BUST OR BACK OFF

As growing-op busts mount, how best to deal with the province's $3-billion
cannabis industry? Should we follow the U.S. get-tough approach, or
consider legalizing and ease up on pot policing?

Jennifer remembers parking on the street, annoyed that cars had blocked the
drive of her North Vancouver home. And how, oh my God, there were guys with
armoured vests in the yard.

She remembers walking into the kitchen on rubber legs, and seeing her
34-year-old husband, Morgan, sprawled on the floor. She remembers the
shouting and the guns pointed at Morgan -- and the wreckage and chaos of
the police search.

She remembers how thankful she was that her little boy was still strapped
into his car seat outside so he could not see this, or hear an adrenalized
member of the RCMP say he might be taken by child welfare authorities.

When he said that, "I freaked. I was hysterical," says 25-year-old
Jennifer. "It was a very bad day."

The police, while tracking a visiting acquaintance, had stumbled on 80
marijuana plants growing in a locked garage under the kind of grow lights
that Morgan's parents use for their tomatoes.

That was almost a year ago. In a region that now has thousands of such
raids every year, theirs is just one more case clogging the provincial
court system.

The Organized Crime Agency of B.C. estimated that the underground cannabis
economy is worth $3 billion to $4 billion annually -- putting it among the
top five economic generators in the province -- possibly outstripping high
technology and certainly conventional agriculture.

Agency spokesman Sergeant Randy Elliott estimates there are 7,000-8,000
commercial growing operations in the Lower Mainland, and 10,000 across the
province. His no-nonsense demeanour suggests the agency has set the
near-impossible task of taking down every one.

There were 2,348 cannabis cultivation offences in B.C. in 1998 -- a
250-per-cent increase in 10 years, according to the most recent statistics.
Arrests have skyrocketed since, and police are on track to shatter all
records in 2000. In one April week alone, Lower Mainland police acted on
196 search warrants.

B.C. and especially Greater Vancouver is fast losing it global reputation
as a kind of cannabis tolerant "Vansterdam" where marijuana was celebrated
by some, sampled by many, and treated with indifference by police.

Instead, B.C. today is home to a confusion of attitudes and policies
towards the policing and use of marijuana.

As shown by a poll of Greater Vancouver residents, conducted for The
Vancouver Sun by Viewpoints research and to be published in Saturday's
edition, this is where most people believe possession of pot should not be
a criminal offence -- but a far higher majority believe growing marijuana
for sale should remain criminal.

This is where, as the second part of this series explores on Saturday, a
baggie of high-grade marijuana can be freely bought at downtown speakeasy
known to police, even as police a few kilometres away are battering down
the doors of homes to get at cannibis plants.

This also is where, as two recent cases show, growing pot for sale can get
you a two-year jail term -- or a suspended sentence, depending on the judge.

'soft' Drugs, Hard Questions

Meanwhile, the steady stream of press releases issued by police poses
questions rarely publicly aired. Among them:

- - Why the crackdown?

Are police responding to genuine concerns of the public and the courts --
or to immense external pressure from agencies of both the U.S. government
and the United Nations to get tough on pot?

- - At what cost?

Is marijuana -- which 63 per cent of British Columbians said in an Angus
Reid poll should be decriminalized -- sufficiently dangerous to warrant
gun-point arrests, jail-time and children ripped from parents?

- - Is jail the answer?

If B.C. courts bow to U.S. demands to match its heavy jail-time for pot
offences, what is the probable result? The U.S. war on drugs has created a
seven-fold increase in the drug inmate population, without alleviating a
worse hard-drug problem than Canada's.

- - What about hard drugs?

Are police neglecting cocaine, heroin and other deadly drugs to chase after
marijuana, which is bulky, smelly and relatively easy to find? As the
just-released RCMP Drug Situation in Canada reports: "With the exception of
marijuana, seizures of all drug types in 1999 have decreased compared to 1998."

The answers to these questions, of course, depends on who is asked.

For Jennifer and Morgan, who want their last name be withheld, such
questions have preyed on their minds through a year of turmoil and uncertainty.

There have been six brief court appearances so far, and they have yet to go
to trial or enter a plea. The police did not act on their threat to call in
provincial child welfare authorities, but they live with the prospect that
the worst is yet to come.

In that time, Jennifer has lost a $45,000 a year job, because of the
repeated court appearances, the couple says. They have moved into the B.C.
interior, hoping for a fresh start. But that depends on the courts.

What to do with Jennifer and Morgan is a challenge that goes beyond the
issues and facts that will eventually face one judge in one provincial
courtroom.

It goes beyond one province and even the country itself.

There is a huge export market for B.C. Bud. The price of fame, or infamy,
is eternal vigilance.

There are simply too many Jennifers and too many Morgans to be
ignored. But what to do with them?

THE CASE FOR A CRACKDOWN

To police officers like Elliott of the new provincial organized crime
agency the reasons are blatantly obvious. The drug is illegal. Cultivation
of the drug is illegal. Trafficking in the drug is way illegal.

The marijuana is more powerful than ever and it starts young people down a
dangerous path to harder drug abuse.

The growing operations trash houses, degrade neighbourhoods and put
innocent people at risk, claims a community impact assessment the agency
prepared for a recent case that netted the grower a two-year sentence.

But even those aren't the reasons the agency has come down hard on marijuana.

The agency's top priorities he says, "are Asian-based organized crime as
well as outlaw motorcycle gangs -- both of which crime groups are hugely
involved in the production, distribution and exportation of marijuana in
this province."

The profits from marijuana underwrite other crimes and harder drug
activities, and they ratchet up the violence and public risk.

Says acting Sergeant Robb McGirr of the Port Moody police: "We've seen an
incredible increase in the presence of organized crime in these
associations and these grow-ops. It's not about a couple of kids with a
Westfalia van and 12 plants to go surfing up in Tofino. It's big, big
business."

Coquitlam RCMP Inspector Earl Moulton, says an average of six murders a
year in B.C. are directly attributable to marijuana-growing and as many as
20 more are indirectly associated over disputes, rip-offs or bad debts.

Moulton is vice-chair of the regional operation police managers committee,
which meets to set regional policing priorities. He estimates that 80 per
cent of marijuana grows are gang-related.

A federal government Criminal Intelligence Service Canada report for 1999
seems to put the number even higher.

"Vietnamese criminals in Vancouver now are responsible for approximately 80
per cent of the hydroponic marijuana grow operations that are investigated
by the police."

The report also notes the active involvement of the B.C. Hells Angels
motorcycle gang.

EXPORTING PRO-POT IDEAS

Nor is the B.C. harvest limited to cannabis and seeds. Also exported, via
magazines and the Internet, are cannabis science and cultivation techniques
- -- and advocacy of the heretical notion that this plant should be
decriminalized.

In the eyes of some frustrated local police -- and agencies of the
government of the United States and even of the United Nations -- British
Columbia is a haven of lax laws, weak-kneed courts and unsettling ideas.

The International Narcotics Control Board, a Vienna-based UN agency, warns
in its 1999 annual report that indoor cultivation of cannabis is promoted
worldwide by sales of seeds and paraphernalia on Canadian Internet servers.
Most are located in B.C.

"There is an urgent need for action required to counter the spread of such
cultivation."

A report this spring by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law
Enforcement Affairs, an arm of the U.S. state department, is even freer
with its criticism.

The Canadian courts in general, and B.C.'s courts in particular, fail to
recognize the value of tough sentences as a deterrent to crime, it says.

"While the RCMP has mounted effective operations against narcotics and
other criminal organizations, the impact of these efforts have been
undermined in numerous cases by court decisions."

B.C. police are slightly more circumspect in their criticism of their
home-field judiciary.

Moulton says the operational policing committee has "a generalized concern
with the levels of sentences in British Columbia."

He explains the disparity with harsher U.S. sentences. "[There] you're
looking at minimums of five to 10 years for our kind of grows, where our
guys were getting $2,000 and $3,000 fines." Cornered smugglers, he says,
sprint north of the border to get caught on Canadian soil.

Committee members have made their case for tougher sentences at recent
judicial education conferences -- and now through community impact
statements prepared for court. "You do see now some changes," says Moulton,
citing the "deuce-less" (two years less a day) sentence that one judge has
started handing to growers.

"That's a trend that will likely continue and grow," he says.

THE CASE FOR BACKING OFF

The problem is not the pot, it's the prohibition against pot, says
Abbotsford defence lawyer John Conroy, whose clients include grow operators
and Vancouver's 1,000-member Compassion Club, which distributes marijuana
for medical uses.

There are clear parallels with alcohol prohibition, in which B.C. helped
slake the U.S. thirst for prohibited spirits in the 1920s and 1930s.

Prohibition created not only the rum-runners who are are now semi-folk
heroes in B.C. history, but also hijackers and organized gangs. The tougher
the enforcement, the greater the risk. The greater the risk, the higher the
price. The higher the price the nastier the people.

"There's no way to avoid it in a black-market type situation," he says.

He looks at the police publicity initiative. They no longer say much bad
about marijuana itself, he says, because the evidence is that it is safer
than all the other drugs, including alcohol or tobacco. As well, the
federal government has committed to investigating its possible medical
applications.

"You can't kill yourself on the stuff. It's one of those drugs that's
non-toxic. It's a mild sedative, and that's it."

'SYMPTOMS OF PROHIBITION'

Instead, police talk about gang activity, or trading marijuana for cocaine
or that people are destroying growing houses and causing fires from poor
electrical work, he says.

"But, obviously, these are all symptoms of prohibition. They're not harms
to society from the use of marijuana."

Indeed, police claims that marijuana is now so potent it's virtually a hard
drug, aren't born out by the facts.

The RCMP's new national drug situation report says the average
hallucinogenic THC content of all pot tested since 1995 is about six per
cent. That's not significantly higher than past decades.

The report also dismisses oft-repeated claims that Canadian pot is traded
kilo-for-kilo for U.S. cocaine. Noting the much higher value of cocaine, it
says, "such a rate of exchange does not make sound commercial sense."

Then there is the undeniable domestic market -- somebody is smoking the stuff.

Twelve per cent of Greater Vancouver area residents admit to smoking pot in
the past year, according to the Viewpoints poll commissioned by The Sun.

That would make for a province full of criminals if the crackdown extends
to the customers who are buying B.C.'s harvest.

Conroy calls Canada's current marijuana laws, "the greatest fraud that's
ever been perpetrated on the general public" -- one the generates work for
lawyers, police, prosecutors and judges, while driving the business into
the arms of organized crime.

Even at that, he dismisses police estimates of gang activity as grossly
exaggerated.

"Let's face it, most of the people that I have represented, there's no
evidence of them being part of any organized gang."

Probably no single writer has been in more grow houses in B.C. than
American "marijuana journalist" Pete Brady, who writes for both mainstream
and alternative publications, like the Vancouver-published Cannabis Culture
magazine.

He estimates the number of B.C. "non-triad, non-Hell's Angels growers" at
closer to 20,000 or 30,000. Many buy their seeds from Marc Emery, B.C.'s
outspoken pot activist and publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine, and take
advice from Emery's internationally distributed magazine and Web site.

There are also gang growers, he concedes, the kind who use sniffer dogs to
search out and rob rival grow houses, who chop off fingers or leave enemies
floating off Wreck Beach, he says.

The major players have deep pockets, tight security and excellent cover. "I
visited a grow operating in a 22,000-square-foot mansion, it was like a
castle," Brady says of one Vancouver-area operation.

"The front part of the operation was a yuppie house with a yuppie couple as
tokens. And then, behind the drywall, was the most sophisticated hydroponic
operation in the world," he says. And behind that, "I met people that
scared me to death."

They are the products of prohibition, he says, urging Canadian courts not
to get sucked into the U.S. drug war. There federal marijuana sentences,
due to political pressure, are often years longer than those for rape or
murder. Proceeds of crime legislation can seize assets even without a
conviction. Extending marijuana penalties to anything approaching
U.S. levels would distort Canada's entire sentencing regimen, say critics.
It would also choke the courts and swamp the prison system.

And to what end? The majority of America's two million prisoners are now
non-violent offenders. The majority are drug law violators, mostly poor and
from visible minorities, according to the Justice Policy Institute, a
U.S. research organization advocating alternatives to incarceration.

When the U.S. state department international drug control strategy report
this spring criticized B.C. courts for their low marijuana sentences and
conviction rate, it earned a blunt rebuke from the chief judge of B.C.'s
provincial court.

B.C.'s Chief Provincial Court Judge Robert Metzger said the U.S. has the
worst drug problems of any country he knows.

What makes him angry about U.S. criticism, Metzger told The Sun in March,
"is that they have a horrendously disproportionate number of black and poor
people in their jails. They don't seem to have a grip on their problems; I
don't see why they should be criticizing us for ours."

JUST 'NORMAL JOES'?

As their court date approaches, Jennifer says she can't read a coherent
message into the wildly fluctuating views that society and B.C. courts now
hold on cannabis crime and punishment.

"That one is scary," she says, sipping coffee after a recent court
appearance. "It really varies from judge to judge."

Morgan also worries about the police crackdown at a time when society can't
seem to decide if marijuana is a healing herb or a demon weed. He awaits
trial, certain of the laws but uncertain anymore of their application.

Morgan, who claims his wife had nothing to do with his pot growing -- "a
non-commercial lark" -- insists that he's not a hydro stealer or a house
wrecker or a member of a gang. "Some of us are just normal Joes who have
made an unfortunate mistake."

The crime in that, he'll find out soon enough.

In the absence of serious social and political debate, this is how the
marijuana policy is being written: in the isolation of a dozen difference
courtrooms on any given week. One sentence at a time.

TAKING THE MEASURE OF B.C.'S CANNABIS CULTURE

- - British Columbians, compared with residents of any other province, were
at least twice as likely to be involved in a drug incident involving the
police. (1997, Statistics Canada)

- - However, police officers in B.C. were far less likely to file charges
than law enforcement officials in other parts of Canada. The B.C. charge
rate for cannabis was 35 per cent compared with 79 per cent in the rest of
Canada. (1997 Statistics Canada)

- - Almost a third (31 per cent) of Canadian offences related to cannabis
cultivation during 1997 occurred in B.C. Total cultivation offences in
Canada rose from a total of 595 in 177 to 6,632 in 1997. (1997 Statistics
Canada)

- - Percentage of Canadians less likely to vote for a politician because the
candidate has . . .

- - Falsified his or her resume: 92

- - Been found guilty of minor fraud: 82 per cent

- - A known drinking problem: 83 per cent

- - Smoked pot: 35 per cent