Hundreds of local, state and federal law enforcement agents and officers fanned across the Denver metro area Wednesday morning in a massive black market marijuana grow sting in which thousands of marijuana plants worth millions of dollars were seized from dozens of homes.
“It’s safe to say there were thousands of marijuana plants confiscated,” said Deanne Reuter, assistant special agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Administration, which spearheaded the operation along with the Joint Metro Task Force. “Everything seemed to go smooth.”
On the black market, marijuana plants are worth up to $3,000 a plant depending on the size of the plants, or around $3 million per 1,000 plants, Reuter said.
At 7 a.m., law enforcement agents from the DEA, FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and numerous local agencies raided homes in Denver, Castle Rock, Parker, Brighton, Arvada, Aurora and Centennial, Reuter said. Despite the large numbers involved, no one was injured during Wednesday’s operation.
Reuter said she visited four homes and each had hundreds of marijuana plants. The investigation leading up to the mass drug seizures took two years, she said.
Agents, including some wearing all-white scrubs and gloves, pulled about 100 marijuana plants from an Aurora home. Other agents in street clothes laid out marijuana plants in neat rows on the driveway.
The nearly full grown marijuana plants had dirt clinging to the roots indicating that federal agents pulled them directly out of planters in the grow house.
In the Aurora raid, agents could be seen carrying plants and grow lights from inside the home, which sat on a quiet street lined with multi-bedroom houses. An American flag sat idly in the back of the three-car garage.
Roughly 100 plants laid out on the lawn here. This is the fourth similar black market bust since last August pic.twitter.com/BQlg2kZ3gE
— Sam Tabachnik (@sam_tabachnik) May 22, 2019
Joyce Menard watched the raid unfold from a driveway across the street. She said she rarely saw anybody inside the home. It’s the second time since October that law enforcement descended on their staid neighborhood to root out black market grow houses, Menard said.
“It doesn’t really bother me because they’re so quiet,” she said about her neighbors. “They’re extremely peaceful. You wouldn’t even know what’s going on.”
Wednesday’s raids came on the heels of three similar drug busts around metro Denver over the past 10 months, where local and federal agents seized thousands of plants, dozens of heat lamps and bags of cash from suspected black-market grow houses in tony subdivisions across Aurora, Commerce City, Lakewood and Thornton.
George Brauchler, the 18th Judicial District Attorney, told reporters after the Oct. 10 raid in Aurora’s Tollgate Crossing subdivision that the pot busts that day centered on a single criminal operation.
Reuter said, in general, black market marijuana operators sell the plants or finished product to gangs and independent contractors, who then market the plants in states where marijuana is illegal.
She declined to say whether the suspects involved in Wednesday’s raids sold marijuana out of state.
“Black market grows in general have been linked to burglaries, robberies and even murders,” Reuter said. “There are violent acts involved in black market marijuana because it’s money.”
If a grower sells the plants to a legal dispensary, they may get around $800 a pound. If they sell the same amount on the black market, they could get as much as $3,000, she said.
