BASIC LOGIC ESCAPES SIX JUSTICES IN TWO DRUG DOG CASES

A public strip search of a suspected drug dealer might be interpreted
as an infringement of Section 8 of the Charter of Rights.

However, a police-trained drug dog, sniffing the back-pack of someone
under suspicion hardly violates this elusive clause that says
everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.

This very basic logic somehow escaped six of nine members of the
Supreme Court of Canada.

Everyone to be afforded the protection of this clause includes a
fellow by the name of Gurmakh Kang-Brown, who was caught with 17
ounces of cocaine in his luggage during a random search at the
Calgary Greyhound Bus depot. Everyone includes a high school student
in Sarnia, Ont., caught with 10 bags of marijuana and 10 magic
mushrooms during a search on school property.

Yet the Supreme Court, in what ranks high on the asinine decision
list, recently rushed to protect their rights and privacy by ruling
that police violated the charter by allowing their dogs to sniff
search because they didn't have enough reason to suspect drugs were present.

Didn't they? And so what. Both culprits were caught with sizable
amounts of illegal drugs - enough to generate a lot of misery and
crimes committed by users needing cash to buy these drugs. Trained
dogs led police to drugs that in no way could be mistaken as stashes
for personal consumption. The last time I looked, our schools,
including elementary, and transportation ports are constantly being
used by drug pushers to apply their trade; hence, the sniffer dogs
are employed to curtail the drug pusher's activity.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who chooses to deal in illegal drugs
forsakes their rights and I believe that most people in this country
feel the same way.

The Supreme Court failed to take into account the privacy and rights
of the long list of victims of drug traffickers. It goes beyond
ruining lives of the children these vultures prey on. Car thefts,
break and enters, prostitution, armed robberies, fraud and a host of
other crimes swirl around the drug trade.

Drug pedaling has a devastating ripple effect on a large segment of
the population. Users have to get their drug money somehow. If it
means victimizing innocent people, that's what they do.

On top of all that, our health care system takes a real kicking every
time we have to rehabilitate a drug-user and guess who pays for that?
We all do.

Not one of the justices made any mention of the human misery attached
as a result of the actions perpetrated by these drug pushers. Is it
because they live in a bubble and don't understand that they are
accountable to the people in this country?

This decision essentially creates another "grey zone" for law
enforcement. What is in effect a valuable tool - to be able to use
the dogs - now has become a dismal dimension of uncertainty, one that
drug pushers and lawyers will revel over.

Police, who are breaking their backs and risking their lives in this
war on drugs that we are losing, have just had another set of
handcuffs slapped on them.

The public wants police to exercise authority and knock pushers out
of circulation. However the police are restrained and at the mercy of
15 years of Liberal governments.

We can only hope that the Conservatives will be successful in putting
some "teeth" in new upcoming legislation. I'll be watching.

The liberal elite - many members of the bar association - is still
under the illusion that the public must simply accept ill-conceived
decisions and that politicians have no right to question their judgment.

The government and lawmakers now, in an effort to protect the public,
have to scramble to find a way to allow police to continue to use
scent-tracking dogs to conduct random searches in public places other
than airports. In effect, the Supreme Court decision has now muddied
the enforcement waters again and left lower courts scrambling to
solve the problem. You see, while the Supreme Court decision
effectively ended the legality of random dog searches in schools and
other public places, it was silent on the use of them in airports.

A cynic might say the high court views the safety and well-being of
the public in airports paramount to the safety and well-being of
children in schools.

Justice Marie Deschamps was one of three refreshing voices of reason
who offered dissenting votes. In the case of the student caught with
drugs, Deschamps noted that the privacy interests of the students
were extremely low considering that educators called in police
because drugs had infiltrated the school.

"Since drugs are readily concealed and since their odours are often
imperceptible to humans, school officials are essentially powerless
to confront the possession and trafficking of drugs in these
institutions of learning without the assistance of police using
well-trained sniffer dogs," wrote Deschamps.

Perhaps the six justices who are so concerned about the rights and
privacy of drug dealers need a reality check, like spending some time
with a youngster in the painful throes of kicking a drug addiction
aided and abetted by these parasites they are so anxious to protect.

Or, they could step out of the bubble and visit with a victim of a
break-and-enter whose peace is forever shattered and whose
possessions were stolen to finance a fix.

You know, police have another tool the justices might be wise to
explore. It is called Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), a basic
program designed to educate children on the ravages of illegal drugs.
Apparently, it isn't only the children whose eyes need to open.

Or maybe the latter is not a good idea. The esteemed justices, in the
type of wisdom they have demonstrated, might determine DARE somehow
violates the rights of criminals.