TACTICS CHALLENGED

Dear Editor:

Re: Police bust pot lab (Nov. 13-14 edition). First, pot grows in gardens,
not labs. Second, young pot plants like the ones in the photo are not worth
$1,100 each.

At a wholesale price of about $5-6 per gram, the most any pot plant could
be worth is about $550-600. Police try to make their jobs look more
successful (and worthwhile), by saying that every pot plant is worth just
over $1,000.

This is exaggeration bordering on fabrication. The police have done such an
embarrassingly poor job of winning the war on drugs over the past eight
decades, it is a wonder anyone listens to a word they say any more.

By not legalizing and regulating cannabis like tobacco and alcohol, our
government, courts, and police are knowingly and deliberately subsidizing
organized crime. They are making people paranoid about their neighbours,
making pot easier for teens to access than alcohol and tobacco, wasting
police time and resources, wasting nearly $2 billion every year on a failed
policy and endangering Canadians.

They are also keeping another $2 billion in potential annual tax revenue
away from Canadians and putting it directly into the underground economy,
instead of education and health care. It leads me to wonder just which side
of the law they are really on.

Prohibition didn't work in the 1920s with alcohol, and it is failing even
more miserably with cannabis. If prohibition were going to work it would
have worked by now.

Russell Barth

Ottawa