STRAIGHT DOPE ON POLICE SCARE TACTICS

Claims that gangsters are setting up grow-ops at an alarming pace are
often unproven, exaggerated or misleading From coast to coast, the
police are telling Canadians to lock up the kids and be afraid. The
quiet streets of suburban neighbourhoods across the country are being
stalked, the police say, by a tall leafy plant known as marijuana (or
"marihuana," as the police and the criminal law still spell it out, as
if determined to demonstrate that their thinking on the subject has
not changed since the 1930s.)

The latest threat posed by the insidious weed comes in the form of
"grow-ops." They're exploding all across Canada, the police say.
Grow-ops are dangerous, jury-rigged contraptions that illegally tap
into electrical lines, creating fire hazards. They are often
booby-trapped and most are run by organized crime. The uniquely potent
product of these pot factories is mainly shipped to the United States,
which is being swamped by Canadian bud. Gangsters use the massive
profits they earn to buy guns and drugs and spread bloodshed and
mayhem on our streets.

And, say the police to any reporter who will listen, this is all
happening because the laws and the courts are too soft and the cops
don't have the resources to crack down.

It's obvious where this coast-to-coast PR exercise is going: The
police want more money and power. No shame in that. All bureaucracies
do. But given the self-interest interwoven in police claims about
grow-ops, one might think journalists and politicians would treat
those claims with due skepticism.

Alas no. The media have repeated every police statement as if it were
objective fact. Most politicians, too, have blithely accepted the
police claims of a crisis and that crackdowns are the solution.

This blind trust is a serious mistake. Much of what the police are
saying is unproven, exaggerated or misleading. Some of it is false.
Most importantly, it carefully overlooks the root cause of the problem.

Is there an epidemic of grow-ops?

Aside from anecdotes and self-interested conjecture, the police have
rarely attempted to actually prove this central claim. An exception is
Ontario, where the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police released a
report with the paperback-thriller title of "Green Tide," which
contains data showing impressive growth in the number of grow-op busts
in Ontario. There, they said. That clinches it.

But as every criminology student knows, more busts does not necessarily mean
more crime. It can also be the result of increased police effort. The
question is how much of the growth in busts is the result of greater police
effort and how much reflects a real increase in the number of grow-ops.
Answer: No one knows.

In fact, the Green Tide report itself notes this key fact in a large
"caveat" on the first page and again in the main text. But as far as I
can tell, the police chiefs never mention this in interviews. Instead,
they flatly claim the report proves there is an epidemic of grow-ops.
And that is simply false.

There are exceptions, such as a British Columbia report that accounted
for police resources and found there really had been significant
growth in grow-ops. But for the most part, police claims on this score
are simply unproven.

Is it controlled by organized crime?

The police constantly insist that the people behind grow-ops are not
amateur horticulturalists looking to make some cash. It's big, bad
organized crime.

But again, there is precious little evidence to support this claim
aside from anecdotes and self-interested conjecture. In Ontario, where
the police have repeatedly claimed grow-ops are "mostly" or "largely"
or "mainly" controlled by organized crime, the Green Tide report
repeated the police line by saying that organized crime is "suspected"
of being "largely behind the emergence of the grow-ops." But as for
what was known, rather than suspected, it tepidly concluded that it is
"likely" that organized crime controls "at least part of" the trade.

And beware of a semantic shell game involving the definition of
"organized crime." The public thinks the term means the Mafia, biker
gangs and other major bad guys -- an impression the police play off by
providing these as examples of "organized crime" to reporters. But the
law defines organized crime as any group of five or more working
together over time to commit crime. That means five ordinary guys who
grow pot in a suburban basement and sell it to friends are "organized
crime." Whenever the police issue scary warnings about organized
crime, they should say which definition they are using. If they don't,
be skeptical.

Is Canadian pot swamping the U.S.?

Not according to the U.S. Department of Justice. In a 2003 report on
the American marijuana market, the justice department found Canada was
such a negligible contributor to the American supply that this country
was scarcely mentioned at all. "Marijuana transported from Canada
clearly amounts to only a small percentage of all marijuana smuggled
into the United States," stated another 2003 Justice Department report.

The U.S. Department of Justice has also dismissed the much-publicized
idea that the majority of Canadian pot is shipped south. "These
estimates cannot be substantiated," concluded a 2001 report.

The Justice Department also dismissed the idea that Canadian pot is
uniquely potent and valuable. "Growers in both Canada and the United
States have access to the same strains of cannabis seeds and the same
cultivation technologies," the department reported in 2001.
"Therefore, growers in both countries are capable of producing the
same quality of high-grade marijuana." The department also concluded,
"reports of a reputed exchanged of Canadian marijuana for U.S. cocaine
on a pound-for-pound ratio are false."

It's also important to know that the U.S. government estimates the
total marijuana supply is between 10,000 and 23,800 tonnes, while the
RCMP estimates that all marijuana grown in Canada amounts to 800
tonnes. In other words, we could ship every bud, leaf and stem of
Canadian pot south and it would make no difference to the American
supply.

Are prison sentences in Canada too soft?

It's true that sentences for growing marijuana are much tougher in the
U.S. than in Canada. But what the police don't say is that tougher
sentences have had little or no effect on American pot production. The
U.S. Department of Justice estimates the domestic production of
marijuana is 5,500 to 16,700 tonnes of marijuana a year -- which makes
the U.S. by far the largest source of marijuana to the American market.

The U.S. Department of Justice also found that "96.9 per cent of state
and local law enforcement agencies nationwide describe the
availability of marijuana as high or medium."

And consider another fact the police don't mention: The number of
illegal methamphetamine labs in the U.S. has exploded over the last
few years despite the brutal sentences offenders get for running a
meth lab. Decades of experience like this proves tough sentences
cannot dent the drug trade.

Why do grow-ops exist in the first place?

This is the core question, and yet it's one the police never touch.
Marijuana can be grown in any window, right beside the geraniums. It
can be grown in any field. So why is it being grown in rickety,
dangerous, clandestine operations? Because it's illegal, of course.
And why do criminals make money growing pot, and not, say, geraniums?
Because pot is illegal and geraniums are not. And why does the growing
of pot involve booby traps and ... You see what I'm getting at. Just
as alcohol prohibition put dangerous illegal stills in residential
neighbourhoods, marijuana prohibition put grow-ops in the suburbs. And
just as the only way to get rid of the illegal stills was to end
alcohol prohibition, the only way to wipe out grow-ops is to legalize,
regulate, license and tax the production of marijuana - as a Senate
committee recommended in 2002.

What will not work, what cannot work, is yet another crackdown. The
police and the criminal law are not the solution to the problem; they
are the problem.

Dan Gardner is a senior writer with the Ottawa Citizen