MOUNTIE KILLINGS ARE A GRIM REMINDER OF DEADLY GROW-OP INDUSTRY DANGERS

Canada's illegal marijuana industry is too often portrayed in the popular
imagination as a benign cottage industry run by a bunch of benevolent hippies.

The lenient court sentences handed out by our province's liberal judges
reflect that fact. They tend to amount to little more than an inconvenience
to hardened traffickers, who treat them as a minor cost of doing business.

But the fact is drug-trafficking is a lethal, organized, criminal
enterprise that corrupts the young and spreads like a noxious weed through
law-abiding communities, slowly poisoning and strangling them.

And it's run by thugs, gang members and other desperate, armed losers who
too often are prepared to shoot first and ask questions afterward.

That much is evident from the tragic slaying of four Mounties yesterday
during a police raid on a grow-op at a farmhouse northwest of Edmonton.

And it should serve as a painful lesson for those young British Columbians
who think that, instead of getting a real job, they should make like Cheech
and Chong and start their own grow-op -- and make a killing.

Sure, the money may be good for a while, the living easy, and the marijuana
smoking itself may only mildly impair their vision.

The killing, however, may be all too real. Witness yesterday's tragedy, the
first time in nearly 20 years there have been multiple deaths of police
officers in the same action.

As Alberta Premier Ralph Klein noted yesterday: "I would hope that it would
serve as a lesson for all those who want to enter into something illegal
not to do so."

The lesson does not appear to have got through to our young people, who
appear to be smoking more marijuana, despite evidence showing it can be at
least as harmful as tobacco -- and serves as a "gateway drug" to cocaine,
heroin, methamphetamine and other so-called hard drugs.

The unhealthy glamorization of marijuana in the media has frustrated many
police, already angry at the minimal sentences handed out by our courts. (A
recent analysis shows most convicted B.C. pot growers receive neither jail
time nor a fine.)

This terrible multiple killing in our neighbouring province will only
compound that anger.

Hopefully, it will also serve as a wake-up call to us all.