MEDIA DUPED ON DOPE STORY

As Canada nears the end of its media-imposed mourning for the four
unfortunate RCMP officers killed in Alberta last week, it might
finally be time to call the nation's police officials out for their
duplicitous appropriation of the shootings as ammunition in the war on
drugs.

In no way should this be taken as disrespectful to the young men who
lost their lives in the line of duty on March 3. No one should have to
die for their job, particularly when that job involves something as
mundane as repossessing a pickup truck - which, now that some of the
smoke surrounding the sad events on that Mayerthorpe farm has cleared,
appears to be what those officers were called in to do.

The fact that the RCMP was so quick to muddy the circumstances of the
deaths of four of its own men by insinuating that they were gunned
down while marching into a heavily fortified marijuana-growing
operation, however, is in entirely bad taste.

Their killer, James Roszko, had about 20 marijuana plants on the
property. Twenty pot plants don't make for a terribly lucrative
operation, if they even qualify it as an "operation" at all. That
number is, in fact, downright mom-and-pop when one considers that a
much-publicized raid on a covert plantation in Barrie's old Molson
brewery last year yielded 30,000 plants. That, my friends, is a
grow-op. And not a single gunshot was fired during its police siege.

Were the RCMP and the chorus of Canadian police chiefs - blowing hot
air about the "plague" of grow-ops afflicting our nation - hoping to
drum up a little anti-marijuana fervour at the Liberal policy
convention in Ottawa last weekend?

Or was the RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli's claim (later
retracted) that the men were killed fighting for "a drug-free Canada"
merely an attempt to make their deaths come off a bit more heroically
in the media?

Whatever the motivation, it looked like shameless opportunism on the
RCMP's part, another case of the police manipulating the media and
fomenting middle-class panic to get what they want - which is,
inevitably, more money and more men to make us safer from the very
perils they're fond of exaggerating.

We've had experience with that in Toronto under outgoing police Chief
Julian Fantino.

Remember all those knives and guns "seized" by police at raves a few
years back? One hears echoes of the same fear-mongering in the recent
police chatter about grow-ops: In the immediate aftermath of the
Alberta shootings, it was impossible to get through an article about
the affair without hearing some police official linking marijuana
cultivation to organized crime, guns, child neglect and booby traps,
booby traps, booby traps. I've never heard the term "booby trap"
invoked so much in a concentrated period of time.

A lot of this is grasping at straws. An OPP official testifying in
court over the Barrie affair is on record saying that the force has
encountered violence in only two of more than 800 grow-op raids in
Ontario. And Sgt. Birnie Smith, an Alberta drug-enforcement officer
quoted in a CP story on grow-ops last week, could come up with no more
pressing public threat from the operations than neighbours being
mistakenly targeted by criminals showing up to rip off the wrong address.

"They go in, they're armed, and there can be serious consequences," he
warned. "It's a danger if you're living next door to it."

Still, the police got what they wanted. Given the circumstances in
which these exaggerations and half-truths were bandied about, the
media - no doubt delighted to have a little bullet-riddled,
American-style War on Drugs violence in its own backyard - reprinted
them unquestioningly. The grow-op angle only receded in recent days,
as it became more and more obvious that marijuana had very little to
do with the killings and everything to do with what happens when you
allow a deranged, antisocial loner to amass a large private arsenal
out in Hell's Half Acre, Alta.

Pledging stiffer sentences for anyone caught growing pot is now an
easy and obvious public-relations mark for politicians, and lingering
fallout from the RCMP's grow-op disinformation will no doubt make it
even tougher for the Liberals to get their half-assed
decriminalization bill through Parliament.

This, of course, is missing the point. Decriminalization won't do
anything to remove the criminal, potentially violent aspects of the
marijuana trade, since it still leaves cultivation illegal. Legalizing
pot completely is the only way to eliminate that side of the game, and
the U.S. is likely to invade us if the Liberals allow that to happen.

The entire legal debate is useless, anyway, as no one's about to stop
growing or smoking marijuana in this country. Supply equals demand,
and the demand is ravenous. As Ron Allen of the RCMP's anti-drug unit
in Toronto told Reuters last week: "If we focused all the forces in
the GTA solely on marijuana, we still wouldn't get a handle on it.
It's that large."

Much as it might ruffle conservative feathers, marijuana has become
part of Canada's national mythology abroad. We're renowned as the
source of killer B.C. weed. We paint affectionate portraits of
small-time growers on Trailer Park Boys. A recent Simpsons mistakenly
assumed pot was legal up here - as many Americans do - and had Ned
Flanders being offered "a reeferino" on the streets of Winnipeg.

While perusing grow-op stories on the Star's own website last week, I
was delighted to see the band of Google-generated advertisements down
the side of the screen, consisting entirely of hydroponics ads
promising advanced nutrient products, "huge yields" and "massive harvests."

Marijuana is not going away. And, in the grand scheme of things, it's
not doing nearly as much harm in this country as, say, guns. Oppose it
if you will - you have as much right to your opinion as you should
have to smoke or ingest whatever you choose - but don't stoop to using
dead men as pawns to support your position. They deserve to be
remembered as men, not symbols.