People who believe they won’t be charged if they grow a few marijuana plants in their backyard may need to think again after local police actions this week.
Yesterday police swooped on a Goonellabah home with drug sniffer dogs and seized just six marijuana plants, albeit large ones.
As a result of the raids, a 50-year-old man was charged with cultivating a prohibited plant and a 49-year-old woman was issued a ‘cannabis caution’.
At around 6.30am, police from the Richmond Target Action Group descended on a property in Milgate Close, Goonellabah.
Drug detection dogs were used to uncover samples of the illegal plant in the kitchen and one of the bedrooms.
But according to the LAC’s Facebook page ‘the police dog wasn’t required to find the next lot of cannabis.
‘”Whoa, they’re some big plants,” stated Senior Constable Puglisi when he saw the six mature cannabis plants growing in the yard,’ reads the Facebook post.
The marijuana was ripped out of the ground ‘with brute force’, according to the post, and taken to Lismore police station.
Comments on the Facebook page were equally tongue in cheek, with one commenter saying, ‘leaf n stems… what happened to the buds?’
Another quipped, ‘You have plants that big and you get a “caution”. Here is your retirement career mum!’
By comparison, in a similar raid in Coffs Harbour yesterday, police seized 165 cannabis plants with an estimated potential street value of more than $300,000.
At South Windsor police raided a house and seized 600 plants and a hydroponic set-up yesterday morning.
And at a rural property in Crowther, in the state’s south, officers discovered some 2750 cannabis plants, with an estimated street value of approximately $5.5 million.