in Jockey Road, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, to the farmhouse in Sevenhills Road, Iver Heath, Bucks, and the handsome, Victorian house in the exclusive Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales, where the imprint of a size ten boot is still clearly visible on the front door.
It belonged to the the police officer who kicked it down during a raid on the building.
"This is a lovely area," said one resident. "Then early one morning police kicked down the front door and took four men and a woman off in handcuffs."
Apart from anything else, the downgrading of cannabis three years ago was supposed to reduce the workload on our already overstretched police.
Instead it has resulted in cannabis factories springing up in what seems like every other street in the country, and organised crime spreading out of London and other major cities into the suburbs and shires.
What a triumph for the 'softly, softly' approach.
www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=488618&in_page_id=177012
Emergency Global Petition for people of Burma same issue, different petition::
Quote:
Burma is ruled by one of the most brutal military dictatorships in the
world. For decades the Burmese regime has fought off
pressure--imprisoning elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and democracy
activists, wiping out thousands of villages in the provinces, bringing
miseries from forced labour to refugee camps.
Last Tuesday Buddhist monks and nuns, revered in Burma, began marching
and chanting prayers. The protests spread—now they're growing by tens of
thousands every day, as ordinary people join in.
Peaceful protesters numbered 20000 on Sat, 30000 Sun, 100000 today. This
week, they could win a new life for their country. In the past, Burma's
military rulers have massacred the demonstrators and crushed democracy.
This time it can be different—but only if we stand with the Burmese.
Global leaders are gathering now in New York for the annual United
Nations summit. In speeches and press interviews, we need them to show
Burma's military junta how grave the consequences will be if they crush
the protesters with violence this time.
Please sign this petition asking the Prime Minister to support the
peaceful protests in Burma through all the means available to his office.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SupportBurmese/sign
Emergency Global Petition for people of Burma I'm never sure that these online petitions ever actually have an effect on anything, but I'll sign it regardless and I think others should too.
I hate the idea of armchair protesting but what's happening over there is pretty savage so consider this "stickied" for the next few days.
I'll also alter your link so it's clickable.
Emergency Global Petition for people of Burma
Quote:
Can we make this sticky?
I think this is worth a few seconds to do:
Dear friends,
The Burmese protests are widening, the international response is building--and the Burmese generals are panicking.
Today, the Burmese junta banned gatherings of more than 5, and sent thousands of troops to take control of the streets -- but still the monks and protesters march. Desperate officers have beaten, tear-gassed and fired on their own people, reportedly shooting five monks in Rangoon.
The next 36 hours are crucial.
Leaders have called for an emergency session of the UN Security Council-- but only a decisive initiative will prevent a massacre like the one from 1988. Already, 75,000 people from 192 countries have signed our emergency global petition.
Please forward this email to others who haven't yet signed--they can click below to add their name, and we'll send an updated petition to the Chinese government and the UN Security Council members every day:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/h.php/?cl=20637616
We're calling for UN powers--above all China, which holds the economic strings of the Burmese regime--to apply decisive pressure now to stop the violence, and to broker a peaceful transition. If they fail to do this, the massacres will be sudden.
The protesters have declared they will not back down. The Burmese have showed their courage.
The scenes fill our television screens--now the world must act.
In hope,
Paul, Ricken, Graziela, Ben, Galit and the whole Avaaz team
...
2007-10-26 – The Awakening, Reading Another Awakening sails over the horizon to beach itself at
Plug n Play
33-35 Milford Rd
Reading
On the good ship, this month:
In the Psy Room
Subliminal System..Live (PharPsyde Records)
The Phonographist (Baraka)
FritzFactor (Glowball)
JimJam (Fushion/The Awakening)
One to Many (The Awakening)
and in Barclays' Chill-On room
Ipcress (Daytrippers/Omniscience)
DJ G (Eden Sounds)
Barclay (Fushion/The Awakening)
Jamez 23 (Fushion/The Awakening)
Red 5 (180Degrees/The Awakening)
Friday 26th October. Doors open 9pm till 6am
Admission is £7 on the door or £6 (inc booking fee) in advance from
www.festivalweather.com
2007-10-26 3PHAZEGENERATOR – JEFF AUTOMATIC FRI 26TH OCT AT KORSAN – SHOREDITCH WILDCATS TWO OPENS AS KORSAN - 165 KINGSLAND ROAD E2 8AL- 5 MIN FROM SHOREDITCH
8K TURBO SOUND RIG - 250 CAPACITY VENUE
LARGE SMOKING AREA WITH ROOF AND HEATERS & LATE LICENSE
THIS FRI 26TH OCTOBER
3PHAZEGENERATOR (POLYMERIC, GENERATOR UK)
JEFF AUTOMATIC
CRAZY GIRL (DJ SET)
ROGER ROBIN
FREE ENTRY FROM 7PM TILL 2AM
Tektronix vs Soundskank @ The Wedgwood Northampton Halloween Special! TEKTRONIX VS SOUNDSKANK - HALLOWEEN SPECIAL
NEW VENUE FOR THIS MONTH
Upstairs @
The Wedgewood
Abington Steet
Northampton
NN1 2BH
10 - 2am
Free before 11pm, £3 after
UNDERGROUND BEATS BY
JOHNNY BRAVO
DJ RIDLER
IGNEOUS
THE PHAT CONTROLLER
DJ VACANT
ALL GOULS, GOLBINS, WITCHES, WIZARDS, DEMONS, VAMPIRES AND DEVILS ARE WELCOME!!
FOR INFO RING 07909788100 or go to www.myspace.com/Tektronix or www.myspace.com/soundskank
any advice on first time ket user. going out this weekend and then for afterwards my mate has got ketamine for when were coming down and chilling. i really want to do it as loads of my mates have and they tell me how fun it is. just after any advice on how much to do and how much of an effect that has. what does one line doa dnt ehn 2 then 3 etc as i dont want to k hole but be nice and fucked. i was thinking key'ing it leaving ti awhile and then doing so agian until i feel comfortable. any tips/ways/advice. cheers, matt.12
Internet Watch Foundation awareness day. I know that this is a crushing topic to read but it applys to everyone who uses the internet.if it helps just one child then its all worth it, we all have to do our bit to end this appauling abuse of children...please read and pass on ..thanks .x
One in 20 Interent users have stumbled across images of child abuse.
About 1.5 million adult Web surfers have been exposed to such photos, which increasingly feature the most severe forms of abuse. And nearly one in three children in sexually abusive images appears to be children under six.
Most of the children are girls, a child abuse charity added.
The figures were revealed as Internet companies - AOL, Tiscali, Yahoo!and MSN - joined forces on monday to mark the first Internet Watch Foundation awareness day.
The organisation, which monitors suspicious images of child abuse, said that while the number of British sites hosting images are now almost zero, it had reported more than 2,000 foreign- based sites to police so far this year.
About 35 per cent of those sites contained severe images of abuse, such as child rape or bestiality.
IWF spokeswoman Sarah Robertson said; 'We can only presume that reflects the demand amongst offenders for purchasing more and more severe content'.
Information on what to do if you come across a suspicious image can be found at www.iwf.org.uk she added.
Driving on drugs How many have driven under the influence of drugs??
I haven't myself,but have been a passenger in a car where the driver was on cocain and weed..
A mother has denied causing the deaths of her two daughters and two other youngsters in a crash.
Davina Smith, 30, of Tilbury, denied causing death by careless driving while under the influence of drugs when she appeared at Basildon Crown Court.
She is accused of causing the deaths of her daughters Karis and Kalli Goyette, aged eight and four, and Lee Gray and Kezia Adger, both 16.
The collision happened in Tilbury, Essex, in January.
All of those who died were in a Ford Fiesta which was in collision with a Vauxhall Corsa. Ms Smith will stand trial at a later date.
A mother has been convicted of killing her two young daughters in a head-on collision while she was high on drugs.
Four-year-old Kalli Goyette and her sister Karis, eight, died after their mother Davina Smith lost control of a stolen car in January of this year.
Kezia Adger and Lee Gray, both 16, who were in the same car, also died.
Smith, 31, from Tilbury, was convicted of four counts of causing death by careless driving "while unfit through drugs" at Snaresbrook Crown Court.
She has been remanded in custody until 2 February, to allow for the preparation of reports. But Judge David Radford warned Smith she should expect nothing other than a "substantial" term of imprisonment.
Traces of amphetamines
Earlier in the trial jurors heard how Smith had initially claimed Lee Gray was at the wheel of the stolen Ford Fiesta when it was involved in a head-on collision in St Chad's Road, Tilbury.
Although Smith later accepted she had been driving she chose not to give evidence.
Jurors heard Smith had had a series of late nights and traces of amphetamines and cannabis were found in her system during hospital tests when she was being treated for injuries. The Fiesta had been stolen in Westcliff-on-Sea the day before the accident.
Could have been one of my friends driving1234
BBC Top Gear goes virtual on PS3
Quote:
The test track used by Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond will be recreated inside GT5.
Virtual drivers will be able to race the hundreds of cars licensed inside the game around the track featured in the show.
Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is due for release in 2008. GT TV will also feature news and features about the motoring world.
Full Article
Makes me want a PS3 now, how cool would it be being able to rag a sports car around the Topgear test track!
:weee:
The Party Pills Advertised Here hey do anybody no about the party pills thats advertised on top of the screen ?
has anybody ever took them??
i was deciding to buy some but i want to no if they actually work and what they are like so if anybody has taken them before can you get back to me and let me no what they are like thanks all my love lolly xx x x x:weee:
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