ARGUING IN FAVOUR OF LEVELLING POT PLAYING FIELD

My dad and my mom's sister loved arguing together over just about anything.
They could run each other's lives and the world, for sure, a lot better
than they could run their own affairs. Every once in a while, maybe just as
a goad, Dad would ask her, "Who made you so smart?

Since I started writing this column in 1997, that question has run like an
undercurrent through my thoughts. I haven't had an answer nor has that
stopped me. The world's full of endless contentions and I enjoy seeing and
saying them from different angles and spins.

Since this is my second-last column - I'm letting this lovely gig go - I'll
write a last example of my polemics, then I'll conclude in two weeks with
the tour of the Tri-Cities area I would give if I had one day only to show
off the place.

(By the way, did you know that a gig is a ship's boat? When a vessel was
anchored in port, the luckiest sailors got a gig to go to town for R&R. A
gig remains a lovely, lucky thing to have - as this one has been, in spades.

If my long-dead dad and old aunt could holler at each other today, they'd
get some great mileage out of the Marc Emery case - or kilometerage
(another favourite rant: can you teach old dogs metrics?).

The guy has made millions from his pot-seed selling business (and given it
all away, though that's a separate issue).

This business isn't open to the general populace, only to a few daredevils.
Most of us won't risk making money this way out of respect or fear for the law.

Our lawmakers and enforcers allow such defiant businesses, in low numbers
and low profiles, at least until something like U.S. attention makes us
face our hypocrisy. Premier Gordon Campbell's business-is-king government
should, I believe, champion a level playing field in the pot-seed selling
industry by either prosecuting law-breakers without exception or by making
it legal, so it's closed or open to all.

Prosecuting feeds the growing business of policing, convicting and
imprisoning transgressors, entirely at taxpayers' expense. In comparison,
making pot-seed selling an equal-opportunity business for all, with
appropriate regulations, would be more sensible and just.

My aunt would have hollered that dope's stupid and leads to worse trouble;
Dad would have said drinking and smoking do too. Or vice versa - they would
switch sides to keep the argument going.

I don't do that, at least. Who made me so smart? If I'm smart at all, here
and elsewhere with my various contentions, I'd have to blame their feisty
example.