KEY POINTS:
Police yesterday busted a cannabis tinnie house suspected of supplying school pupils.
Four people were arrested during the raid on the house, just metres from an intermediate school.
Police found thousands of dollars worth of cash and cannabis after they swooped on the Pt Chevalier property yesterday.
As
mothers parked their cars to collect their children from Pasadena Intermediate, a decile 6 school with about 240 pupils, two police vans pulled up.
Uniformed officers spilled out and descended on the property, which is directly opposite the school.
Western Springs College is also nearby, with a roll of more than 1000.
Officers used a metal "ram" to break down the door, and found the suspects inside.
Concerned neighbours emerged from their properties to find out what the commotion and the heavy police presence were about.
The two main suspects, a 44-year-old woman and a 47-year-old man, along with two others - a middle-aged man and the woman's 18-year-old daughter - sat quietly talking to police, their hands handcuffed behind their backs, as gloved officers combed the cluttered home for drugs.
Police were last night tallying items seized in the raid but within just two hours, they had already found several cannabis ounces valued at between $200 and $400 each, containers stashed with dozens of prepackaged tinnies valued at $20 each, and other containers which held thousands of dollars in cash.
Four people - three men and a woman aged in their early 20s - who arrived at the house and bought fake tinnies filled with grass supplied to them by undercover police were also to be charged for attempting to procure cannabis.
Police expected to charge others as people continued to arrive at the house in the evening.
Senior Sergeant Rod Salt, the officer in charge of the raid, said it was a matter for concern that young people might have been buying drugs from the house.
"They're doing it directly over the road from an intermediate school - that's one of my major concerns."
Mr Salt said the man, 47, would be charged with possessing cannabis for supply and the woman, 44, charged with allowing a premises to be used to sell drugs.
It was not the first raid at the house. The woman was arrested and charged with cultivating cannabis after a police visit in 2004. On that occasion they seized 48 live cannabis plants and 371 grams of dried cannabis.
A call to the Western Springs College principal was not returned last night.
