Angelenos of the Week: Southern California's Indoor Pot Growers

Wonder why your neighbors have never invited you over for coffee? And why they only seem to enter and exit the house a few times a week?

Yup, they're cultivating pot inside their converted home. Welcome to the neighborhood.

OK, it's not that common. But it sure felt like it in recent weeks, as recent raids in L.A. suburbs have uncovered several of these operations. These are pretty sophisticated affairs: Homes completely gutted and replaced with sophisticated pot growing equipment -- irrigation, sun lamps, ventilation, the whole deal.

The L.A. Times looks at what it calls a "major boom in large-scale marijuana cultivation operations run from inside homes":

Officials with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration say the number of indoor marijuana plants seized by federal, state and local authorities in California has quadrupled in just the last three years, from at least 54,000 plants to nearly 200,000 in 2006.

Many of those seizures have occurred in middle-class and upscale suburbs, where the pot growers took advantage of cheap home financing — and minimal credit checks — to purchase homes and remodel them into sophisticated farms, authorities said.

Using equipment that can cost as much as $75,000, the homes were transformed into illicit greenhouses complete with blacked-out windows, sophisticated irrigation, high-powered and timed lighting and ventilation devices to hide the smell of the plants.

"They have cropped up in neighborhoods like never before," said Gordon Taylor, who heads the DEA office in Sacramento. "I am not talking about the Cheech and Chong marijuana cultivation of two plants in someone's closet. I am talking about organized crime groups who are purchasing homes in our communities and creating marijuana factories."

Local authorities have discovered at least six indoor suburban pot farms in just the last month — including two this week in Rowland Heights.

For triggering what felt like a daily barrage of images of indoor pot farms on the local news (LA Voice even found a fake one inside the old Daily Breeze pressroom -- part of a set for the movie "Pineapple Express"), you guys are our Angelenos of the Week.