WAR ON MARIJUANA WASTE OF TIME, MONEY - CRITICS

REGINA (CP) - For months, RCMP officers had a secret window into Leland
Dosch's life.

They taped his family's phone calls, studied his daily routine - even broke
into his home and planted listening devices.

Then, in a carefully planned manoeuvre, they raided his rural Saskatchewan
farmhouse and arrested him as a suspected drug trafficker.

It was hailed as the successful climax to a long, painstaking investigation
- - another victory for the good guys in the war on drugs.

But after the intense surveillance, thousands of taped conversations, and
countless hours on the job, what did police have to show for their
Herculean efforts? Thirty immature marijuana plants and less than a
kilogram of pot.

The Dosch case and others like it have some experts questioning the wisdom
of devoting so much time and money to battle a drug that many people regard
as harmless and millions of Canadians use.

And with the latest statistics showing marijuana accounting for 72 per cent
of all drug offences, some suggest it's time to back off.

"There's nothing more costly than a drug case for Canadian criminal
justice," said Alan Young, a professor at Osgoode Hall law school in Toronto.

"When you get to drugs, you find that the cost of enforcing these laws is
extraordinary and, in my opinion, it saps the criminal justice system of
necessary resources to deal with serious predatory crime."

Young estimates authorities across the country spend $1 billion a year to
battle the drug trade - 70 per cent of that on marijuana.

"People have to start wondering whether this is money well spent," he said.

It's not just the cost that bothers Young, it's the consequences for civil
liberty.

"There are enormous invasions of privacy in the name of intelligence
gathering," Young said.

"You often come up with diddly-squat and what you have effectively done is
invade the privacy of dozens of people at dozens of locations in order to
find out that Joe had 200 plants growing in his basement."

Mark Brayford, the lawyer who represented Dosch, agrees the intrusion of
electronic surveillance is troubling.

"The vast majority of people whose voices are on wiretaps don't know it,"
he said.

Brayford pointed to the fact 2,000 hours of tape involving dozens of
innocent people yielded just 20 bits of incriminating evidence against Dosch.

Brayford questioned the severity of sentences for marijuana offences. He
noted in Saskatchewan, trafficking marijuana can net a longer sentence than
molesting a child.

For Dosch, who was convicted last month, it brought a 16-month jail term.

Umberto Iorfida, president of NORML Canada (National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws), said it's time to end the war against pot.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police is against legalization but
wants Ottawa to look at decriminalization in some instances.