The West Midlands police’s Walsall Taskforce has taken down a marijuana operation running out of an unused pub in the Willenhall town centre last week, seeing over USD600,000 worth of weed during the raid. The task force used a drone with a thermal camera to see hotspots within the building.
The thermally equipped drone was able to see the heat produced by the high-power lights used to grow, essentially giving the police the ability to see through the walls to get a better idea of what was going on inside.
The cannabis operation was spread out over two floors of a former pub. On Tuesday, June 9th, police moved into the Castle Pub, seizing all the marijuana in the facility along with the equipment used to grow it. Currently no arrests have been made in connection with the raid.
The taskforce took to social media and tweeted that the Walsall Taskforce had a productive afternoon discovering and taking down a huge cannabis factory. The force counted nearly 600 cannabis plants with an estimated street value of UKP500,000.
https://twitter.com/WSTaskforce/status/1270365479144734722
Earlier this year, police in New South Wales, Australia, used a drone to help take down a massive rural marijuana farm spanning over 20,000 acres. The police were able to seize a whopping 3,000 plants with an estimated street value of around USD3.5 million. The property was a large-scale commercial cannabis cultivation that supplied much of eastern Australia.
In 2018, Colombia announced that it will begin testing the use of drones to destroy coca plants used in the production of cocaine. The drones are equipped with a herbicide capable of killing the plants. The trials saw 10 drones being used to spray the plants with greater precision that can’t be matched by manned aircraft that are currently used to destroy the plants.
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