HARSH POT SENTENCE IS THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Large grow operations are not the victimless crimes they're made out to be.
Unless the courts impose harsher sentences, neighbours and children within
the houses will be danger.

Police and prosecutors have not been shy in asking the courts to impose
something more substantial than the discouragingly minimal consequences for
convicted marijuana growers.

As it turns out, the B.C. Supreme Court obliged them in late January, and
then some, when Justice Allan Stewart gave a 30-year-old Vancouver man
convicted of pot farming two years jail time, eight times the three-month
sentence the prosecution had asked for.

In transcripts posted on the court's Web site this week, Justice Stewart
clearly felt some of the same irritation and frustration police and Crown
prosecutors have complained about.

There is no doubt marijuana growing is an epidemic. In 1997, U.S. border
guards seized 51 kilos of B.C. pot bound for the States; this year, by
October, they had already seized more than 10 times that amount. Rough math
would suggest production has also increased tenfold. (The U.S. drug
authorities estimate three-quarters of all B.C. pot is grown for the
American market.)

And while arrests have risen as well production is apparently undeterred
because of lenient sentences; only one in five people convicted receives a
jail term and 80 per cent of those sentences are 90 days or less. Most
receive an average fine of $3,000, or less than the wholesale price of one
kilo of pot.

And so Justice Stewart declared the time had come to "up the ante", and said
it was simply bad luck that this man was in the dock that day.

It may turn out to be bad luck all around. The judge was well within the
scope of the law to impose that sentence -- the maximum under section 7.1 of
the Controlled Substances Act is seven years -- but it is unlikely to
survive appeal. For one thing, sentencing guidelines in the Criminal Code
instruct judges to consider every possible sanction other than prison for
all offenders, and this was a first offence.

But in every other regard Justice Stewart was right, particularly in saying
marijuana cultivation is far from the victimless crime many believe it to
be. In this case, the man's home, where he lives with his wife and child,
had been the target of a home invasion aimed at the drugs and cash on the
premises. There have been many such violent robberies of marijuana growers
in recent months. Because such operations are increasingly found in
residential neighbourhoods the potential for tragedy is high.

Amateur rewiring to bypass B.C. Hydro meters is often the cause of fires
which endanger neighbours, and explosions from propane heaters used to dry
the plants are a common danger. For just those reasons the province has
apprehended more than 40 children living in houses where marijuana growing
operations were busted in the last six weeks.

Justice Stewart should have chosen a case involving a repeat offender, not a
first-timer, on which to make his stand. But he had the right idea that
harsh punishment is needed.