Power Bill Leads To Pot Bust

By Marcus Gilmer in News on Apr 15, 2010 7:30PM

If you're going to go to the trouble of helming a large marijuana growing business, you might want to do your homework and come up with the best way to not get caught. Some growers in Gary, Indiana obviously didn't and were nabbed after their astronomical power bill tipped off the power company. The power usage raised eyebrows at NIPSCO, a gas and power provider in Northwest Indiana, who turned over the suspicious info to law enforcement. According to WBBM 780:

Officials' suspicions were first raised when NIPSCO said Monday that the house had averaged between 2,300 kilowatts per hour to 2,700 kilowatts per hour in the past four months. An air-conditioning wall unit uses about one kilowatt per hour, meaning the house was using the energy of what amounted to running 2,300 to 2,700 air conditioning wall units per hour.

Of course, that's just an example. The power was actually being used for a complex irrigation and light system that harbored the growth of 493 marijuana plants. The three men were arrested yesterday. A complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Hammond yesterday quoted one of the men as denying he knew anything about the operation while another admitted it was his first attempt at growing marijuana and is quoted as saying, "If you're going to do it, you might as well go big." There's that entrepreneurial spirit that makes America great.