Florida Congressional candidate’s property busted as grow house

1 arrested in beachside grow house sting | floridatoday.com | FLORIDA TODAY
One man is being held at the Brevard County jail this afternoon after Brevard County Sheriff’s Office agents armed with search warrants uncovered four grow houses on Merritt Island, Satellite Beach and Indialantic.

Sheriff’s spokesman Andrew Walters said David Tobias, age and address unavailable, was charged early today after search warrants were served on three suspected grow houses. Walters said the investigation stemmed from a resident’s complaint about a week ago of suspicious activity at one of the homes involved.

In the course of the investigation, sheriff’s agents found there was another grow house Tobias is accused of operating in Indialantic. The home at 370 Rio Lane is owned by owned by Stephen Blythe, who is a candidate for a congressional seat held by Rep. Dave Weldon, who is not seeking re-election.

Contacted this afternoon by FLORIDA TODAY, Blythe said he was surprised, and had not heard from authorities.

Walters said the investigation is ongoing and other arrests are pending. No charges are pending against Blythe, but others may be charged in the course of the investigation.

Blythe said he was renting the property out to a James McJunkin. It doesn’t appear McJunkin lives in the home, authorities said. Walters said the layout is consistent with the other grow houses with the equipment and materials involved.

“I guess anybody can get caught up in this,” Blythe said. “Anybody who has a rental property.”

Agents seized several vehicles, including a Chevy Chevelle registered to Tobias parked in the garage of the home owned by Blythe.

This story follows the passage of the new Florida grow house law that makes it a second-degree felony to grow 25 or more plants in a home. But also included in the law is a “third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison to own a house where marijuana is being cultivated, packaged and distributed.” Apparently the prosecutors don’t see the need to charge the Florida Democratic Congressional Candidate with a third-degree felony.

This law got passed through the “Not Your Father’s Woodstock Weed” scaremongering of people like Florida’s Republican Attorney General, Bill McCollum:

In 2006, law enforcement detected marijuana grow houses in 41 of Florida’s 67 counties, ranking Florida second only to California in the amount of grow houses. Many marijuana growers have moved from rural fields to sophisticated growing operations in the suburbs of Florida. This cultivation shift has been accompanied by new techniques to vastly increase the drug’s potency. This extremely potent form of marijuana contains up to 15 times the amount of THC, the addictive chemical found in marijuana, than marijuana common 20 years ago.

Fifteen times… twenty-five times… four hundred times more potent! Bwaa-ha-ha, it’s Super Pot! Oh, wait, only twice as potent, maybe? And good bud has always existed? And the data from twenty years ago was flawed? And potency is irrelevant because marijuana’s non-toxic? And marijuana is about as “addictive” as coffee? Got anything better than that, Bill?

Grow house marijuana has a street value of $4,000-$6,000 per pound and can be traded pound for pound for cocaine.

Really? Then somebody’s losing money in the deal, since cocaine is selling at about $17,000/kg in Florida, and when Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff announced the seizure of 42,000 lbs. of cocaine was worth around $300,000,000, that puts the price at about $7,150/lb.

The legislation, sponsored by Senator Steve Oelrich (R – Gainesville) and Representative Nick Thompson (R – Fort Myers), creates a tough new penalty for those who grow 25 plants or more. This legislative change specifically targets for-profit growers who exploit Florida’s current standards of 300 plants and the federal threshold of 100 plants to avoid prison time. Additionally, the bill creates a new penalty against those who own a house for the purpose of cultivating marijuana, as well as a new penalty for those who live in or are the caretakers of marijuana grow houses.

Perhaps Stephen Blythe gets a pass because he didn’t own the home for the purpose of growing marijuana; he owned it for the purpose of renting it. But I don’t know if I’d want to rely on a prosecutor trying to imagine my intent when I choose a renter. I’ve written before about the possible unintended consequences of this bill – will property owners now start drug testing renters or scheduling more frequent home inspections? Will Floridians with minor pot offenses on their record be denied housing?