SEEING POT THROUGH BENIGN SOFT LENS IGNORES HARD REALITIES OF GROW OPS

I've never been big on marijuana. Though I did smoke it one long-ago
adolescent summer, it was all about lust for the boy who was selling
it, not out of any particular affection for weed. That particular boy,
whatever he was selling, I would have bought just to be near him.

Anyway, I found the whole accompanying exercise tedious, all that
hideous pacifism and the cross-legged sitting and the stupid stoner
vocabulary and the long drum solos. It made me crazy.

I didn't touch the stuff again until seven or eight years ago and then
again once last year; each time a toke or two was more than enough to
remind me I didn't like it. And the drug has changed dramatically in
the intervening years. It is usually estimated to be between 10 and 25
times stronger than it was in its hippie heyday. So, where dope once
made me sleepy and crabby, today's version goes right to my tiny
brain, and as a control freak, I can't have that. I am far better
behaved on tequila.

Still, I'm not sure I subscribe to the reefer madness/gateway drug
theory (one toke and you're on a direct path to crack or heroin), and
in a general way, I don't much give a hoot what people do in their own
lives so long as it doesn't harm anyone else.

Thus it is I reacted to the recent picture of that poor giant-footed
swimmer Michael Phelps smoking dope out of a bong with a bit of a
yawn. What was interesting about that to me was the fact that he was
ratted out by whoever sold the photo to the News of the World,
presumably someone who was with him at the time. This modern penchant
for squealing on others - especially celebrity others - by taking and
selling pictures of their various indiscretions is way more repugnant
than any amount of dope-smoking.

All that said, I don't see marijuana wholly through the benign soft
lens of the Sixties.

Dope is fabulously lucrative, its profits attracting the involvement
of organized crime (now a big player in the business) with attendant
weapons and violence. Illegal grow operations, with their electrical
bypasses and jerry-rigged lights, pose a major fire hazard, a recent
example occurring just this week, when a late-night blaze that razed a
house in Toronto led to the discovery of a suspected grow op. Fires
are almost 25 times more likely to start in a house with a grow op
than a regular house.

And the damage doesn't end there. Grow ops are also breeding grounds
for disgusting moulds and fungi, with health problems for those who
live nearby, and woe be to the poor home buyer who unknowingly buys
such a place superficially tarted up for sale.

Three and four years ago, in two separate parts of the country, grow
ops found themselves with an unlikely opponent - their local friendly,
beloved-by-everyone firefighters.

In 2004 in Niagara Falls, a fireman was trapped in a fire and burned;
the building turned out to be a grow op. Pat Burke, then the city's
fire chief and now the Ontario Fire Marshal, had Deputy Chief Jim
Jessop examine how the department could apply the Ontario Fire Code
and Building Code to grow ops - and if necessary to the clandestine
labs producing meth and ecstasy.

With a new protocol in hand, the fire department then began supporting
the local police when they moved to take down a grow op or lab, and
the department would lay charges for any violations of the fire code.
The fire service then enlisted the help of the City of Niagara Falls -
through its building, legal and finance department - to make sure that
no one would buy or rent such a home unless and until it was properly
fixed up as good as new.

They had remarkable success. At the height of their grow-op problem,
Deputy Chief Jessop says, one in every 257 homes in the city contained
an illegal marijuana grow operation. Between 2004 and 2009, working
with the police and the municipality, Niagara has seen a 500-per-cent
reduction in the number of grow ops.

And the fire department has earned back more than $500,000 in fines
and won more than 17 custodial sentences for those involved in grow
ops. In fact, Deputy Chief Jessop says, the fire department has
consistently received "more jail time and higher fines" for fire-code
violations than the police have prosecuting offenders under the
Criminal Code.

About a year later, in Surrey, B.C., Fire Chief Len Garis noticed two
disturbing trends: first, the police weren't able to respond to the
increasing number of complaints from the public about grow ops, and
second, the number of house fires in his city was rising, at one point
averaging more than one fire a month associated with a grow operation.

To cut a long story short, Surrey took a sober, considered approach
much like Niagara Falls - it formed electrical-fire safety-initiative
teams, composed of firefighters, electrical inspectors and police,
and, acting on the unanswered tips police had received, began
conducting inspections on homes where the hydro bills were at least
three times higher than the norm. They gave notice, and did it in a
lawful manner so that with one proviso (the police presence, which was
found to violate homeowners' right to privacy and breach the Charter),
the teams were deemed legal and proper by the Supreme Court of British
Columbia last year.

In the first three years, the teams inspected 1,002 addresses in
Surrey, the police marijuana-enforcement teams hitting another 623,
and sure enough, the number of fires began dropping (last year there
were three or four), ads for hydroponic shops dropped, and in the
process, the fire service recovered $3.7-million for Surrey taxpayers.

"If [only]we can separate the product [marijuana] and the situation,"
Chief Garis says. "In terms of marijuana, I don't give a damn what
people do. But the fires, tampering with the electrical system,
drive-by shootings" that are the byproducts of grow ops are genuine
public-safety issues.

Mysteriously, municipalities in the B.C. Interior and on Vancouver
Island have recently reported huge increases in hydro consumption.
Grow-op owners there would be wise to remember that old bit of
Sixties' wisdom: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone's
not out to get you.