A FUTILE WAR ON MARIJUANA

Another week, another grow-op bust. The latest, at the former Nordik
Imperial Mushroom Farm in North Stormont, was unusually large, but
you can be certain it's not the only multimillion-dollar
marijuana-growing operation in Eastern Ontario. Police say they
seized 3,100 plants and $700,000 worth of gear in the building near
Moose Creek. They charged eight people with growing-related offences.

As usual, police linked the operation to organized crime, the
official definition of which is three people involved in committing
an offence for profit. Most grow-ops bigger than one plant in a
basement would qualify.

Police have been trumpeting purported triumphs like this for decades,
even as the street price of marijuana has slid and the proportion of
THC intoxicant in any given joint has increased. They dismantled a
30,000-plant grow-op in Barrie's decommissioned Molson brewery two
years ago and the market absorbed the loss with scarcely a hiccup
(it's more resilient than the market for gasoline, apparently). That
raid evidently didn't dissuade the operators of the Moose Creek
marijuana farm from setting up.

Grow-ops are dangerous because they're clandestine, not because
there's something intrinsically hazardous about the plants in them.
The only reason for chasing them down, at root, is a prohibitionary
approach toward marijuana that we don't apply to alcohol or nicotine.

The war on pot is futile. It's long since time to declare a ceasefire.