Suburban Marijuana "Grow Houses"

(Cleveland, Ohio) Area law enforcement agencies are raising the alarm on the existence of indoor marijuana farms, called "grow houses," in suburban neighborhoods. According to Michael Barnhardt of the Medina County drug task force, recent raids indicate that the grow houses may be operating in many communities.

From Cleveland.com:

The raid on the Baywood Drive residence, three other homes and four apartments in Brunswick and Brunswick Township netted 600 marijuana plants and $60,000 worth of plant-growing equipment. The bust led to a raid in Lorain County on a house in Avon.

Agents located the houses in Brunswick after another grow house in Wadsworth caught fire earlier this year. Information gathered after that led to the other raids.

Twelve people were arrested and charged with growing marijuana with intent to distribute. They are scheduled to go to trial Nov. 27 and each faces eight years in prison if found guilty.

The pot farmers taken into custody were Vietnamese, however, there's no evidence that they are linked to the Vietnamese gang problem moving into the U.S. from Canada. Logically, since Vietnamese-speaking people are a minute segment of the population in North America, I would suspect some sort of connection.

Notably, grow houses are very large consumers of electricity due to the lighting required for the plants and consumption can be an indicator of an indoor farm. However, electric power distributors typically "would not alert police if they saw a huge increase in electrical usage" even though it's evidence of a crime being committed.

I don't understand. Possession of child pornography is a crime simply because it's evidence of child sexual abuse being committed and it's viewed as furthering the crime of child sexual abuse. Why shouldn't it be a crime to withhold evidence of a drug farm and shouldn't the utility be considered complicit if electricity continued to be supplied in massive amounts after it became known that usage was for criminal purposes.

I'm not advocating new law, rather, just pointing out an apparent disparity in reasoning. Customarily, I'm in favor of fewer laws. Nonetheless, to be a good business neighbor, I'd suggest that prudent managers adopt guidelines to notify somebody when electricity consumption at a particular residence increased ten or twenty fold above historical usage for the neighborhood without a reasonable explanation.