COURTS TOO LENIENT ON POT GROWERS

Minimum Fines Are Needed to Provide a Real Disincentive to Illegal
Marijuana Cultivation

We're not surprised that officials representing law enforcement
agencies across Canada were in Ottawa this week demanding tougher
penalties for pot growers. Police don't subscribe, generally, to the
softer approach to this soft drug being taken by social workers, some
health experts and a few lawmakers today.

They think decriminalization of simple possession of marijuana, now
under study by a House of Commons committee, and which Justice
Minister Martin Cauchon seems inclined to favour, is the wrong way to
go. They want penalties to be tougher, citing the criminal connections
of those dealing in pot and the danger to public safety.

But this week the cops were joined by representatives of the
electricity and real estate industries. Pot-growing, they announced,
steals power and is threatening to push hydro rates even higher then
they're going anyway. Grow-ops also lower the tone of even upscale
neighbourhoods, are undermining house and property prices and driving
up insurance premiums.

Delegates also told MPs that grow-ops are putting the lives of
children at risk. The motorcycle gangs across Canada, the Asian gangs
around Vancouver, set families up in grow houses -- some of them
$400,000 houses in trendy neighbourhoods -- to try to disguise them.

This month, in a nationwide sweep of grow-ops, police picked up 73,000
pot plants worth, they said, about $73 million on the street. They
also swooped up 43 children and teens, as young as four months and as
old as 17 years, who were living among the plants and turned them over
to social services agencies or their families.

They were exposed to mould spores, carbon monoxide, pesticides, and
electrocution. They could suffocate in houses where the windows are
never opened; they could burn to death when overstrained wiring
catches fire.

In Vancouver, police have reduced the number of grow operations, but
this has only driven them further east, or north. There are at least
50,000 of them nationwide, officials estimate.

Law enforcement agencies say decriminalization won't make a dent in
this lucrative enterprise. Pot that sells on our downtown streets for
$2,300 a pound brings in $9,000 a pound in the U.S. Most of the
marijuana grown in B.C. is for export, and decriminalization will only
give U.S. border authorities more headaches, police say.

The problem, police have long argued, is the leniency with which
pot-growers are treated when they get to court. While traffickers can
get a life sentence, the maximum sentence for possession of marijuana
is five years less a day behind bars.

Yet, according to police, most growers are given conditional sentences
which are served at home, maybe among the empty flowerpots, and no
jail time. The typical fine, they say, is $1,000 to $3,000, an amount
that three plants are enough to cover.

Police in Sechelt were particularly incensed this week when they were
forced to give back dozens of confiscated marijuana plants to a man
who had convinced the judge he needed to smoke pot 12 times a day to
ease his cancer symptoms.

Clearly, if the courts can't make the punishment fit what still is,
after all, a crime -- because very little pot is grown for home
consumption -- they need a little guidance from our lawmakers.

By setting minimum sentences and fines for grow operators, our
legislators would be providing the deterrence that our courts seem
unable to.