Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

it’s a big-time earner. Laws were sensible. Now they’re crazy. Stickypoint’s
Wells says he’s never seen bikies come into his hydroponics shop. He
says 95 per cent of the crop is still mums-and-dads, and 5 per cent in
seriously criminal.
Mike Rann has told Parliament: ‘Many of the large-scale hydroponic crops
are part of highly organised operations and we must crack down on
criminal gangs’
Penalties have increased the risk and therefore the rewards. Ten backyard
plants can now put you in jail for two years. Just one plant is a $300 fine. It
means people buy their smoke not grow their own,’ says the dealer a little
smugly.
So here’s the big question about the biggest agricultural crop. Who runs
the industry?
‘Let me explain it like this,’ says the dealer. ‘In the old days marijuana was
a bit like home brewing. Now it’s like illegal distilling. ‘Just five or six really
big boys do most of the commercial crop. They outsource to satellite
growers called gardeners. Each of these growers then feed into the
distribution network. It’s sold in bulk interstate.’
Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP) is a pro-cannabis lobby which
stood for Parliament. ‘Police have failed to collect the evidence and act on
it, preferring instead to pick on Mr and Ms Smith rather than go after the
Mr Big’s of the trade,’ HEMP spokesman Russell Haynes said when the
new penalties came in. ‘The Government’s actions fly in the face of the
widely supported recommendations of the recently convened Community
Drug Summit and will only make matters worse by playing into the hands
of the serious hard-core element of the drug trade.’
So if people in the business say there’s a dangerous criminal element in a
crop worth more than SA’s $2.7 billion export wine industry, what are SA
police doing?
Alcohol prohibition in the US in the 1920s and 1930s gave us gangsters
like Al Capone, who survived with the protection of corrupt police and
politicians. As the 1989 commonwealth inquiry into drugs, crime and
society put it: ‘There have been a number of notable instances in recent
years of law enforcement officers who have been seduced by the superprofits
offered by the drug-trade.’
These days Australia’s most famous policeman is Federal Police
Commissioner Mick Keelty. Twenty years ago he was an anonymous
rookie cop seconded to the National Crime Authority. Concurrently,
Adelaide’s best-known cop was drug chief Barry Moyes.
Keelty believed that South Australia had a problem. You heard about
police corruption in NSW and Victoria but no one had heard of it existing
in South Australia,’ Keelty recently reflected.
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