POT: POLICE AND PARLIAMENT MUST DO THEIR JOBS

If police and the federal government had done their jobs in a timely manner,
it would never have come to this.

On Thursday evening, Vancouver police conducted a raid on the Da Kine Smoke
and Beverage Shop and found nine kilograms of marijuana, half a kilogram of
hashish, 300 baked goods containing marijuana, $63,000 in cash and $1,700 in
U.S. currency. As a result, police recommended that charges of trafficking
in marijuana be laid against Da Kine's staff and owner.

The raid was a high-profile affair: Police established roadblocks, and more
than 30 officers, including undercover narcotics cops wearing balaclavas,
conducted the raid. About 200 people assembled behind the roadblocks,
smoking marijuana and heckling the police. While they are free to protest,
impeding police from doing their job is just not on.

And after all of that, Da Kine was open for business on Friday morning.
Staff were busy dividing up bags of marijuana, the store was doing a booming
business and there were reports that other stores on Commercial Drive had
also begun selling the drug.

This entire circus could have been avoided had police raided the store when
they first got wind that pot was being sold. Da Kine has allegedly been
trafficking in marijuana since May, and police had said the shop was on
their radar.

Yet they chose not to proceed with a raid until Thursday, and not until
after Solicitor-General Rich Coleman said the open pot sales were
unacceptable. The comments of some city councillors and Mayor Larry Campbell
didn't help: The mayor, who also chairs the police board, said he didn't see
what the "big deal" was.

That might be his personal opinion, and certainly, there is a strong
movement in favour of legalizing pot. But marijuana trafficking is illegal,
and the police can't ignore their duty to enforce the criminal law just
because some people, and some municipal politicians, consider it out-dated
or irrelevant.

If the law is to be repealed or reformed, the change must occur on
Parliament Hill, not on Commercial Drive. Which brings us to our second
point.

Da Kine's owner, Carol Gwilt, claims she was providing marijuana only to
people who need it for medical reasons. Whether that's true or not remains
to be seen, but Parliament has permitted people with certain medical
conditions to possess and use marijuana.

Yet Parliament has never provided them with adequate means to obtain the
drug. The government's attempts to grow cannabis have been a dismal failure,
so people have had to rely on "compassion clubs" that distribute the drug.
Yet in so doing, the clubs are breaking the law.

So as it stands, the law permits some people to use marijuana but those
people must engage in illegal activity to get it. This is an impossible and
unacceptable state of affairs.

But if the police start doing their job by enforcing the law, maybe it will
convince the feds to their job and reform our marijuana laws.