POLICE BLOWING SMOKE WITH PR EFFORT

The annual aerial assault portion of the police war on drugs got
underway this week.

Every summer, RCMP members hop in a helicopter for weeks on end to
search for illegal marijuana grow shows set up in Vancouver Island's backwoods.

It's an expensive endeavour, considering the manpower involved, the
cost of equipment and the open-ended duration of the program, which
RCMP say will go on "until there's no more work to do."

The biggest costs will be for the three Sea King choppers on loan
from the Department of National Defence. Whether it's the RCMP
footing the bill or the military hardly matters, since both are
taxpayer-funded - and there's only one taxpayer.

And from a cost-benefit perspective, it's all a big waste of time and
resources that could be better spent fighting more serious crime.

Last year the effort netted some 16,500 plants from 200 different
grow sites around the Island. That's not an insignificant number and
a sizable dent in the marijuana drug trade.

Police argue the dent carries through to an impact on organized crime
- - since pot revenue often funds such activity - and thus reduces
street violence and other lower-level crimes.

I don't see it.

Sure, removing more than 15,000 plants will pinch some growers'
wallets, but it will hardly put them out of business.

It's more of an expensive make-work project than actually fighting
crime, since the grow-ops are near the bottom of the crime food chain.

Stamp out one or ten with the annual summer attack and they'll just
pop up elsewhere, or the criminals will shrug it off as another cost
of doing illicit business, while continuing to reap no shortage of
revenue from their myriad other underground - or in many cases
in-plain-sight - money-making schemes.

Often this law enforcement effort doesn't even result in charges,
unless the plantations are on private property or some idiot is
sufficiently moronic to hang around even after the tell-tale
thwump-thwump-thwump of a chopper provides an alert to police presence.

Despite the vast number of intellectually-challenged criminals, that
scenario is unlikely. No one is that stupid.

So all we're really getting for the hefty unknown tally for which
we're paying is a few thousand pounds of pot that won't make it to the street.

No doubt that effort does make a tangible difference in crime, but
it's doubtful that benefit outweighs the cost that went into
achieving the benefit.

Or who knows what other law enforcement benefits might be
accomplished by retargeting those resources to more burning issues -
it might even result in landing the so-called big fish, rather than
settling for the small catch year-in and year-out, which ultimately
amounts to little more than blowing smoke as public relations.

If people are buying the hazy logic behind this program, I'd say
they're smoking something.

Drug Disposal

Getting drugs off the street is one thing, destroying those drugs is another.

A decade or so ago, while working at the Elk Falls pulp mill in
Campbell River, I got a few first-hand glimpses of how it's done.

Every so often the steam plant would get cordoned off - with only
steam engineers and a few other key personnel allowed in - and a
caravan of unmarked trucks, vans and SUVs would cruise through the
mill gates and bags of someone's illegal harvest would be tossed in the boiler.

More than a few employees would crack jokes about getting downwind of
the smoke stacks on lunch break.

A similar method was employed after a huge hashish bust up in Fanny
Bay in the late 1990s. Nearly 10 tonnes of brick was trucked down to
Ladysmith, under protection from numerous armed officers of the law,
and burned to ashes in the old Peerless Road incinerator.

I've no doubt people were trying to get downwind of that smoke too.