POLICE REFUSE TO ADMIT HUMILIATING DEFEAT OVER GROWS

Editor: The Standard

RE: RCMP track down grow-ops

"With four grows, in just two days, it shows that police are taking
grows seriously". Most Canadians would feel a lot safer if police got
off gardening duty, and got into guarding the subways, border
crossings, airports, and train stations where they belong.

RCMP statistics say there could be as many as 50,000 grow-ops in
Canada. If police on every force did nothing but bust grow-ops, and
took down as many as 5 per day, it would take over 12 years to get
them all. This is providing, of course, that no new operations spring
up while the cops are busy with the ones they know about. Meanwhile,
every other crime would receive no investigation at all.

Police usually exaggerate about grow-ops. They do this so that it will
appear to the media - and the public - that they are actually
accomplishing something useful, which we already knows isn't true.
This keeps the budget big, because the "War On Certain Drugs" was
never meant to be won, it was meant to be continuous.

Police say that grow-ops present a fire hazard, but out of the 50,000
grow-ops the police know about, how many have actually caught fire?
How many people have died from grow-ops, and how many have died from
Tazers? Clearly, Tazers are a much bigger threat to public safety.

Much like someone trying to bail out a sinking ship with a thimble,
police aren't making any progress fighting the proliferation of
grow-ops, and they know it. They refuse to admit their humiliating
defeat, however, so instead of asking the government to plug the leak
- - by regulating cannabis growers - they just keep asking for more
elaborate and expensive thimbles. It leads me to wonder who the real
criminals are.

Russell Barth

Federal Medical Marijuana License Holder

Educators For Sensible Drug Policy

Ottawa