THE MUDDLE OF MANAGING MARIJUANA

For what it's worth I'm preparing for another onslaught.

Any time I write an article or editorial with the word marijuana in
it, I am guaranteed to be flooded with e-mail responses. They come
from the Shuswap, and from the Lower Mainland. They come from New York
City and New Zealand.

Some of the e-mails are civil, others refer to me as a "brainwashed
lame duck," others call me names by using language not fit for a
community newspaper.

The people who write generally are those who support the legalization
of marijuana for a variety of reasons. Certainly there are
medicinal arguments for allowing marijuana use, a topic that has been
addressed by the federal government which allows licence holders to
produce a supply of the otherwise illegal plant for personal use.
Others argue that legalizing marijuana is the ticket to a safer,
better society. Regulate it like alcohol or cigarettes, and then you
remove the criminal element, which has become so prevalent in
marijuana growing operations that are increasingly linked to organized
crime groups.

It's an argument I was leaning towards myself, considering the
enormous amount of our local law enforcement resources spent on
dealing with marijuana grow operations in the city and surrounding
Shuswap.

The business is, pardon the pun, blooming. The police, who used to
freely provide an estimated value on the amounts of marijuana seized
in drug busts, no longer do so. My feeling is the policy changed
because the RCMP don't want to advertise to the public exactly how
lucrative a grow operation can be.

The underground green economy is also flourishing in light of the
attitude of the justice system towards drug offences. Sentences
usually do not include jail time and fines are laughable. When a
single crop can net hundreds of thousands of dollars, paying out a
fine of $1,000, $5,000 or even $10,000 is no deterrent a€" it's simply
a cost of doing business.

Recently, Provincial Court Judge Doug Moss said he would have liked to
send Warren William Spencer, a 24-year-old West Vancouver man, to jail
for his role in a 362-plant marijuana grow operation, but legal
precedents prevented him from doing so. Instead he received a 12-month
conditional sentence (served in the community) and 12-months probation.

"To date, the imposition of conditional jail sentences and fines, and
even house forfeiture, have not served in any real way to deter
generally people of like mind to Mr. Spencer from involving themselves
in this illegal activity," Moss wrote in his June 13 judgment. "Actual
jail is rapidly becoming a more realistic penalty if the conduct is to
be deterred."

If we want to keep marijuana illegal, then stronger enforcement
measures are certainly needed. If we want to go in the direction of
legalization, it would do away with some, though certainly not all, of
justice issues. But then I considered another police statistic I heard
at a public meeting on policing a few months ago. An officer there,
estimated that 90 per cent of the local detachment's files related in
some way to alcohol - society's legal drug.

I wonder what would happen to crime rates if we were to add another
legalized drug to that list?