B.C. URGES OTTAWA TO STIFFEN PENALTIES

Deaths Prove Marijuana-Growing A Serious Business: Officials

VICTORIA -- B.C. Solicitor-General Rich Coleman is calling on the federal
government to wake up and act to stiffen penalties against people convicted
of marijuana-growing operations following the murder of four RCMP officers
in northern Alberta Thursday.

"The people at the federal level who make the laws and give instructions to
the drug prosecutors before the courts should wake up and realize the
significant problem with the violence in drugs, marijuana grow-ops and
their relationship to organized crime," Coleman said in a telephone interview.

And B.C. Attorney-General Geoff Plant said the deaths should dispel any
doubts people might have about the dangerous nature of marijuana-growing
operations that plague B.C.

"We're talking about the commercial manufacture of marijuana for the
purpose of participating in an international organized crime activity.
That's very serious business."

Insp. Paul Nadeau, head of the RCMP Coordinated Marijuana Enforcement Team
in B.C., said: "I think there is a feeling among the general public that
the people inside grow-ops are like ma-and-pa, law-abiding citizens that
are growing pot, but the majority of people we arrest have extensive
criminal histories."

Victoria Police Chief Paul Battershill, whose partner was killed in a
police raid in Vancouver in 1987, said investigators increasingly find
growing operations that are either fortified, booby-trapped, or guarded by
people with weapons.

Battershill said he has seen reports pegging the number of
marijuana-growing operations in B.C. at 9,000 to 10,000. "I think we'd be
in range of 1,000 grows on the Island," he said.

But he said police have a difficult time controlling the problem because
the courts hand out such light sentences.

The Vancouver Sun reported earlier this year that fewer than one in seven
people convicted of growing marijuana in B.C. over the past two years were
sentenced to any time in jail.

"The sentences given out in B.C. are ridiculously low for grow-ops,"
Battershill said.

"I think that grow-ops that are either booby-trapped or guarded by persons
with weapons or barricaded should receive a considerably higher sentence.

"That should be a separate category."

Said Coleman: "Repeat offenders have to be incarcerated to get them off the
street and we have to start seizing their assets.

"Frankly, one of these days, maybe they [the federal government] will wake
up and realize that they are sitting on their hands in Ottawa and it is
hurting the communities across this country."

Battershill said news of the Edmonton shootings took him back to the day
his police partner, Vancouver Sgt. Larry Young, was shot and killed by a
drug dealer during an emergency response team raid.

"As a former tactical officer," Battershill said, "I can tell you, without
even looking at it, there was nothing those people could have done to
protect themselves if they were ambushed."