Las Vegas Going to Pot

-----quote-----

Las Vegas has a pot home problem. And like many of the region's maladies, it's tied to the housing slump.
Last year, authorities took down 153 indoor grow sites in Nevada and seized more than 13,000 plants, compared with 18 sites and 1,000 plants in 2005, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said.

'You can't have crime without opportunity' " said William Sousa, a criminologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. " ' And all those empty homes present an opportunity for criminal activity.'
Major [marijuana] cultivators spend tens of thousands of dollars turning cheap homes into greenhouses. Small-scale growers transform bedrooms into grow rooms, . . .

In neighborhoods where residents may be as transient as crowds in a subway station, growers are rarely questioned about dark windows and empty driveways. Those are also hallmarks of abandoned homes, of which America's foreclosure capital has plenty.

---endquote-----
Ref:Los Angeles Times

They missed a few years there. Or did they pick 2005 because it had the right data to support the point they wished to make?

One person's pot-problem is another person's pot-heaven. I'm glad to see people are buying American.

I've noticed the problem myself. Perhaps they need to crack down harder on it. It is after all an illegal drug.

Could easily be that the actual number of pot houses did not change very much. Variations in enforcement policy can make a difference in the statistics. Could be one administration or one key person might have had a political reason to concentrate on the problem one year- or not to. Or if it was a network of growers, as occurred in NE Ohio a couple years back, authorities can get a line on a whole bunch of grow houses with a single lucky break.

Agree that a neighborhood with cheap, available homes and lots of turnover is ideal for pot houses or meth labs. And they can both be dangerous to the other homes. Labs can explode; hot grow lights or overworked furnaces can ignite combustibles. And of course, untended homes are bad for a neighborhood in other ways. The neighborhood where we rented a home last year (not in Nevada) had a terribly high percentage of unoccupied homes. We will not return. People have asked us why we don't buy something when places are so cheap. We would if it made economic sense for us, but sometimes cheap comes at a price.

Like someone on another thread said, listen to what P.J. says because he nails it 98% of the time.

How come you can go to the corner liquor store and buy enough cigarretes and booze to cook your lungs and your liver, but you can't grow a single plant of marijuana? R-I-D-I-C-U-L-O-U-S!

+1

Ya see, the reason for those indoor "pot houses" in Vegas
is because of the problem with the the harsh, dusty, bone dry soil conditions outside.

It's much different than the lush mountain loom of Don Diego's Appalachia.

Rick

Legalization is tangential, especially in Appalachia. Grow houses and mountain plots would exist whether or not pot is legalized, just as illegal (hence tax-free) alcohol production traditionally thrives there. In the part of Appalachia I lived in for 4 years, "Meigs County Green" was a popular strain. They grew it on farms and I assume in clearings in the Wayne National Forest.

I'm not saying any drug is worse than the other, I'm merely saying that it's illegal. I believe that if something is illegal, even if we don't agree with it we need to follow the laws of the land. Aside from that, people who are into pot many times are doing other illegal activities as well.