BC SKUNK WEED LANDS PROF IN TROUBLE

VANCOUVER (CUP) A University of Victoria sociology professor who
specializes in the family's role in society, has pleaded guilty to
cultivating and possessing marijuana for the purpose of trafficking.

During a raid on the home of Jean Veevers last Tuesday, police found 122
marijuana plants and 8.6 kilograms of marijuana.

The University of Victoria says it will wait until Veevers is sentenced
before deciding on any disciplinary action.

"I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens," said Patty Pitts, a
university information officer. "There's no cut and dried policy for this
kind of thing."

Veevers, who has been a faculty member at the University of Victoria since
1980, is slated to teach a third-year course on the family and society
starting January 1999.

This may be the first time a pot-cultivating professor has been discovered
in the country, according to Neil Boyd, a criminology professor at Simon
Fraser University (SFU).

Boyd says that Veevers wouldn't be the only professor in Canada with a
criminal record, even though the cultivation for the purpose of trafficking
is most unique.

"Certainly there are faculty in Canadian universities who teach with
criminal records, and there are faculty who have received convictions for
things like impaired driving," he said.

But Mel Hunt, Veevers' legal counsel, has asked the court to consider an
electronic monitoring sentence, whereby Veevers would be effectively
tracked via a device physically attached to him.

On November 27th, Veevers is expected to appear before the British Columbia
Supreme Court to receive his sentence.

Last year, CNN reported rough estimates that the indoor marijuana growth
industry in British Columbia was then valued at hundreds of millions of
dollars per year, possibly billions.

"Nowhere is the boom greater than British Columbia," reported Larry
LaMotte, a senior correspondent for CNN Impact.

Since then, the debate in Canada over marijuana's legitimacy for medical
usage has made headlines with at least four cases of Canadians involved in
legal challenges over medical usage of marijuana in Saskatoon, Alberta and
Ontario.

In Toronto, AIDS activist Jim Wakeford recently launched a publicity
campaign to expose the difficulties he's having in securing legal
permission to use marijuana for medicinal purposes.

The Federal Ministry of Health told Wakeford that cocaine and heroin are
drugs that have been rubber-stamped in the past as controlled substances
for terminally ill patients.

At the same time, the ministry also stipulated that marijuana was off limits.

"It is only recently that marijuana in Western science is known for its
medical use," said Diane Riley, representing the Canadian Foundation for
Drug Policy (CFDP).

"Before, it had no medical use as far as the government's concern because
it hasn't been approved medically." Riley adds that while heroin and
cocaine were approved for pain relief in the 70's, marijuana has remained
unnoticed.

The drug policy foundation has been fighting for years to bring about the
de-criminalization of marijuana and other drugs they deem as soft.

But Bonnie Fox-McIntyre, a spokesperson for Federal Minister of Health
Allan Rock, says that the procedures within Health Canada prohibit any such
permission to be granted because there has never been a federal clinical
test weighing the benefits of the drug.

"There is no scientific data that supports the medical use of marijuana,"
she said, adding that the ministry would be happy to accept applications to
conduct a clinical trial.

But Riley says the time for de-criminalization is now.

"Now there's more public sentiment and more people are in favour of
de-criminalization. It will start with lack of enforcement or minor
penalties. The same steps were taken in Australia and the Netherlands,
where the final stages of de-criminalization have been achieved," said
Riley.

And according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
in the United States, one arrest related to the possession of marijuana
occurs every 49 seconds.

With files from Carla Tonelli