And it is not just the police that the army of illegal growers should fear. ‘Home grows’ have become so widespread that energy companies calculate that up to £100 million of electricity is being stolen to fuel the sophisticated lighting systems needed to encourage the drug to grow. British Gas – now a major supplier of electricity – has formed a special team to tackle the hash barons after detecting an upsurge in the use of power-draining hydroponic equipment to produce marijuana indoors without soil by pumping nutrients directly into the roots of the plants.
In Greater Leys, near the city of Oxford, two neighbourhood police officers delivering a stray letter to an address, stumbled across a cannabis factory at the house. Sergeant Ian Roch and Special Constable Oscar Hayward had been greeted by a ‘strong smell’ when they knocked on the door of the property. When two ‘wide-eyed, scared people’ answered the door their suspicions heightened. Amazingly, the two men managed to escape the clutches of the two officers, who then found sixty saplings, forty-five 2ft plants close to harvest and forty other 2ft plants.
Meanwhile, police in Newcastle called to a suspected burglary in 2011 discovered a huge cannabis farm in a house. Some 300 high-potency cannabis plants were seized, with an estimated street value of more than £150,000.
With average prices of £21 per quarter ounce, there is an ever growing commercial and personal market for home-produced hash in the UK.
That’s where ‘The Consultant’ comes in …
*
I’ll call him Tig because his real nickname is so memorable he’s convinced he’ll be recognised by all and sundry. Being unmasked could cost him dearly.
Tig is a UK-based freelance pot-growing expert, who actually bills himself as ‘The Consultant’ and specialises in organising every aspect of what he professionally calls a ‘home-grown operation’. This can include everything from the renting of a suitable house to organising the heating, the lighting and, most important of all, the right crop to grow. Tig’s ‘clients’ cover the whole gamut from people wanting to smoke their own cannabis to those who see it as a way to make a living. As a result, Tig’s services do not come cheap.
Tig ‘The Consultant’ charges a flat fee of £3,000 for organising the setting up of growing rooms, sometimes in an otherwise empty rented house or one where the occupants have vacated at least an entire floor to make way for cannabis plants.
‘It’s a thriving business because growing here in the UK is a hell of a lot safer than importing cannabis from abroad,’ says Tig. ‘There is a general misconception that the quality of the stuff is inferior on home grows, but if the right buds are used with the right equipment you can match anything coming out of the mountains of Tibet or the paddy fields of Thailand. My job is to ensure that every single available inch in a house is used to grow the finest quality weed.’
Tig clearly loves his work and describes every assignment as ‘a real challenge’.
He enthusiastically explains: ‘I love it because, quite frankly, most of the people who try to get started don’t have a clue how to do it properly. They need a character like me to kick off their home-grown production.’
Recently, Tig has made it his ‘duty’ to encourage home-grow operators to produce hash as well as grass. ‘God knows why this hasn’t been done before but it could effectively double the profit from every cannabis plant,’ he explains. ‘It suddenly dawned on me last year that I had been missing a trick with this home-grown thing for years. Hash is there. You just have to know how to get it out of the buds that are left over.
‘It’s as if people have been so obsessed with growing and selling their own potent weed they’ve overlooked the bloody obvious, which is that you can produce hash from what remains of those same plants.’
Tig says that all home growers need to do is follow his guide: ‘Get the trim and buds off what remains after you’ve removed the grass and dry it all carefully. Then put it in the freezer for a couple of days. Take it out and grind it up into tiny particles of powder. Use a clean dustbin and add your trim and buds into the bin and then attach a thin netting around the edge of the bin.
‘Then turn the bin upside down so the buds fall onto the net then shake the bin to make the remains of the buds turn into powder and keep filtering it at the same time. Then add the powder into either plastic or clingfilm and compress the powder very tightly. Then wrap it all up in paper. Add water and put it in the oven for twelve to seventeen minutes. Then use something solid like a rolling pin or hammer and press down on the hash, put it back in the freezer for fifteen minutes and you then have the hash.’
Tig considers himself both a hash and a grass consultant and believes that his income could triple over the next two or three years ‘once people cotton on to the fact they can make double the crop from each plant’.
Tig epitomises the sort of characters who end up at this level in the secret underworld of hash. He’s a happy-go-lucky fellow with an optimistic outlook on life, even though he’s had some very close shaves during his career as a hash consultant.
He explains: ‘I know this sounds kinda corny but I like helping people set up these sorts of operations here in the UK. Sure, I like the money too but I genuinely get a kick from seeing this sort of home-grown operation work out.’
The phrase ‘home grown’ is confusing because the sort of people who pay Tig for his expertise are often either criminal gangs or people who have hit on such hard times that they have turned to crime to make a living. Tig makes out he is some kind of pot-growing guru but in reality he is also a businessman with a very lucrative ‘skill’ to offer people.
Tig himself is an eccentric former public schoolboy who grew up surrounded by ‘duckers and divers’ including his own father, who sold second-hand cars. ‘Sure, I didn’t get a lot of grounding in basic morals but I learned how to survive and in many cases thrive, so I can’t complain,’ he says now.
For some years back in the early 1980s, Tig was an old-fashioned grass dealer in one of the richest areas of London: Kensington and Chelsea. Through his dealing, he says he got to know pop stars, actors and even a couple of members of the royal family as his reputation as a trustworthy supplier of the finest grass spread around west London.
Tig only ‘fell into’ the consultancy game some years later when he tried a bit of home growing when his supplies from abroad slowed down. He explains: ‘I started doing a bit of home growing and was selling it on but it was nothing big. Just a few customers here and there. Then this twenty-two-year-old guy I was selling grass to asked me if I knew how to set up a proper home-grow operation because his mother had lost her job and they needed to find a way to make decent money very quickly, to pay the rent on their house.
‘I moved into this guy’s house and within three days we had converted the entire loft into a home-growing plantation. I chose the seeds and provided a lighting kit made from things you can buy at any DIY store. Within a couple of months the first crop of home-grown had been produced.’
Tig doesn’t like to talk in any detail about his methods because he believes that ‘might be bad for business’. ‘The key is to buy the best cannabis seeds. Or they can even come out of your own grass supply. The aim is to germinate those seeds. That means dropping the seeds into moist soil. Place a group of them between about six moist paper towels, or in the pores of a moist sponge. Leave the towels or sponge moist but not soaking wet. Some weed seeds will germinate in twenty-four hours while others may take several days or even a week. Then you know you’re in business.
‘Next you have to plant the sprouts. As soon as a seed cracks open and begins to sprout, place it on some moist soil and sprinkle a little soil over the top of it. That’s when you need to supply the plants with light. Fluorescent lights are the best. Hang them within two inches of the soil and keep them there even after the plants appear above the ground. But to ensure prime quality and the highest yield in the shortest time period, however, you need the help of a consultant like me …’
T
ig is immensely proud of his skills as a ‘consultant’. ‘Those people I first worked for paid me a flat fee and then offered to pay me more for every visit I made to the loft to inspect the crop and make sure it was all growing properly. That made me realise there was a whole new market out there that needed the sort of advice I could offer.’
Within months, Tig had half a dozen ‘consultancy’ jobs on the go. ‘It was amazing how many people wanted to set up a home-grow operation. Many of them wanted to sell on the weed but some were doing it purely for themselves. Quite frankly, I couldn’t see anything wrong with it. I mean surely it’s better to do it this way in the UK then line the pockets of cold-blooded gangsters who charge a fortune to smuggle stuff here?’
Tig himself says he has had a few run-ins with such criminals in the past, so he was delighted to find himself offering an ‘advice service’ to people ‘who on the whole were just decent middle-class folk either with money problems or a serious pot habit’.
He explains: ‘There has always been a clear demarcation line between weed smokers and those who prefer hash. I reckon that’s why it’s taken so long to wake up to the concept of using the remains of each plant to produce hash as well. I must be stupid not to have thought of it before but then again, neither did anyone else.’
Meanwhile, Tig tries his hardest to avoid the heavyweight home-grow criminals. ‘I can’t handle the Chinese and Vietnamese, who have started setting up entire rented houses filled with home-grown in recent years. They don’t care about the quality and most of the people they have working in these houses are virtual slaves. It’s a horrible side of the business which I do not want any part of.’
Tig is just the wrong side of fifty but he looks slim and fit. ‘I love a decent smoke but I’ve always been very careful to look after myself as well. In any case, I have to be super alert in this job.’
He went on to explain: ‘I am very wary of calls that come out of the blue asking me to help set up home-growing factories. Recently some Irish guy contacted me and offered me three times my normal fee to fly over to Dublin and launch a home-grow operation for him. But I made up an excuse about not being available because I didn’t like the sound of what he was proposing. It was all to be done in an isolated farm, which is asking for trouble.’
Tig reckons you are far less likely to be caught with a home-grow operation in the city. He says: ‘Best place of all is a loft in a terraced house. The police simply don’t look for them in a city. But an isolated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere is an easy target for one of those helicopters with their infra-red cameras.’
Tig is referring to the much publicised but rarely used helicopters with special infra-red cameras used by UK police forces to check on such home-grow operations, which can be flagged up through their complex lighting systems.
But there are other risks involved in being a ‘consultant’, as Tig went on to explain: ‘One time I helped this couple set up a home-grow operation in the loft of their house in Norfolk. Everything was going well until it got so hot in the loft that the weed literally started smoking. The smell was overpowering and you could whiff it from a hundred yards away. I tried everything to change things around to alter the temperature problem but the loft was south facing and the sun was turning it into an oven in the daytime. In the end, I had to abandon them.
‘I warned them they’d get a pull very soon because their neighbours were sure to smell the weed. They ignored my advice and, surprise, surprise, the police paid them a visit, closed down the weed farm and they ended up getting eighteen months each for their troubles.
‘You have to be careful. It’s not quite as easy as people think. I guess that’s why I have so many people queuing up for my services! The cultivation of the plants is essential and they need round-the-clock attention. Just chucking a few seeds in a plant pot is not going to get you anywhere.’
Tig’s latest ‘assignment’ is to help a young aristocrat friend to set up a ‘fucking huge operation’ in one wing of his stately home. ‘I’ve known this guy for years and we’ve smoked a lot of hash and weed together. But recently his dad died leaving him this fucking huge pile in Wiltshire but he can barely afford the local council taxes, let alone the rest of the running costs for the property.
‘He asked me to take a look and see if I thought there was potential for a home-grow factory. Well, it was the dream scenario because there was a completely separate wing, which hadn’t been touched in years. It was about the size of three terraced houses in square metres, so it had the potential to grow literally hundreds of plants.
‘The only problem was my friend was so broke he couldn’t afford to pay me a consultancy fee. I looked at the longer term and broke my own golden rule and agreed that he should pay me a 25 per cent mark-up on every plant that produced decent enough weed for him to sell on to a handler. I think it will turn out to be a very lucky move because once he gets going I will rake in a very healthy monthly retainer from his sale. I’ve also persuaded him to use the offcuts to produce hash as well, so it looks set to be the answer to all his financial problems.’
In some ways, Tig seems to see himself as some kind of Robin Hood depriving the rich, evil gangs of drug importers by encouraging everyone he knows to ‘grow their own’. But of course there is a financial incentive from every person he helps, so it’s not quite the charity he likes to make out it is.
‘An old friend of mine recently told me I was like the saviour of the pot industry in this country. I like that description. It suits me down to the ground. I am a gentle old soul and all I really want is to make sure everyone is happy and rich!’
After our initial meeting in a pub in south London, Tig takes me to a nearby home-grow factory in the loft of a large semi-detached house in Lewisham. The owner greets Tig like a long lost old friend and he is equally polite to me. This is not anything like I had previously experienced inside the secret criminal underworld of hash.
We climb the staircase to a landing where a special attic ladder is sitting leaning against the wall. I can feel the heat wafting down from the loft immediately. Above me ultraviolet lights buzz lightly. We go up the ladder and find ourselves entering a netherworld of pot plants. They fill every inch of space apart from a narrow passageway through the middle of the loft area. It’s baking hot. Almost like a sauna or a steam-room.
‘The only problem with these sorts of operations is that they are a high fire risk,’ explains Tig. I am not surprised. It feels as if one lit match would ignite and explode instantly.
Then Tig agrees to pose for a photo for my book on condition he disguises his face. ‘I am immensely proud of this one. It’s like my baby. I have nurtured this “grow” so carefully and now look at the result.’
It is certainly a stunning scenario. Dozens upon dozens of seeding cannabis plants reaching at least three foot in height make the attic feel more like a jungle than a suburban loft in a nondescript Victorian house. The smell is not so much overpowering as all-consuming.
As I descend the ladder I feel a bit dizzy from inhaling the air in the loft. Tig and I then head downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Tig’s openness, even in front of his ‘client’, is almost disarming. He treats the other man like a friend and persuades the man to pose for my camera with a disguise on.
‘Yeah. I always tell people that the fire risk is very high on an operation like this. You have to be very careful. A couple of months back I helped set up one grow factory. Two weeks after I left some idiot lit a cigarette in the plant room and the house was turned into an inferno in minutes. Luckily the guy running it got out okay. I just hope the owners of the house [it turns out to have been rented] were insured because there wasn’t much left of it.’
Naturally, Tig prefers to avoid any contact with the police. ‘The police have their job to do and I have mine. One of the most important aspects of my consultancy business is to ensure that the factory is 100 per cent discreet. I explain to my clients that it’s not just about growing p
lants. They have to be very careful whom they tell about their operation. They must never allow visitors to their house anywhere near the growing rooms and most important of all, they need to make sure their neighbours don’t have a clue what is going on. The neighbours are the ones who most often end up informing the police.’
However, Tig says he is excited by the ‘new challenges’ he faces with his plans to encourage clients to make hash from their cannabis plants as well as grass. ‘It makes such good economic sense. You can double your income virtually overnight by simply using the remains of each plant to make hash. I just can’t work out why it was never done before.’
But, I point out, doesn’t producing hash mean a completely different kind of customer? ‘Good point,’ agrees Tig. ‘Most people either smoke weed or hash. The hash smokers here in the UK seem to be on average older than the grass users. Quite frankly, that’s good news for me because most of my contacts and customers are middle-aged and I know I’d much rather be flogging hash to middle-class, middle-aged folk than walking into a squat with a bag of pungent weed.’
Back in that ‘home-grow’ house in Lewisham, owner Ronnie explains why he brought in the ‘consultant’ in the first place. ‘Tig is a bloody genius. He helped me set this up from nothing, literally. He nurtures the plants as if they are his children. It’s a very organic process and he is the key to its success.’
Ronnie admits that the ‘grow’ has been set up in the attic of his house for ‘commercial and personal’ reasons. He explains: ‘I like a good smoke but I lost my job three months ago and, quite frankly, I am hoping that I can grow enough weed and produce enough hash to pay my way through life and get a good smoke thrown in for free!’
Ronnie says his wife knows all about the grow, but since the house itself is owned by his in-laws, he is keeping it a secret from everyone else he knows. ‘Look, I know they’d be pretty angry if they knew what I was up to and I also don’t want my mates knowing because they’d be round here all the time trying to get me to give them some free smoke. No way!’
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