HOW TO STOP GROW-OPS? LEGALIZE POT

At the time, you couldn't help but laugh at last month's big pot bust
in Barrie. The size of the operation, its location (an abandoned
brewery), its blatancy -- it was all too funny. It was as if Monty
Python had descended from comedy heaven to demonstrate the absurdity
of Canadian drug laws.

Looking ahead, however, Ontarians may well remember the winter of 2004
as the last time any of them laughed about a marijuana grow operation.
This week's news -- a bust in a postcard-perfect Toronto suburb, with
plants strung across the living room, and six children, now in the
care of the state, sleeping on bare, urine-soaked mattresses in the
corner -- was not funny at all.

Nor was it amusing to learn from police that such operations are
becoming increasingly common. "Grow houses not only bring a dangerous
criminal element into our community," York Regional Police Chief
Armand La Barge said, "but the fact that children are being raised in
this environment is a major concern." Two people have been murdered in
connection with York Region grow-ops over the past two years, he added.

Grow-ops in high-rise apartment buildings are the latest scourge south
of Steeles Avenue, according to Toronto police. This week, Chief
Julian Fantino highlighted the proliferation of marijuana grow-ops as
a major pressure on the police budget. Toronto cops busted 33 of them
in 2001, 81 in 2002 and 140 last year, according to the chief.

So they are not only acutely dangerous to the people involved, who
live under the constant threat of raids from gangsters who sniff them
out before the cops do, grow-ops are also irrepressible. There is
nothing funny about that combination of attributes; it is the birth of
a serious social problem.

But the saddest thing of all is the response from the governments that
have the clear ability to head it off. Indeed, the latest legislation
introduced by the Martin government is guaranteed to speed the crisis
on.

Justice Minister Irwin Cotler confirmed that when he re-introduced the
Chretien government's retrograde anti-pot law last week. Although
touted as a decriminalization initiative -- once it is passed,
Canadians will be able to possess small amounts of pot without fear of
a criminal record -- the real intent of the new law is to nail the
growers, to "be tougher on large-scale grow-ops," according to the
minister.

Any scale grow-op, in fact. The new law will put people who grow as
few as four plants in jail for five years. Under its terms, the
Richmond Hill parents busted last week could go to jail for 15 years
each. As marijuana activists are fond of pointing out, the maximum
sentence for conspiring to commit terrorism in Canada is 10 years.

Monty Python would have fun with a law that encourages consumption of
a substance while redoubling penalties against those who supply it,
but the judiciary is not necessarily amused. Last week, Mr. Justice
Stephen Hunter of the Ontario Court of Justice in Belleville
criticized decriminalization as "an inadequate compromise" that "gives
all the wrong messages."

"If you decriminalize it, who's going to supply the product?" the
judge asked, pointing out the obvious contradiction in the upcoming
law. Like a growing number of informed observers, he favours
legalization.

"If you legalized it and grew it and sold it as a product like
alcohol, and regulated it and controlled it as much as you can, kept
it out of schools, kept it out of people's hands who are under 19 --
as much as one can -- then you would probably be better off in the
long run," he told the Belleville Intelligencer.

That view will undoubtedly become more commonplace as underground grow
houses proliferate and police bust down doors everywhere in their
fruitless quest to suppress them. Late last year an Ottawa grower blew
himself up trying to make marijuana oil. There were no children
present, but more accidents and more violence seem inevitable,
especially as the growers continue to decentralize and domesticate
their operations in response to Ottawa's new law.

It's unlikely, however, that the problem will have worsened
sufficiently by next month, when the province hosts a so-called
"summit" in Toronto to address the grow-op problem. Virtually all
politicians seem to think that greater police power -- at
ever-increasing cost to urban taxpayers -- is the answer. Last week
Ontario Community Safety Minister Monte Kwinter declared himself to be
"quite pleased at what the federal government is doing."

If marijuana grow-ops must be suppressed -- and nobody, least of all
proponents of legalization, wants the current situation to persist --
governments would be smarter to do it with their revenuers, not
police. The job could be assigned to Integrated Proceeds of Crime
(IPOC) units, with more private-sector investigators than detectives
on board -- and broad powers to seize the assets of growers. The units
would pay their own way and the police they free up would surely find
more important work.

The defence bar would go crazy at such a blatant revenue grab, but it
would also get rich. (Canadian law allows defendants in such cases to
pay attorney fees out of their seized assets.) But it would make for
an interesting argument; at the very least it would nudge the current
debate closer to reality.

Even legalizers agree that pot must pay.