ARE THE KIDS ALL RIGHT?

What kind of parent would subject toddlers to the dangers of living in
a marijuana grow operation? We would suggest they are parents who may
not have the basic moral or intellectual capacity to care for children.

So when police busted a Richmond couple for running a marijuana grow
operation in July and found five kids under the age of five in the
home, we all presumed the children were removed from custody and
placed with someone more trustworthy.

Fact is, we don't know that to be the case. As the B.C. Association of
Social Workers points out, there are serious questions about how the
Ministry of Children deals with kids found in grow operations.

How the ministry operates is, of course, veiled behind that convenient
cloak of invisibility that governments love to cite when they don't
want to be accountable to the press and public: privacy concerns. In
the interest of protecting the children's privacy, the public can
never know if the ministry is protecting something even more
important: children's lives.

The association is calling on the ministry to adopt some new protocols
for dealing with the growing problem of kids growing up in drug
houses. We urge the ministry to move quickly on this.

Smoking pot may not be harmful to your health the way legal stimulants
like tobacco and alcohol are, but the production of pot on a large
scale certainly is. The hazards include exposure to chemicals,
electrical rewiring that can cause house fires and, of course, grow
rippers. Sadly, and ironically, when police bust a marijuana grow op
with kids in the house, they can lay charges against the parents for
the production of a controlled substance, but they apparently can't
lay charges for endangering the health of the children. What is wrong
with that picture?