POLICE-STATE TACTIC APPROVED BY HIGH COURT

Let's say you're walking down Yonge Street with your backpack (or
your briefcase or whatever) and a cop thinks (or claims to think)
there's a smell of pot coming from it.

The cop uses that superior sense of smell as probable cause to search
your backpack. You can't resist or you'll find yourself in handcuffs,
maybe Tasered, certainly brutalized to some degree and hauled off to
51 or 52 Division.

Inside the backpack the cop finds no pot, but does discover you're
carrying a box of small baggies you picked up at the dollar store.
The backpack also contains your iPod, your laptop and thick pile of
about $1,000 in small bills wrapped in a rubber band.

Plainly they're the proceeds of crime. It's clear to any official
with a paranoid (or greedy) bone in his or her body that baggies are
illegally used to package marijuana for sale and that the money, the
electronics and any other luxury items you have in that backpack were
acquired through the unlawful sale of pot.

Now you didn't have any pot on you and, if after police search your
residence-as they have a right to do under the probable-cause
doctrine-they still don't find any pot, you're not out of the woods.
You won't be charged with a crime because there's no evidence that
would hold up in court against you.

However, you can beat the rap but not the ride. They have a right to
confiscate whatever they find that might have been bought with money
from sales of pot that are inferred from the fact you have a box of
baggies you planned to use to wrap your sandwiches.

They'll grab from your backpack that stack of bills that you've been
saving for months in a box. You wrapped them in a rubber band because
it was too thick to put in your wallet and you planned to deposit the
cash in the bank that day.

Maybe they'll find other things in your residence that should be
taken from you as well because they could reasonably be inferred as
the fruits of an illegal activity you haven't even been charged with.
Baggies, cash, luxury items and a cop's purported sensitive nose are
all it takes for the police state to rob you of your belongings.

That's been happening for years in the U.S., making it a police state
in that sense even before the W. Bush regime cranked up the
Orwellian-named Patriot Act after the Twin Towers catastrophe.

There it's called Civil Forfeiture. It turns all levels of police
into potential treasure hunters for their departments, which get a
piece of the take, and their superior levels of government. Many
police departments wallow in wealth funded by their money-grabbing
civil forfeiture activities.

Just Google "abuses of civil forfeiture" to see the overwhelming
numbers of atrocities it causes in the U.S.

Now the Supreme Court of Canada has given the provinces a green light
to launch into these treasure hunts. It ruled that an Ontario law
passed under the nasty regime of Mike Harris in 2001, the Civil
Remedies Act (CRA), isn't a bone-headed villain's assault on the
righteous concept of punishment only with proof of crime, but a great
way to compensate all levels of government for their expenses in
upholding the law.

It's a tax on the guilty, the unlucky and the unpopular.

What a shame that Dalton McGuinty permitted the appeal of that CRA to
continue. It's clearly open to such horrid abuses as occur routinely
in the U.S. Even though it's deemed constitutional by Canada's high
court, it's still evil and wrong.

Certainly no progressive ("liberal") premier would permit such a law
in Ontario. But McGuinty is a neocon. Likewise Stephen Harper, whose
government recently called for stepped-up penalties against the
Killer Weed, otherwise known as the largely harmless weed marijuana.

Neocons are lackeys of big business and enemies of the increasing
poor class and of the diminishing middle class. Marijuana prohibition
is the paragon of corporate abuse of the public good for selfish
profit. Likewise alcohol.

Pot's prohibition started with U.S. newspaper mogul William Randolph
Hearst. He owned thousands of acres of pulpwood forests that couldn't
compete with hemp (marijuana's other name) to make newsprint. Hemp is
cheap, readily renewable and makes a superior paper product.

He funded the Reefer Madness furor in the federal government to
outlaw hemp and fatten his bottom line. Newsprint sacrificed trees
from then on.

Alcohol has a similar story. The culprit this time was J. D.
Rockefeller, the U.S. oil mogul who saw Henry Ford making Model T
automobiles that ran on alcohol. Alcohol is clean burning, has more
octane than gasoline, doesn't have to be refined in costly and
polluting facilities, and doesn't explode. But most threatening to a
big-time oilman: Alcohol can be produced profitably and cheaply by
many small operations. It's a perfect fuel for cars.

Rocky gave what was then a monumental $4 million to the Women's
Christian Temperance League. The rest is the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition.

The marijuana prohibition continues to this day for several reasons,
the least of which is its moderate to minimal effects on human health
and psyche:

1. Marijuana is a profit-centre for governments strictly because it's
contraband. It's a weed. If it weren't illegal, it would be
practically free. It accounts for the lion's share of thieving civil
forfeitures in the U.S. and was the test case that validated
forfeiture in Canada.

2. Marijuana sales by government operatives fund covert activities by
the U.S. The Iran-Contra scandal during the Ronald Reagan years is an example.

3. Some major corporations would suffer profit declines if hemp and
pot arent' illegal.

They gain by the pain prohibition causes almost everyone.

These are benefits created by decriminalizing marijuana:

1. Those with medical conditions that benefit from pot use would have
better access to their palliative.

2. Harmful grow operations would no longer be profitable and would
simply disappear.

3. Smuggling of pot would end and marijuana would cease to be a
profit centre for organized crime.

4. Law enforcement would pursue more worthy duties.

The hazards of decriminalization are:

1. As with anything from booze to gambling, some will blow their
brains out on pot and become problems to themselves and others.

2. Some will drive while under the influence. But they're likely less
of a hazard than drunk drivers.

3. As with alcohol, children will see that marijuana is socially
sanctioned in certain situations and environments.

If a huge number of backyards, patios and sunny windows have
marijuana plants growing, the price of pot will be minimal. The
novelty of forbidden fruit will have vanished and a fruitless
prohibition that only enriches some huge corporations and bureaucrats
will probably diminish the use of the Killer Weed.