Three men jailed for turning Aberdeen nightclub into cannabis farm

Three men in their 30s have been jailed for turning a former nightclub in Aberdeen, The Pearl Lounge, into a fully operating cannabis farm.

A raid was carried out on the former club site last August, where Police Scotland discovered cannabis worth more than £850,000 in street value growing inside, the BBC News reports.

Over 1,000 marijuana plants were found growing inside the Dee Street venue, which closed permanently in 2014, spread across two floors of the building.

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According to police, officers discovered a “large-scale” cultivation when they entered the building, which smelled strongly of the drug and featured special lighting and ventilation systems.

When police raided the building, two men were reportedly found emptying pots of soil, while the third man was asleep. All three were said to be living inside the building.

One of the men’s solicitors claimed in court that he had accumulated debt to those who transported him to the UK from Albania, while another said he was being used as “cheap labour” for the people behind the operation.

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"He accepts that at that stage he should have left, but he was worried about potential consequences for his family back in Albania if he did so," one of the men's lawyers argued (via Press & Journal).

All three men, aged between 31 and 36, received two years in jail at the Aberdeen Sheriff Court last week. They were said to have been running a “substantial commercial operation”.

Sheriff Morag McLaughlin said (via BBC News) that the only option was to give the men a custodial sentence, reduced from three years to two due to their guilty pleas.

Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Associate Digital Editor