FAR TOO MUCH ANTIPATHY TO LITTLE GREEN PLANT

Editor: This is a response to "Feds urged to cancel grow-op licences"
(The Times, March 11).

Although I don't use it, nor want my kids to use it, the little green
plant has no basis for the amount of antipathy shown toward it. For
millennia, its curative power has been used to treat both physical and
mental/emotional conditions with great success in the right
circumstances.

I'm uncomfortable with the ongoing knee-jerk reactions of powerful
people, reactions that only serve to keep the means to grow and
distribute it in the hands of the criminals who care little what the
plant is used for. It is well known that criminals will and do often
kill, maim, extort, and make huge piles of tax-free profit at the
expense of those who use it for curative or pleasurable purpose.

The specious argument for closure made by our local RCMP head is that
a few grow-op licensees have had grow-rips and break-ins happen. If
this is solid logic, then we should surely shut down car dealerships
that sell us vehicles that are broken into, stolen or trashed at the
hands of idiot criminals.

Banks should close immediately, having shown clearly that they cannot
be trusted to do the people's business without multi-billion dollar
white-collar crime, destroying the ability of a quick economic
recovery in North America.

Churches should close their doors permanently, considering the huge
number of sexual crimes against children and young men and women that
have become a heavily publicized blight upon organized religion.

The Langleys' two mayors are of a single mind: distribution should be
through pharmacies. There can't be many pharmacies that would want to
become a cannabis distribution centre, considering their prominently
placed signs about how little of this or that type of narcotic they
have onsite, meant to prevent robberies.

My point is that the only good choice is to legalize and tax
marijuana, and begin to treat people as grown-ups, thus taking the
biker gangs and high-ranking criminal element out of the equation
within months. And stop demonizing one of nature's greatest gifts -- if
we only had the guts to use it that way.

Eli Bryan Nelson,

Langley