Weed Plantation Found In Our Apartment Building

Weed Plantation Apartment Building

“It was a weed plantation.”

It was not the usual kind of text message I expected to receive from my girlfriend during an average working day but it certainly explained the small collection of police and security vans I had seen parked outside our apartment building that morning.

“They broke the door down early in the morning and found over 500 cannabis plants all set up with heat lamps,” she informed me upon my return home later, relaying information from a neighbour.

It also explained the loud banging that had woke me up at five in the morning. It had not been an insomniac handyman doing some early renovation. It had been the police forcefully entering one of the apartments in our building as they carried out a drug bust.

“No one was there though. They don’t even live there. They just use the place for growing weed.”

That ruined my metal image of a tall blond Dutchman dressed like Al Pacino in Scarface, standing in the middle of his two bedroom marble decorated apartment, screaming, “Zeg hallo tegen mijn kleine vriend,” before he opened fire upon the finest of the Dutch police force with a machine gun as they tried to take him down.

“All the plants were two weeks away from cultivation. The only reason they found it was because the watering system had started to leak through to the apartment below.”

That just proves that you should never short change a plumber.

When I had first seen all the activity outside in the morning there had also been a large white van reversing up to one of our apartment building’s exits (the one next to ours). At the time I had thought an eviction was being carried out and they were getting ready to throw some one’s furniture into the van, not 500 plants worth of ganja.

“They were carrying cannabis plants out of the building all morning so the fumes started to fill up the stairwell and apartments. Our neighbour said she has been feeling high all day.”

I imagined that a few of our other neighbours had probably experienced the same. I imagined the old couple from 212 having an attack of the munchies while calling each other dude, the normally hyperactive child from 204 being extremely calm as he discovered a much deeper level of philosophical meaning to Sponge Bob Square Paints, the old lady from 234 no longer complaining about her arthritis and the little puppy from 201 suddenly developing a taste for Bob Marley music and dreadlocks.

Now that everything is over there is a big anti-drug sign displaying a cannabis leaf with a red line through it stuck to the window of the former weed growing apartment, declaring that a drug bust recently took place there. It looks slightly like a ‘For Sale’ sign from a somewhat questionable real estate agency of college kids. It’s very nice of the police to put it there but it does not really help us with our plans to sell our apartment if potential buyers see it (unless they are interested in starting their own ‘greenhouse’).

“Legally you’re allowed to have five plants…”

Maybe the ex-owner of the apartment had miss placed a decimal point somewhere but somehow I doubted it.

“…so we were joking that it was a shame we could not have taken five plants each,” she finished.

Joking? Or spotting a hole in the market now that the local marijuana plantation has been taken down?

Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

11 Responses

  1. mac says:

    Legally you are not allowed a damm thing. The five plants rule is no prosecution. It is tolerated usually but if the police really wanted it they can seize them. The same with marihuana possesion. you are allowed nothing but below 5 gram they will not prosecute but they can seize it none the less if they wanted. The country with the most lax drugrules in europe is currently Portugal.

  2. mub says:

    Apparently the apartment -right next door- to us was growing pot… I went to leave one day and there were 5 police officers surrounding the elevator when I went to get off. I didn’t know what had happened until days after when one of the other neighbors mentioned it to my husband. He told me and I said “OH… that’s why there was a hoarde of police officers!”

    So apparently if you want to break the law, just do it around me because I’m unobservant and completely oblivious ;)

  3. Invader Stu says:

    mac – So 500 is bad then? :p

    Mub – Really? On an unrelated topic do you mind holding on to these five body shaped bin bags and this bloody axe.

  4. Keith says:

    My neighbour has found a way round it. His garden is overgrown with every type of weed and bramble you can think of, and believe me, after 20 years of neglect there are some funny looking “weeds” in there! He put a notice on his gate saying “Weeds. Pick your own. Only £15 for as much as you want!”.

    I wonder . . . . .

  5. Invader Stu says:

    Does he have any weeds left now?

  6. Gez says:

    Sounds similar to another drugs bust my girlfriend told me about: Apparently the police run a service whereby you can ask them to keep an eye on your house/flat/run-down boat whilst you’re away on holiday. Some guy had done this, and the poilice actually saw people in his house one day. On asking these intelopers, it turns out the owner had asked them to keep an eye on the house too – clearing mail from the box, etc. But the police also noticed a funny smell, and found a weed farm in the attic. Police were waiting for him to come back from holiday so he could them “help them with their enquiries” as the Brit police put it.

  7. Invader Stu says:

    Gez – Wow! It does not sound like the smartest move asking the police to keep an eye on the place where he was doing his illegal activities.

  8. VallyP says:

    Stu, I really enjoyed this post…and the last one…and the one before that…and….sheesh, how prolific have you been? I mean I know I’m busy and can’t keep up with everything at the moment, but this is silly! How am I going to have time to read all this, because of course I have to! In any event, I really did enjoy this one and the last two, which I have now read. Knowledge of a drugs raid in your building might give it a bit of extra notoriety…just what you need when you’re trying to sell ;-)

  9. Invader Stu says:

    Thank you :) I really enjoyed writing them. I’m hoping to sell out place to a mob boss who wants to hide a few bodies.

  10. Tess says:

    Some friends brought back seeds from Amsterdam and grew them in the UK, you could smell the plants as soon as you were near the front door, it was hilarious (they were in the basement). I’m glad NL has a cool policy although these days I don’t bake herbal cakes anymore ;o)

    Can you nick the sticker for me? :o)

  11. Invader Stu says:

    Maybe but I’d need spider-man like powers to reach the outside window of the fourth floor :p

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