JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: Of cannabis farms and criminal audacity... and what the shocking state of our high streets says about our society

Daily Mail​

07-08-2025

Do you ever wonder what goes on behind the shuttered doors and boarded up windows of the commercial businesses which once thrived in our towns and cities?
When everything worth anything is stripped out and no one comes to refit the place for the next venture because bricks and mortar shops are failing almost everywhere, the intuitive assumption is cockroaches and rats move in.
We see weeds sprouting from the window ledges and roofs and growing into bushes. As the familiar stages of decay take hold, the commercial unit becomes an eyesore and we divert our gaze and our thoughts to the ones still trading, still cleaning the windows and passing a brush over the floors.
A High Court case in Glasgow this week suggests that many of us - not least the police - should take a closer look at the buildings we prefer not to behold.
Really? A prime town centre location unused for months or years by a single living soul because no one could think of a way to make it pay? How naïve of us.
The Forum shopping centre in Irvine, Ayrshire, may have looked to all the world like a busted flush but of course trade continued there long after the doors closed.
The wooden boards and metal grilles which blocked out daylight and prying eyes helped the commercial venture along. The bleak state of dereliction was the perfect cover, as it is for similar buildings the length and breadth of Scotland.
This place had been repurposed as a cannabis farm, growing industrial quantities of the class B drug just a short walk from the town's high street.
The plants grew over two floors and numbered 3,058 in total. All told, they were worth up to £1.8 million.
It was operated by a trio of Albanians, two of whom had previously been ordered to be deported from the UK. It seems one never left while the other snuck back in.
Their business hid in plain sight, as cannabis farms do. They are everywhere, as prevalent, perhaps, as our best known coffee chains or burger joints. They just don't hang a sign on the door.
The defunct Poundstretcher in Kirkcaldy's High Street? A cannabis farm. The unit a few yards away where WH Smith used to trade? Another one.
A former stationer in Dunfermline; a disused pub in Airdrie; a boarded up Indian restaurant in Bathgate, the mothballed Antonine Hotel in Falkirk; a one-time furniture shop in Glasgow's Strathbungo; another old Poundstretcher unit, this time in Greenock... all of them given over to illegal horticulture.
When the late Queen embarked on her final journey through her beloved Royal Deeside her cortege passed within yards of at least one cannabis farm in the first 17 miles.
This was the Huntly Arms Hotel in Aboyne - once a favourite stopping off point for Queen Victoria but, by 2022, a thriving drugs operation trading rent-free behind those convenient wooden window boards.
How many Caffe Neros or Burger Kings line the route between Balmoral and Aboyne? That'll be none.
The farms I mention are, of course, the ones which have been raided and shut down. Do we suppose that's the bulk of them uncovered now or that the surface has barely been scratched?
I'm going with the latter theory. It would also be my educated guess that for every farm shut down, several more spring up.
That is because, in the modern drugs world, small is beautiful. The organised crime gangs profiting the most from these operations understand that vast cannabis farms are hostages to fortune - and they have lost fortunes when they have been uncovered.
Far better to have multiple smaller crops in the hundreds of vacant commercial premises which litter our communities - and to staff them with expendable dogsbodies, often trafficked here or at least living in the country illegally.
We do not know whether the three Albanians arrested at the Irvine cannabis farm were trafficked. They refused to answer questions on that.
What can be said with certainty is this depressing case is a tale which tells us much about our country, none of it good.
Our town centres are hollowing out and criminal enterprise is moving in. You may blame covid or online shopping or low emission zones or parking charges or commuter belt retail parks or economically illiterate politicians.
Whoever you blame, witness the decay - see those wooden boards bringing down the curtain on legitimate business and shielding the crooks now lurking behind.
Our police force is increasingly hollowed out too. While the cannabis farms all around hide in plain sight, their customers make no effort to hide at all any more.
The putrid reek of the drug is ubiquitous on our streets because it is smoked openly by users who know perfectly well the force has no appetite for engaging with them.
While it is certainly to their credit that three criminals are now facing jail, let's not forget they came to police attention only because ScottishPower tipped them off that an empty building seemed to be using an awful lot of electricity.
You may wonder who pays for the energy which cannabis farms typically steal by tampering with the electricity supply or hijacking a neighbour's. Ultimately the cost is passed on to you and me in our bills.
It is, I suppose, all the complacency in the face of all the cynicism that gets me the most - the blithe acceptance that is the kind of society we're stuck with.
It is one where youngsters walk down the street openly taking controlled drugs and police officers walk past them, openly doing damn all about it.
Where do they get their supplies? From dealers who get it from bigger dealers who get it from the cannabis farm in your high street that you remember as a bookstore back in the day.
And who is minding the farm? Modern slaves, trafficked foreign nationals, failed asylum seekers... you name it. Anybody who doesn't matter very much to the gangs running the show. Anyone who can be intimidated into silence.
How can this be happening in a former WH Smith? Because we have no meaningful control of our borders. We are importing criminals and willing doers of their dirty work.
I don't pretend to know whether Elton Skenderi, 30, Gjovalin Toma, 31, and Eduard Daja, 3,9 were kingpins or lackeys.
But the words of Judge Lord Mulholland, who heard their case this week, bear repeating. 'You have all come here to receive the benefits available from living here and this is how you treat the country - criminality on an industrial scale.'
I do wonder, though, whether we let them do it. If cannabis farms are operating under our noses in commercial zones across Scotland one must suspect a certain inattention - or indifference - on the part of all of us.
The drug remains illegal in this country. It seems to me a crackdown on the brazen partakers of it in public places would be a timely reminder of this.. Call it a start at least.
Criminal audacity rarely grows on its own. Society's complacency is its fertiliser.