RCMP DEATHS SPARK CONFUSED DEBATE OVER POT ISSUE

In my life, I've inhaled. I'm betting most of us have, if my experiences in
high school, university, work and every neighbourhood I have ever lived in
are any indication. Pot was ubiquitous 30 years ago: it is ubiquitous now.

Does that make me complicit in the tragic death of four RCMP officers in
Mayerthorpe, Alta.? Does it make anyone who has ever smoked or still smokes
pot complicit in their deaths?

Uncomfortable questions. But in the superheated and often overwrought
coverage of the four officers' deaths, linkages are being made that beg
answers.

Suddenly, the guilt of the officers' needless deaths has spread beyond the
actions of a lone psychopath and fanned out, by inference, to the millions
of illicit drug users in this country. Are they, we, ultimately, the guilty
party? Is anyone who has ever had a toke involved? Did James Roszko embody
our collective lawlessness or was he merely an unfortunate singular
eventuality?

Many took the opportunity to expound on both suggestions. With the RCMP
officers' deaths still fresh, and with the facts still vague, various
eminences at the Liberal party convention offered up the whole spectrum of
strategies, from calling for the complete legalization of marijuana, to a
further decriminalization of marijuana, to mandatory prison sentences for
operating a grow-op, to a renewed effort of the war on drugs and a
zero-tolerance approach.

Letters to the editor pages mirrored that confusion. One letter in our
sister paper, The Province, argued the four officers would not be dead if
pot were legal: another argued pot played only a marginal part in the
killings: a third argued drugs are "the front end of terrorism" -- making,
in a single bound, the leap between Mayerthorpe and al-Qaida. The same
dichotomy can be found in today's Sun, with one letter writer calling for
stiffer sentences for grow-ops, likening them to a "disease," while
another, decrying the senselessness of the officers' deaths, called for an
end to marijuana prohibition. Remove the law: remove the problem.

In Saturday's paper, Sun editorial cartoonist Roy Peterson -- the nation's
best and most decorated at his job -- suggested in his editorial-page
cartoon that pot smokers were complicit, with a cartoon of a youngish,
toque-hatted dopehead toking on a doobie, and saying "Smoking cigarettes
can kill you or me. Smoking pot kills cops and criminals but not me." The
headline above it was "Customer Denial 101."

Peterson, who has never smoked pot, was right in one sense: There is a
whole lot of denial and avoidance going on. He was wrong in another. His
image of pot-users as feckless low-life slackers is out of touch.

Pot is firmly entrenched in the middle and upper-middle classes. It is not
exclusive to the marginalized or to the young. This is a country of several
million polite, tax-paying criminals. For all the talk about terrorist
groups and export, grow-ops serve a primarily domestic audience. They meet
a consumer demand, which seems to be forgotten in the call for stiffer
sentences.

Oddly, the killings in Mayerthorpe had only a peripheral connection to
grow-ops. Even the Mayerthorpe RCMP, as its media relations officer told me
on Sunday, did not consider this a raid on a grow-op: it was a retrieval
operation of stolen property. They stumbled on James Roszko's grow-op, just
as they stumbled on his psychopathic anger. His grow-op wasn't much to
boast about, either: Twenty mature plants and 280 "others" -- seedlings,
perhaps -- is nothing in the marijuana industry, not when B.C. has seen
seizures in the range of 20,000 plants. James Roszko wasn't a problem
because he grew pot: He was a problem because he was nuts.

At any rate, the corrosive effects of grow-ops manifest themselves in ways
other than violence. The majority of raids do not result in shoot-outs. But
grow-ops are fire hazards; they steal power in huge quantities; they ruin
property; they bankroll gang life and gun-running and all manner of illegal
activities. And they put police in harm's way.

And here's the thing about that:

All us nice, tax-paying criminals who have ever smoked pot in our lives, or
who casually take a toke at a party if offered, know this.

We would feel differently, of course, if the grow-op was next door to our
house. But the odds are, it's not. It is somebody else's problem. We live
with that fact, and in this, we are complicit, and we are guilty of
avoidance, and Peterson is right.

On the other hand, the prohibitionists and those who call for stiffer
sentences against grow-ops suffer an avoidance of their own, namely,
grow-ops serve a huge market. That market lives next door, and is made up
of neighbours who, having seen the havoc that alcohol and tobacco have
legally wreaked on society, don't see pot use in the same alarmist
perspective they do. Those neighbours would charge the prohibitionists --
who probably don't mind having a drink and or smoke -- with being guilty of
hypocrisy.

But then, terminology is everything, isn't it? Some will always see it as a
war on drugs, when that is only half the equation.

This is a civil war.