York Regional Police ended a two-year probe into a Toronto hydroponics supplier with raids on 18 grow-ops across the Greater Toronto Area in May 2008, seizing 3,288 plants worth C$12.5 million. Thirty-one people were arrested on more than 200 charges.
🇨🇦 Greater Toronto Area · Ontario, Canada
Arrested
31
Charged
31
Plants destroyed
3,288
Value (official estimate)
CAD 12,500,000
An anonymous tip in 2006 led York Regional Police to Tropical Distribution, a hydroponics retailer first in Vaughan and later Toronto that served as a one-stop shop for kits, lights, chemicals and growing advice.[1]The two-year Project Tropical Storm investigation ended with raids on the store and a Newmarket home on 17 April 2008, and a press conference announcing the outcome on 16 May.[1][2]The shop’s two proprietors faced multiple charges, alongside a Mississauga man accused of running the distribution ring.[1][2]
Police shut 18 grow houses in Mississauga, Brampton, Toronto, Richmond Hill, Aurora, Newmarket and Vaughan, many of them ordinary homes on upper-middle-class suburban streets.[1][2]The final tally was C$12.5 million worth of cannabis, 3,288 plants and a seized SUV, with 31 people arrested on more than 200 charges.[1]At least one house had been obtained by mortgage fraud, and police said some of the crop was shipped to the United States in exchange for cocaine, heroin and guns.[1]
The Mississauga News reported more than 8,000 plants seized; this report uses the final police tally of 3,288 plants given at the May press conferences.
No court outcomes for the 31 arrested were reported in the opened sources.
The Toronto Star published a photograph of the seized plants, but no direct image address could be recovered, so it is not embedded.
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