They say, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” but that wasn’t the case at an ordinary looking house on Mulberry in Pawtucket last month. It’s a three story framed house on the corner divided into apartments. So when a smoke alarm sounded, firefighters had every expectation they were stopping multiple residents from losing their housing.
But when police arrived, they found a hallway full of smoke and “marijuana odor.” The first grow was discovered when a resident, James Packer, allowed narcotics officers into his third floor apartment. His claim was that the grow is legal under our state’s medical marijuana law.
Another resident of the apartment house, Jacob Archamault, tried to stop firefighters from entering his place. When police did go in, they found another grow operation. That’s one on the third floor and another on the second floor. Also noted by the firefighters was an unsafe wiring job that ran power to the plant lights.
It’s a tough call. Those with permission to use medical marijuana in our state can grow up to 12 plants. Caregivers, which both of the accused claim to be, can help up to five patients. This means that a single individual with a card can grow up to 72 plants. What wasn’t mentioned in the report was just how many plants were discovered. Six dozen is quite a lot and at full growth, would easily require the entire floor space of an apartment.
Since licensed grows attached to care centers were banned, we can expect this sort of thing to arise more and more. This is the farm that supplies the goods. Because they don’t have to be licensed or inspected (other than being a caregiver), people are free to wire up whatever they like. Regulations would fall under the electrical code, but enforcement and inspections would depend on requests or complaints.
This time there wasn’t a fire. Reports didn’t indicate where the smoke was coming from or if the normal operation of a marijuana grow could set off a smoke alarm. Next time, who knows? These are high intensity operations with high power consumption, hot lights and usually fans. Judging by the type of “octopus” wiring we see with Christmas trees or the typical home computer setup, it’s actually surprising there haven’t been more reports of fires.
The lesson may be that avoiding regulation is just puts the state on a path toward free-wheeling, anything goes grow operations.
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