TAX POT TO REDUCE SERIOUS CRIME

Dear Editor,

Langley MP Mark Warawa and the Conservatives are again engaging in
retail politics, rather than using our taxes wisely.

Despite more than half of Canadians feeling that pot should be
privatized, the Conservatives insist that taxpayers should fork out
hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for more prisons, judges, and
police to prosecute pot smokers and small growers.

Yet, nearly every expert recognizes that organized gangs will
continue to make billions in tax free profits.

Bill C-15, recently supported by Mark Warawa, sets minimum prison
sentences of six months in jail for someone who grows as few as five
pot plants. This will further clog up our courts and result in longer
waits to try dangerous offenders such as the Bacon brothers, while
forcing the provinces to build more remand centres in our communities.

Where are our politician's spending priorities? This money would be
better spent on hiring more doctors to care for seniors and creating
new after-school programs to keep teenagers out of crime.

With deficits soaring, in the next few years governments will be
forced to cut services or increase taxes. Instead of raising income
taxes and cutting hospitals, it only makes sense that we should
follow California's lead and consider taxing cannabis and reducing
the amount of non-violent offenders whom we choose to imprison.

Privatizing pot would help cut the federal deficit, put gangs out of
business, and keep taxes lower for non-pot smokers.

It is time that fiscal conservatives demand that the federal
government use our tax dollars responsibly.

Dan Grice, Langley