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January 12/04 CTV
Ont. Molson brewery site of major pot bust
CTV.ca News Staff
A vacant Molson's brewery in a Barrie, Ont. industrial park has been found to be housing one of the province's largest marijuana grow operations ever discovered.
"It is huge. It's the largest indoor operation that any of us have ever seen," said Ontario Provincial Police Supt. Bill Crate. "We encounter a lot of indoor operations and certainly being the OPP, a lot of outdoor operations, but this is the largest one that we've ever encountered."
Over 100 police officers moved on the operation shortly after midnight Friday.
The building is 125,000 square feet and three stories high. Police won't say how much of the plant the operation covers, but they will say it's massive.
Ten people were arrested, and more arrests are promised.
Molson's, Canada's largest brewing company, shut the plant down just over three years ago. Four hundred people lost their jobs.
Since then, it's been leased to industrial tenants.
Police say they can't put a dollar value yet on the marijuana produced there, but believe it was professionally run.
"(It) involves thousands and thousands of marijuana plants, and at this moment they are close to fruition, to being harvested," Crate said.
"The operation here is very, very sophisticated and like I said, it was run like a factory with shift workers."
It isn't known yet how such a large operation managed to exist for so long.