POT GROWERS REACH FOR GOLD IN THE LIKELY-EST PLACE

A lot of mining towns in British Columbia disappeared after the ore
ran out.

Not Likely.

The town with the eternally optimistic name is a survivor, one of the
few remaining Cariboo gold rush settlements. Originally called Quesnel
Dam, it was renamed to honour John A. Likely of the local Bullion Pit
mine that operated from 1892 to 1942.

While the town of Likely outlived the mine, it would be an
overstatement to say it has thrived. Local residents turned to
tourism, logging or whatever else they could find to allow them to
live in their picturesque valley after the primary economic driver ran
out of gas.

So when quiet strangers started buying up properties that by Vancouver
standards were going for a song and hiring local residents to build
windowless barns with elaborate irrigation systems, they were treated
like a gift horse best not examined too closely.

But not everyone agreed to look the other way and the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police started getting wind of the strange goings-on.

This week, the province announced that a Likely acreage became the
largest marijuana growing operation ever seized under the provincial
civil forfeiture law.

While it may seem a town 100 kilometres east of Williams Lake would be
an unlikely candidate for a boom in grow-ops, the only real surprise
is that such operations aren't uncovered more often in economically
depressed regions of the province.

Given the nature of the business, there are no hard numbers available
on the size of the marijuana crop in B.C. or the number of growers.
But estimates for the value of B.C. Bud are in the billions of dollars
from hundreds of grow operations, large and small.

Unlike forestry, marijuana farming feeds what seems to be a stable
market with the potential of large returns for minimal risk.

Solicitor-General John Van Dongen hopes the forfeiture will send a
signal that the government is doing a better job than previously at
controlling criminal activity.

That may be. But as long as growers perceive that the rewards outweigh
the risks and neighbours look the other way, this gold rush will continue.

The editorials that appear in this space represent the opinion of The
Vancouver Sun newspaper. They are unsigned because they do not
necessarily represent the personal views of the writers. The positions
taken in the editorials are arrived at through discussion among the
members of the newspaper's editorial board, which operates
independently from the news departments of the paper. The members of
The Sun's editorial board are editorial page editor Fazil Mihlar,
editorial writers Harvey Enchin, Craig McInnes and Peter McKnight,
editor-in-chief Patricia Graham and publisher Kevin Bent. Columnists
Stephen Hume, Jonathan Manthorpe and Barbara Yaffe are advisers to the
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