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Down a quiet cul-de-sac in suburban Quebec, police discovered large-scale marijuana cultivation in 13 neighbourhood houses. In Manitoba, an underground pot farm complex was concealed beneath a grove of trees, reports COLIN FREEZE. They're in every Canadian city and town, some run by gangs and some by industrious young cannabis devotees. Ottawa's vaunted new marijuana law won't stop them. Has the house next door gone to pot?

The rows of metre-high plants burst with flowers. Touch the buds and a sticky, smelly resin attaches to your fingers. The connoisseurs can identify the vintage simply by bringing their hands to their noses: California Orange? Mighty Mite? Dutch Treat?

To a layman, marijuana by any other name would smell as sweet, including the Sweet Tooth variety. But for the growers here, the various strains each have unique traits, yielding distinguishable scents while growing, and idiosyncratic highs when smoked. Some brands are said to be better at stimulating appetites. Others are more esteemed as painkillers or sleeping aids.

Altogether, there are almost 400 plants of various heights and heritage inside this quiet three-level house, grown by two young roommates who live and cultivate inside the home they rent in the Toronto area. While they were eager to talk about their crop, the growers kept their real names secret (we will call them John and Steve). They had arranged for a reporter and a photographer to be driven over, blindfolded.

Much of the marijuana is concealed down in the concrete-floored basement. The rest is in a converted upstairs bedroom, filled with plants and hydroponic gear. "I have sat in this room and watched them grow. I'm not lying," said John, a skinny, short-haired 30-year-old in track pants and a T-shirt, whose bedroom is across the hall.

The plants can grow an inch a day, he said. And if you listen closely, you can almost hear a new leaf rustle open.

You can certainly catch its pungent scent. In the converted bedroom, a charcoal filter is used to keep the odour from wafting out of the vent and into the neighbourhood.

It could be any neighbourhood. The way grow operations are cropping up across Canada right now, it easily could be your neighbourhood. And from outside, you wouldn't smell a thing.

For instance, Sainte-Marthe-Sur-Le-Lac, about an hour's drive west of Montreal, is an excellent place to raise a family. On quiet streets, little girls jump rope and boys with helmets ride bikes. Adults are walking strollers when they are not out manicuring their lawns.

But not all the weed in this neighbourhood is being pulled out of the garden. A lot of it gets cultivated indoors. In January of last year, police shut down 13 indoor grow operations in a single bust, in a quiet little subdivision known as Mon Rêve. A cul-de-sac with only one road leading in and out, it is probably the Canadian record holder in terms of the most grow houses shut down in a single neighbourhood all at once.

"We're now on the map," said a middle-aged man who sat on a lawn chair outside his front door.

His wife sat beside him, drinking a glass of milk. She said that despite their numbers, the growers had caused few problems. "There was no transactions here -- it's for another place," she said.

Still, the busts certainly stirred up action in their peaceful kingdom. A neighbour who was not a grower but happened to own a hydro-guzzling welding machine had to face some difficult questions.

The couple themselves found it awkward explaining to their daughter why police had arrested her friend's father.

The police cars created a panic when they busted all the grow houses, Marc Provencal recalled as he watered an evergreen tree on his lawn.

"You see cops and stuff, and they tell you to go inside. It's very scary," the father of two said.

Mr. Provencal takes a dim view of marijuana, and he had no idea that thousands of pot plants were being grown near him. "It was a shock," he said.

Karine de Bonis, on the other hand, was not surprised. Many houses had been bought up in recent years, she said, and they had long grass and no flowers, with not a kid or dog anywhere to be seen. Her suburban intuition was on the money -- police say that in several of the houses, plants were the only inhabitants.

"No city or town in Canada can claim to be absolutely free of any marijuana growing activities," reads the most recent RCMP report on cultivation.

Nationally, the force says, seizures are six times what they were in 1993, but by all accounts, that's still a tiny percentage. Canada's cannabis-cultivation culture isn't expected to stop proliferating any time soon.

While decriminalization is the most talked-about provision of the marijuana bill introduced in Ottawa this week, it would also raise penalties for growers. Penalties for simple possession would be reduced to a fine, but a large-scale cultivator who currently faces a maximum sentence of seven years in prison could get up to 14 years under the new law.

The government is trumpeting this aspect, which makes the bill sound tough on crime. But some police are already scoffing, saying the judiciary has headed in the opposite direction.

"What's 14 times nothing?" asked Sergeant Rollie Woods of the Vancouver Police drug squad. Sgt. Woods wryly explains that from what he has seen, cultivators almost never get handed any sort of jail sentence at all, let alone the maximum.

"If I saw someone get two years, or even one year, I'd be pleased as punch," he said.

Police blame these light sentences, permissive public attitudes, considerable domestic demand and the American willingness to pay a premium for made-in-Canada pot for the grow-operations boom. But there's another factor -- a bumper crop of ingenious, enterprising growers.

A Manitoban named Patrick Richardson was sentenced last year for a bizarre subterranean subterfuge, in which eight railway boxcars had been buried three metres deep and stacked side to side to form an underground pot bunker. Powered by diesel generators and hooked up to a well, the bunker was concealed above by freshly planted trees.

Mr. Richardson, who has been described as a "simpleton" by his lawyer, pleaded guilty to tending 1,400 plants. His bosses rarely let him above ground and paid him minimum wage. After pleading guilty, he was ultimately sentenced to 30 months in jail.

It's unclear why the Manitoba growers were prepared to go to such depths. Small houses in residential neighbourhoods are much more common grow-op facilities. Marijuana growers have come to appreciate the privacy afforded them once they transform better homes into gardens.

Vancouver once had the reputation of being ground zero for sophisticated indoor operations, but in recent years gardening expertise, gangs and ganja strains have been franchising eastward at a rate Starbucks would envy, and often in communities where Tim Hortons is the coffee of choice.

Pot is a growth industry in the burbs and in small-to-medium-sized cities, where houses with enclosed garages and basements are relatively affordable, and property taxes are cheap. Organized crime has played a huge but not monolithic role in expanding the enterprise. Outlaw bikers such as the Hells Angels have been at the job longest, but Vietnamese gangs' green thumbs are becoming well-known too.

Police fear that feuding gangsters will bring bloodletting to sleepy towns, but so far there seems to be enough money and common interest to go around in most cases.

For the moment, accidents and property damage involving cultivators are more common. Utility companies and real-estate agents are increasingly complaining of growers stealing electricity and rewiring houses -- badly -- as they try to cover up the large bills that can tip off law enforcement. Police in B.C. estimate that grow ops cause an average of three electrocutions a year.

Mouldy houses and toxic chemicals are another concern, as is the increasing frequency of grow-op robberies -- stealing someone else's pot is a lot quicker than growing it. So growers take many indiscriminate measures to protect their turf. Police complain of encountering booby traps during busts, ranging from concealed boards with nails in them to shotgun shells attached to trip wires.

If growers are willing to cope with all that, will longer sentences be any deterrent? There's too much money to be made. One busted home, said Sgt. Woods, was worth $600,000. It had two SUVs out front and a million dollars in cash inside, and the tenants still managed to collect GST-rebate cheques from Ottawa.

The police convoy pulled up at 10 a.m. to a house on a quiet block in East Vancouver. The neighbours were unaware that the small stucco house, with all its blinds drawn, was about to become another statistic.

A big white van, with http://www.growbusters.ca on the back door, pulled up first, followed by three squad cars and a couple of unmarked vehicles. After a brief planning session, the 12-member police drug team sped down the street, pulled out a battering ram, and with two big thuds, blew open the locked door of a house on Adanac Street.

Vancouver police are taking a new approach to cracking down on cultivators. Relying heavily on working with citizens and building public awareness, the idea is to dismantle grow operations as fast as possible -- and if no one is home, not to waste valuable time searching for someone to charge. If they can't throw the growers in jail, the theory goes, they'll throw them in the poorhouse instead.

While police officers in black uniforms streamed in and out of the house, loading bulging garbage ...

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