ALTAMONTE SPRINGS - Marijuana grow houses are becoming so prevalent in Florida that local law enforcement are calling on the state to create an intelligence repository to combat the problem. And Florida isn't alone, officials said. More than 400,000 plants with a potential annual value of $6.4 billion were seized from grow houses in the U.S. last year - up from about 270,000 the year before, the DEA said. "The days of mom and pop growing a couple pots of grass in their house is gone," said Mark R. Trouville, chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Miami office. The upswing of indoor marijuana growers in Florida culminated Thursday in a meeting among officials from the DEA and local and state authorities. "We're so overwhelmed with the operational side of things and we're only working in our own little functional jurisdictions," Highlands County Sheriff Susan Benton said. Florida has the second-highest number of indoor marijuana growers behind California, Trouville said. In 2006, officials in 41 of Florida's 67 counties uncovered indoor growers, he said. "Local law enforcement is keeping up with the day-to-day operations, but we're missing the intelligence piece to pull it all together," Benton said. In these houses, the marijuana is typically grown hydroponically - that is, using a nutrient solution instead of soil. It is usually cut, dried and packaged on the premises. Marijuana grown this way is as much as 200 percent more potent than if the drug were grown outdoors, Trouville said. Growers can harvest the drug in three months as opposed to six months in the fields. "This ain't your grandfather's or your father's marijuana," Trouville said. "This will hurt you. This will addict you. This will kill you." http://www.theledger.com/article/20070622/NEWS/706220375/1004
My first reaction was Yippieeee! Another example of the failed war on weed. But who is this ["This ain't your grandfather's or your father's marijuana," Trouville said. "This will hurt you. This will addict you. This will kill you."] Its a town in france Trouville-sur-Mer, commonly referred to as Trouville, is a commune and the chief town of a canton of the Calvados département, in the Basse-Normandie région, in northern France. Oh I get it.. He's the Spokes person for Major federal funding. Guess this is their whipping boy for more money. The DEA has sent Mark and Mary Ellen Trouville around the world to battle drug trafficking. Now they're back home, with their work still cut out for them. By Elaine McArdle A treacherous mountain road outside La Paz, Bolivia, in 1986: Three Bolivian government tanks had squared off against 5,000 miners angrily protesting working conditions. As the mob shouted “Yankee, go home!” Mary Ellen Trouville, CJ’79, an intelligence research specialist with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), crouched beneath old newspapers in the back of a car, clutching her two young daughters, wondering what she’d gotten them into. Outside, her dark-haired, tough-looking husband, Mark, also CJ’79, perched on the car’s hood alongside their driver, an enormous Bolivian who resembled Lurch on The Addams Family. Mark was hoping no one would realize he was an American. Or find out he, too, was with the DEA. “I’ll never forget just sitting there. I had my hand on my gun, but if they decided we were a problem, we were done,” Mark says now. For two hours, they waited for the miners to pass by. No one spotted the blond woman and her towheaded daughters, in part because the little girls never made a peep. “I have great kids,” says Mary Ellen. Fortunately, the Trouvilles weren’t ones to be discouraged by little things like the hostile crowd, or the avalanche that blocked the road for two more hours until farmers dug it out. A thirst for adventure was a primary reason the couple—who’d met as Northeastern students when both were selected for coveted DEA co-ops in Washington, D.C.—had joined the agency in the first place. Now they were making their way to a new assignment, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a major area for growing the coca that’s shipped to Colombia for manufacture into cocaine. Mark was the first DEA resident agent in charge to be assigned there. After a ten-hour journey, the family finally arrived at their new home. “It was the most desolate place,” recalls Mary Ellen. “Mark looked around and said, ‘You know, we can get out of this job.’” But they found the Cochabamba people warm and welcoming. Striking miners notwithstanding, Bolivia was relatively safe for Americans at the time. Still, most of the parents with children at the so-called American School—Mary Ellen notes with a wry smile that her kids were the only Americans enrolled at the school—were drug traffickers. Some served with Mary Ellen on the school board. Meanwhile, Mark spent his days in the jungle, wearing sneakers and carrying a revolver, working with local police to arrest coca producers. Even the Bolivian peasants and farmers knew about the agency they called “La Dea.” No one bothered the Trouvilles their first two years in Cochabamba. Then one night, the phone rang at home. Mark started screaming in Spanish, then English: The caller had threatened his family. A few days later, someone threw dynamite at the house. Though no one was injured by the explosion, Mark and Mary Ellen decided it was time to move on to the next assignment: Los Angeles. The new top cop For the Trouvilles and scores of other Northeastern graduates who work at the DEA, no other job could be as exciting or rewarding. Established in 1973 by President Richard Nixon, the DEA is the primary agency for the enforcement of U.S. drug laws. Working with Interpol and foreign police forces, as well as local, state, and federal law-enforcement organizations in the United States, the agency investigates, apprehends, and assists in the prosecution of drug traffickers and dealers worldwide. Its ultimate goal: Stemming the tide of illicit drugs within the United States. Substances under attack include heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. And there are newer worries: Ecstasy, for instance. “Predatory” drugs, such as GHB and Ketamine, often used by sexual assailants to incapacitate their victims. Overall, the DEA operates nineteen U.S. field divisions, which encompass more than a hundred offices, and sixty overseas offices. At the New England division, 35 of the 140 field agents are NU graduates. Including the man at the very top: Mark Trouville. Trouville became the division’s special agent in charge last year. From his Boston command center, he oversees sixteen field offices in six states, including a particularly busy outpost in Lowell, Massachusetts, a city that’s become a distribution center for funneling heroin and other drugs into New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. With her husband at the helm in New England, Mary Ellen Trouville has been temporarily assigned out of the DEA to a sister organization, the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area—a division of the Office of Narcotic Control Drug Policy—where she’s a supervisory intelligence research specialist. Even so, the New England division’s ranks are studded with Northeastern graduates. At the administrative level, Thomas Pasquarello, MPA’81, and Rodney Benson, CJ’86 (right), are two of the four assistant special agents in charge. (Rodney’s twin brother, Russell, also CJ’86, works at DEA headquarters in Washington, D.C.) Anthony Pettigrew, CJ’86, is the division’s public information officer. And the co-op program helped all of them land the jobs of their dreams. In the 1970s and 1980s, a DEA co-op was the biggest prize for NU criminal justice majors. The work was incomparably exciting and—no question about it—cool. “If you wanted to be in law enforcement, the DEA always had that exciting allure,” Mark says. “It has undercover work, street work, guns, and a badge.” For his DEA co-op, for instance, Rodney Benson worked in the radio room at the New York City office, running criminal-record and license-plate checks for officers as they moved in on suspects, hearing all the action as the officers made their busts. Back then, Benson says, as many as fifty students might apply for the nine available DEA slots in New York. Not only was the work thrilling, Northeastern students who finished their DEA co-ops in good standing were guaranteed a job with the agency after graduation. Though current Northeastern students still land unpaid internships at the DEA, the co-op partnership fell victim to federal budget cuts during the 1990s. But Mark Trouville plans to rectify that. “It’s such a great program for the DEA,” he says, adding that, without exception, every NU co-op student who’s worked at the agency has been a notable asset. “I want to get another look at the co-op relationship with Northeastern, to see if we can get it back on track,” Trouville says. “It’s a win-win for everybody.” Miami vice Back in the summer of 1978, Mark Trouville and Mary Ellen Capps got to know each other after they were selected for two brand-new DEA co-ops in Washington, D.C. Unbeknownst to them then, Mary Ellen had beaten out Mark the previous year for a DEA co-op in New York, where she, like Benson, worked the radio room. “I found my own co-op, thank you very much,” Mark says—at the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office, where future U.S. senator John Kerry served as assistant prosecutor. The couple began dating during their second stint at the Washington office. Both worked in the intelligence division, researching drug trends worldwide and analyzing intelligence reports. The work was fascinating. Some of Mark’s D.C. roommates had co-ops at the U.S. Customs Service, “where they were doing data entry,” he recalls, smiling. “We were doing criminal-investigation work.” A year later, Mark and Mary Ellen earned their degrees. Mark, who graduated summa cum laude, received the university’s Alumni Award for Professional Promise, given each year to a handful of graduates who, according to their college’s dean, have shown the highest potential for professional success. Mark immediately enrolled in the DEA’s D.C. training academy, a sixteen-week boot camp where he expanded his knowledge of criminal law and procedure, and learned skills Northeastern didn’t teach, like how to shoot a .357, work undercover, and arrest very dangerous people. Mary Ellen started training to become a DEA intelligence analyst. The couple married in June 1980, in Hingham, Massachusetts, near Mary Ellen’s hometown, Marshfield (Mark grew up in Dracut, near the New Hampshire border). Mark was raring to begin undercover work as a field agent in Miami. But as the DEA’s first married agents, he and Mary Ellen presented a new complication for the agency. It responded by creating a position for her in the Miami office’s intelligence division. At the time, Miami was right out of the Brian De Palma movie Scarface: violent, crazy, obscenely wealthy. Within a span of months, cocaine had consumed the city. Thousands of kilos poured in every day. Drug traffickers were instant millionaires, tossing money around like confetti. After Fidel Castro opened Cuba’s prisons and mental institutions, and sent inmates, along with 100,000 other refugees, to Miami via the Mariel boat lift, things got even wilder. Rival drug gangs had shootouts on the streets. People were murdered for ratting to the cops. Local banks laundered fortunes. “You could go to the beach and see money floating on the water,” says Mary Ellen. “Those were the days when you’d find a defense attorney shot dead on his doorstep,” Mark recalls. “It was like the Wild West, with the Cuban and Colombian dealers fighting each other. Everybody had a gun. The cash floating around South Florida was unbelievable. Everybody was carving up a piece of the territory. They were shooting at each other; they were shooting at us. “It was a wonderful time to be on the streets,” Mark adds, wistfully. “Just a lot of fun. Being a twenty-one-year-old with a gun and a badge.” Now that he’s a top DEA official, he says, his access to that kind of action isn’t what it used to be. “They won’t let me do that anymore.” The tidal wave of drugs inundating Florida in the early 1980s was a phenomenon unprecedented in U.S. history. The fledgling DEA was still learning how to deal with it. “We were seizing so much marijuana, we had no place to put it,” Mark says. Drug dealers were figuring out operating systems, too, like how to package their product. At first, kilos of cocaine were shaped into large eggs and wrapped with duct tape. “So we called a key of cocaine a ‘football,’” Mark says. Later, dealers realized they could transport more if the coke was pressed into stackable bricks. Mark started sporting gold chains and affecting the look and talk of a drug dealer. “I had the Mr. T starter set,” he says. “And some wild haircuts,” Mary Ellen adds. Undercover, Mark posed as the front man for a major Northeast drug trafficker looking to score big in cocaine. “To this day, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had,” he says. “Going undercover, kicking down a door, and testifying in court. Those are the three things I loved to do.” Then there was the 1,000-pound cocaine shipment Trouville and some other agents discovered in a cooler when they busted a major dealer. “A thousand-pound sugar cube is what it looked like,” Mark says. It was so large, there was no place back at the office to store it safely, so Mark, the junior agent, was handed a shotgun and told to stand guard. His usual daily responsibilities included fingerprinting people under arrest, and doing anything else his superiors requested. “I didn’t mind at all,” he says. “There weren’t enough hours in a day that I could work.” Meanwhile, Mary Ellen was working 9 to 5 in intelligence, where she wasn’t required to carry a gun. After the couple decided they’d have children someday, they’d agreed only one of them should work as a field agent. “The downside of the DEA is the pressure on your home life,” Mark explains. “I’d never see him,” says Mary Ellen. “I wouldn’t see him for three days.” She’d be watching the late news and hear about a major drug bust, and force herself to keep calm for hours, until Mark could call to say he was okay. “If we were a typical couple, and I were a teacher or a nurse, it would have been more difficult,” she says. “But I lived it and breathed it, too, so that made it easier.” Rodney Benson’s family ties created different complications. Since he and twin brother Russ had both chosen to work at the DEA, some confusion was inevitable. When Russ went through the training academy a few months after Rodney, instructors assumed Rodney had washed out the first time and was trying again. And then there was the incident during Rodney’s first undercover assignment, in Newark, New Jersey. An informant had said two major traffickers would be delivering three kilos of cocaine to a hotel. “I was waiting in the lobby,” Benson remembers, “and they both showed up. As soon as they saw me, one guy turned white as a ghost. He started shaking his head and talking to the informant. The informant came up to me, and said, ‘He says you’re an agent in New York.’” Realizing the bust was about to go sour, Benson managed to signal other DEA agents, who moved in and grabbed the traffickers. “It turned out that my brother was in New York at the time, doing Colombian drug cases,” Benson says. “This guy was swearing up and down that I’d arrested someone connected to his family in New York.” Traffic problems When asked whether, in the endless war on drugs, he toils like a modern-day Sisyphus, Mark Trouville laughs. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “But if we weren’t there to push that rock up the hill, it’d come down and crush everybody. So we believe in stopping what we can.” And there are victories. In Los Angeles in 1989, a group of agents Trouville supervised made the world’s largest-ever cocaine seizure: twenty-one tons. (Along with the cocaine, the agents found plastic bags filled with $12 million in cash.) In January, the New England field division, working with state and local police, made a major heroin bust in Willimantic, Connecticut, arresting forty-six people and seizing 5,552 bags of heroin packaged for street sale. Though the DEA doesn’t typically get involved with street-level dealing, Willimantic was in desperate need of help, Trouville says. “The quality of life there was being so affected by heroin, we felt we had to step in and help out,” he explains. “Sometimes we go beyond our mission in areas like that that are so bad.” Heroin, cocaine, and crack cocaine remain the DEA’s top priorities. “Heroin has always been a terrible problem. Has been and will be,” Trouville says. Decades ago, the heroin in New England came from Asia and Mexico; these days Colombia provides most of it, shipped in through New York or Miami. Mexico remains the major provider of heroin going to the West Coast. Today’s heroin is 70 to 80 percent pure—compared to 3 percent twenty years ago—making it far more dangerous, especially since many users snort it. “The high quality is sending people into emergency rooms,” Trouville says. “It’s killing a lot of people.” Marijuana is also far more pure, he says, with a much higher THC content than in the 1970s. (According to Trouville, most of the marijuana sold in the United States comes from hydroponic growers in Canada.) Beyond the agency’s traditional operations, a DEA initiative called Operation X-Out is attempting to reduce the supply and use of Ecstasy, as well as the illegal diversion of prescription drugs like Oxycontin, a powerful painkiller that abusers crush up and inject. And, as the father of daughters, Trouville has made it a personal mission to educate the public about the dangers of predatory drugs. Since the Trouvilles have lived outside their home state for more than two decades—moving from posts in Miami; to Glynco, Georgia; to Bolivia; to Los Angeles; to the D.C. area; and then back to Los Angeles before heading to Boston—Mark says he’s still learning the particulars of the New England drug scene. But he’s delighted to have come full circle. “This is where I’ve wanted to be for twenty years,” he says. “Back home in the Boston area. “I plan to be here for quite a while, to give all our resources to help New England.” ------------------------- I think we know Mark and his family now...
"Marijuana grown this way is as much as 200 percent more potent than if the drug were grown outdoors, Trouville said. Growers can harvest the drug in three months as opposed to six months in the fields." So bad!
One of the myths (aka lies) I always hear in bust reports is that hydroponic is way more potent than soil grown. We all know that isn't true, but the average ignorant citizens and politicians have been brainwashed to believe all the lies. It takes a long time to change the way people think. People used to think that slavery and witch burnings were A-okay. Ignorance is a hard habit to break.
I'm just glad that more people than ever have smoked (or are smoking) pot, and can judge lies about eventual death from THC overdose for themselves. I've smoked everything from 1% ditchweed from Mexico to 20% CBD white widow in Amsterdam and i'm not dead yet. It's physically impossible to consume enough THC to kill you, you'd pass out long before you reached the threshhold. And I love the "mom and pop" quote.
...run for yer' life... ...daze of propaganda and fearmongering are apparently alive and swell... ...I trust that all of us who frequent this site have the wherewithal and substance to realize when someone is trying to spoon feed us hype and lies...ain't buyin' the gunna kill me part either...like one other mention'd above me...the threshold is unreachable while the user is still awake...next stop slumberville...no stops inbetween...trust me or yer' select'd government officials...I bet I know who you will follow... DC:new_scatter:
a friend of mine got busted not too long ago, an the cops called out a hazmat team in full suits, and air fed hoods to remove the contents of his growroom. appareantly the cops are being taught that a hydroponics setup is just as hazardous as a meth lab, and its contents ar just as caustic. then they try to tell you that hydroponically grown weed is chemically/genetically altered, or even laced with chemicals. it really tears me up to hear about the kind of bullshit thats being fed to the average person watching the news.
Man, I wish that were true! :rolleyes2: I would only need 1/2 of a hit and I would be good for the day.
