back in the 90s you could tell a stoner
by the tiny holes in their clothes
they were burns caused by hot rocks bits
of badly crumbled hash falling out of a
spliff
no one talks about hot rocks anymore
because almost no one smokes hash
that's because an international war on
drugs crackdown led to britain swapping
mellow hippie hash for something far
stronger
skunk and with skunk came violence and
mental illness
while you protect yourself well you have
to be equipped
as well for five times in his face
his face was like a pineapple
this man is a weed dealer part of the
uk's new and ultra violent industry of
gangs
pushers slaves and smokers caught in the
trade of potent super skunk
well you see this one this is okay
you might look funny but when they get
logged into your brain it's not
this is ninja you see there are tens of
thousands of rooms
just like this across the united kingdom
and they exist because the demand for
skunk
is through the roof i've been doing this
business for
three to four years i know about
approximately more than
four houses in this block that actually
grows with
one room will give you approximately
like you know let's say like five kilos
so every single room you'll be having
like you're 20 40 kilos in your hands
like you know when you're elvis if you
get bursted
never mind we do somewhere else cannabis
is a drug that has developed a somewhat
confusing public image
on the one hand it's grown and sold by
people like this
but on the other it's still associated
with people like this
chilling out in the lovely spring
time harmless dopey stoners doing
harmless dopey stoner things
the sort of people who just want to be
left alone to live a chill life
give human names to their bongs and
juggle at the police
the truth is that many of the old
stereotypes about cannabis and its users
like their unquestioning faith in peace
love reggae and hemp
are slipping away and that's because the
type of cannabis people smoke is
changing
in the uk that shift has been seismic
the proof
is in this highly sophisticated graph in
2005
just under half of the cannabis seized
by uk police was hash but in the space
of just three years
that figure had plummeted to 14 by 2016
it had fallen again to omega 6 as the
hash market collapsed
skunk seizures skyrocketed from 51 in
2005
to 85 in 2008 climbing again
to 94 in 2016. the trend is clear
skunk goes up hash comes down this
declining love for hash has its origins
in the 1990s dutch drug scene
over the course of that decade many key
figures in hash trafficking were killed
or put in prison
including this guy class brunsman based
in amsterdam brunsomer built the largest
narcotics empire ever seen in modern
europe
before he was shot dead by an ex-cop in
1991
and then 10 years later this happened
in the wake of 9 11 the war on terror
was launched in retaliation
and it quickly became clear that jihadis
had been funding their attacks by
selling hash
which as you can imagine was bad news
for hash
at the time morocco was the planet's
biggest producer of the stuff but under
heavy international pressure
morocco's authorities targeted the
cannabis farmers and traffickers of the
rift valley
and a weed crop one-third the size of
los angeles was destroyed
a subsequent drop-off in export to the
netherlands meant a drought for the
nation's service by dutch drug gangs
including the uk by the time the towers
fell though the ingenious dutch had
already found a way to make themselves
less reliant on cannabis brought in from
abroad from the mid-90s onwards
expert seed breeders had been filling
the nation's coffee shops with new
super smooth super potent strains of
weed one of these was called skunk
and it was arriving in a big way the
dutch even coined a name for this
phenomenon
the green avalanche potheads abandoned
hash in their droves for the ultra
strong weed that the dutch gangs were
growing themselves
in special tinfoil labs that looked like
spaceships
with rows of chemical fed cannabis
plants rigged up to irrigation systems
blooming in double speed beneath red-hot
lights that mimic the sun
but the room you're gauging at right now
doesn't belong to some rotterdam drugs
kingpin with an alias like
the reverend or calvin slashman it
belongs in fact
to a british grandmother we're crouching
in the middle of a jungle right now
how many plants have you got here
there's about 16 in here at minutes
yeah so how many of these rooms do you
have mid-person
right now about six six of them yeah
okay so you're running almost a small
empire whoa
you're being modest if you'd like to
call it that and how strong is this is
this skunk
this is something you can get different
levels
from hybrid cheese blue
there's there's different natures yeah
it sounds like you quite you enjoy it i
do actually
i know i do elderly female cannabis
growers like this are now so common in
parts of the uk
that they've got their own nickname on
the streets they're known as groppers
or granny croppers their existence is a
sign that over the last 25 years
dutch weed growing know-how has spread
so far and wide
the labs can pop up anywhere even in the
spare bedroom of a nan from birmingham
are more and more gangs using
groppers to grow weed more breakfast
than males
more groupers than men properly thoughts
the graph is under the prison
do you answer to anyone or are you no i
don't understand anybody at all
i'll just throw it's true
how much is this all worth one piece
quick turnover
so 16 grand yeah every 12 weeks oh i
need to promise me because the fumes are
low he's just
whoo police estimate there are thousands
of domestic grow houses
all over the uk often violently defended
by
all sorts of people have you managed to
basically bypass
all of the criminal gangs i don't have
to worry about criminal banks about
gang members being every corner of my
family
okay so i don't think they've got my
back i can't use them right i don't know
that they
yeah if i was to want to use them there
weren't always this many civilian weed
grows hidden away on the suburban
streets and high-rise estates of the uk
when skunk first arrived in britain only
a select few knew how to cultivate it
chief among them were vietnamese gangs
who showed up in the early years of the
new millennium they came to exploit the
post-911 hash shortage and quickly
seized control of the uk cannabis market
the vietnamese operated a multitude of
skunk grow houses
hiding in plain sight amid busy
transient neighborhoods
they had links to chinese slave
factories british sex
rings and international human
trafficking networks and with a mixture
of skill cruelty and violence
they were quickly raking in millions it
was through them that skunk first
seduced british donors on mass
and once it was in widespread use there
were more nasty surprises on the way
when did you start smoking about 4am
literally me up from young sent
me mad
when did you like realize that wow this
shit's
strong when i went to the psychiatrist
and i says look i don't think it's
normal that uh i'm not sleeping
that's like one one example like how man
can go mad you get me a paranoid
all that because i'd walk down the
road and
feel like i have to walk like close to a
battle yeah you know what i mean because
it gets car pulled up and i'll bring my
boxers with my samurai sword on top of
the roof and thing you know me looking
like yo
you get me i've deeply died like five
times some draw got one eye and all
that you get me
here you go lads yeah
little one eye for you stay in school
you bastards
have you ever heard of a term psychosis
he had a
doctor sat there when i was about 16 17
and says i had it
as taste changed the uk saw the rise of
a new generation of smokers raised on
thc heavyweight
way more potent than hash the number of
teenagers and young adults reporting
mental health problems continues to grow
and skunk continues to get much of the
blame but is that fair
let's ask professor david nutt well for
the last 30 years has been a huge debate
about the role of cannabis
in causing psychosis in particular
and recent analysis has shown that it's
not cannabis per se but it's the high
potency stuff we call skunk
skunk has grown under conditions which
maximize the thc
potency and when the plant is producing
such high levels of thc
it really struggles to produce any of
the protective element called
cannabidiol or cbd
so when people with schizophrenia skunk
is associated with the increased
severity
of the symptoms particularly the
hallucinations the voices
by now skunk is truly entrenched in
british society
these days it's not vietnamese growers
who run the industry
but gangs from the uk and albania who
are getting so rich selling heavy
artillery cannabis
they've started branching out you know
that cocaine epidemic you've been
hearing about
one of the reasons there's so much coke
floating around is because gangs that
got a rich selling skunk
started investing in harder drugs though
the bosses have changed
many of those tending the crops are
still foreign slaves
trafficked across the world into the uk
to work in grow houses
they're known by the authorities as
ghosts because they drift
unnoticed through british society
they're barely there
their presence doesn't register today
the same can't be said for skunk
an import whose pungent aroma has almost
completely replaced the scent
and presence of hash on the streets of
any major town or city
in the uk we'd like to congratulate
drugs
for winning the war on drugs
you