CRACK DOWN ON COCAINE AND CRACK

The editor writes in the Points of View section of the Chilliwack
Progress March 13, 2009 edition. Once again Chilliwack has earned the
dubious distinction of being listed among the Top 10 "most dangerous"
places to live in Canada according to McLean's magazine.

In the same editorial it was written, RCMP spokesperson Const. Angie
Bowen was quick to point out that the statistics used by the magazine
to reach its conclusions were old, 2007, and since then Chilliwack
has implemented several new crime reduction strategies.

We all know the Chilliwack crime statistics are much higher today,
than in 2007, because the RCMP told us crime was way up, when they
came to City Hall to ask for more money.

Today in Chilliwack we have violent, unemployed, homeless, drug
addicts, men and women in the community who do crime as the only
option they have left.

Don't prejudge them, because the crime option could very easily happen to you.

Visualize this scenario, you have lost your job and unable to find
another job. When your unemployment benefits run out, welfare denies
you assistance because you meet the criteria for being physically
able to work. With no money and unable to pay your mortgage or rent
you are forced to become homeless, live on the street, beg for spare
change and sleep in a public shelter where you are further physically
degraded and have to fight every night for a bed mat on the floor in
a crowded windowless room.

Then to make matters even worse, one cold winter day, while you are
sitting on the pavement behind the closed Empress Hotel, soaking up
the morning sun trying to get warm and wishing you had money for a
hot cup of coffee, another homeless person, also seeking warmth from
the cold, sits down beside you and offers you a toke on his crack
pipe; and you being so depressed at being homeless and the
circumstances you have found yourself in accept the offer, thinking,
it is only once, I won't get addicted.

But what happens in reality, by the end of the day you are a full
blown crack cocaine addict, who will do anything to get more crack cocaine.

After a month of doing property crime to pay for your crack cocaine
addiction you finally get arrested, sent to prison, and you become a
statistic of the success of RCMP policing.

In the prison you have a bed, three meals a day, gang recruitment,
gang training, and then you are released back into the community a
far more dangerous reoffender and gang member.

Cocaine and crack cocaine is the most dangerous and addictive drug in
the world. Why are we not seeing the police arresting the cocaine
smugglers and crack producers?

For the last five years, all that has been reported is, the police
close down this marijuana grow op, the police close down that
marijuana grow op, and so on and so on. Marijuana arrests seem to be
the primary crime focus of the police. Yet, very seldom, if ever, do
the police report arrests of the cocaine smugglers, crack producers
and crack cocaine dealers.

This obsession by our city of ridding the city of marijuana is out of
control and I am angry because I am a law abiding renter who has been
subjected to numerous searches of my home by my building
superintendent, ordered by the city and the police, searching for
marijuana. How would you like to have strangers force their way into
your home every month and search every room and closet in your home
for marijuana? You'd be screaming bloody murder.

The police are using untrained unpaid innocent civilians on the front
line in their battle on marijuana. Will an innocent building
superintendent have to be murdered before the police and the city of
Chilliwack admit searching for criminal marijuana grow ops is a
police job; not a job for untrained civilians.

Cocaine and crack cocaine, not marijuana, is responsible for 99% of
the crime in Chilliwack. Our crime prevention strategy should target
the drug that is destroying our community, cocaine and crack cocaine,
and stop wasting the millions of police dollars hunting down and
busting down doors of pot smokers and hemp growers.

Mike Hodge