CAPRI WANTS CLOCK TURNED BACK

It's a rare moment when you find Marc Emery and the Vancouver Police
Department in agreement. But that's exactly what has happened in the
fallout after the latest annual marijuana smoke-in on the lawns of
the Vancouver Art Gallery.

It took none other than our municipal scold, NPA Coun. Kim Capri, to
bring these two together. And in doing so she has given us all
further insight into what Project Civil City is all about. The annual
rally of pot advocates gathering at the Vancouver Art Gallery has
taken place for a decade. Emery, the self-proclaimed Prince of Pot,
is the organizer and he dutifully gets permission from the gallery
and a permit from the city that this year cost $1,500.

Emery says there has never been a complaint about the event from
people who turn up to see it. And he adds, if you really want to see
chaos, try the Granville entertainment district on weekend nights
when drunks roam the street looking for fights. VPD spokesman Tim
Fanning agrees that the rally, which this year attracted more than
6,000 people at its height, is monitored and managed by the police
and relatively trouble free.

But Capri told reporters she finds this celebration of cannabis
culture and calls for legalization of pot "disturbing and
unacceptable." (She apparently had nothing to say about her boss,
Mayor Sam Sullivan, and his history of buying heroin for junkies and
giving a crack addict money so he could smoke the drug in Sullivan's
van. Talk about disturbing and unacceptable.)

But people puffing on pot is quite another matter for our leading
lady of law and order. She wants the cops to have a stronger presence
at these events. This demand has led Fanning to ask: "What are we
supposed to do? Arrest 6,000 pot smokers?"

The last time the Vancouver cops charged into a crowd of dope smokers
was in the summer of 1971. They were spurred on by hippy-hating Mayor
Tom "Terrific" Campbell, who in turn was heated up by the rants
against the evils of the weed and degenerate youth by hard drinking,
chain-smoking iconic radio talk-show host Jack Webster. Cops on
horseback cracked skulls and made arrests in what came to be known as
the Gastown Riot.

A lot of smoke has passed through the old hookah since then. But
judging from her comments, Capri would have us go back to those days
and have us ignore how times and attitudes have changed. Canadian
politicians are now, more often, calling for the legalization of pot.
And anyone would tell you the drugs Jack Webster and Tom Terrific
regularly consumed--alcohol and tobacco--are responsible for far more
damage than the stuff being sucked back on the art gallery lawn.

For Capri to equate that annual event with the "open drug market" at
Hastings and Main is disingenuous in the extreme. Her idea of a civil
city is a place where everyone sits facing forward with hands folded
on their laps and their legs crossed at the ankles, and where
homeless people are swept off the streets by private security guards,
panhandlers are busted and laws are obeyed even when they are stupid.

Capri may be in a minority, but she is not alone. She is joined in
her crusade by B.C. Chamber of Commerce president John Winter. He
told the Province editorial board the cops should have thumped those
dope smokers: "In a perfect world the police would have dealt with
them with some severity."

To Winter's dismay, "the police don't have the support of the
community," to go in and bust heads. Fortunately the cops are well
aware of that and so is Marc Emery.

Contempt for the laws that make marijuana possession a criminal
offence is obviously widespread. Until those laws change, the police
have found a civil way of dealing with that problem. Capri's solution
would have us increase enforcement which would be anything but civil.