Police seized thousands of pot plants and more than 300 kilograms of cannabis from a property southwest of St. Thomas.
The Ontario Provincial Police-led cannabis enforcement team launched an investigation after Health Canada, the country’s pot regulator, alerted them to a residence on Talbot Line near Coyne Road in Elgin County that was associated with three expired licences to grow medicinal marijuana, the OPP said on Thursday.
Police searched the residential property on Nov. 28 and seized 6,060 cannabis plants and 345 kilograms of processed pot, police said.
Nobody has been charged, but the investigation is ongoing, police said.
Under Health Canada rules governing the production of medical marijuana, prescription pot users can buy their supply from a licensed producer, grow it themselves or appoint someone to do it for them. As many as four designated growers can have an unlimited number of cannabis plants at the same location, which doesn’t require municipal approval, nor is it subject to zoning and compliance with the building code.
But police say some people abuse the medicinal marijuana system to supply the black market.
“Those seeking to conceal their illegal activity behind legitimate licences regularly exploit the system,” OPP Det.-Insp. Anne Goodwin said in an email.
The grow-it-yourself medical marijuana system, under which Health Canada is responsible for inspecting operations, poses challenges for police, Goodwin said.
“The existence of a licence (or up to four at one location) does create a layer of complexity for law enforcement. Establishing grounds for a search warrant on such a location is more challenging,” she said, adding only Health Canada has the authority to revoke a grower’s licence.
“When serious non-compliance is identified, enforcement action may include seizures, destruction of plants or referral to law enforcement,” Goodwin said.
A Health Canada spokesperson said the agency couldn’t respond to a request for comment until Friday.
In 2021, five people were charged after police seized 5,332 cannabis plants from the former Spencer Steele building in the city’s Hyde Park neighbourhood that housed a licensed medical marijuana grow-op. Neighbours and area businesses had been complaining for years about the pungent smell coming from the building on North Rutledge Park, but city officials and even politicians said they were powerless to do anything.
The cannabis enforcement team, made up of police officers from nearly a dozen forces across Ontario, was established in 2018 to crack down on the thriving black market. That was the year Canada became the second country in the world to legalize recreational pot.
The unit originally focused on illegal brick-and-mortar pot shops but later shifted its focus to illegal growers after shutting down most of the dispensaries.
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