COPS CAUGHT IN MIDDLE OF DRUG WAR

It must be demoralizing to be a drug cop. While our politicians and pro-
and anti-liberalization forces endlessly debate how to curb drug use, the
police are stuck in the middle.

They're supposed to uphold the law but the line's getting blurry. Some
judges have declared that there's no law banning marijuana possession. To
arrest or not to arrest?

Ottawa says it intends to move ahead with the decriminalization of the
possession of small amounts of pot, while continuing to crack down on those
who produce and sell the stuff.

The truth is the people involved in marijuana grow-ops are laughing all the
way to the bank.

Our politicians would like you to believe that we're tough on pot
cultivators and traffickers.

Remember, cannabis accounted for three-quarters of the more than 90,000
drug incidents reported to police last year.

But cultivating pot - at least in B.C. - appears to be a walk in the park.

It's extremely lucrative and if you're caught it's likely you won't even go
to jail.

The University College of the Fraser Valley and a Vancouver law reform
group published an interesting study last year on marijuana grow-ops in B.C.

What they discovered must make drug cops want to tear their hair out. The
researchers looked at charges laid against 4,700 suspects between 1997 and
2000 and found that the prospect of obtaining a conviction was minimal.

Cultivation of marijuana charges were withdrawn in 53% of the cases and
charges of possession of marijuana for the purposes of trafficking were
withdrawn in 83% of the cases.

Overall, 43% of the suspects had all charges stayed. People are innocent
until proven guilty, of course, and there may simply have not been enough
evidence to secure a conviction.

But what must really irk the cops is that even those who were convicted
received unbelievably light sentences.

Only 18% of the offenders were sent to jail. The vast majority received
either conditional sentences, probation or a fine.

It gets worse. The average prison term was four-and-a-half months and the
severity of the sentence wasn't significantly affected by whether the
offender had a record.

For instance, if the offender had no previous convictions, the average jail
term was just under four months. If he had nine or more previous
convictions, the average prison sentence was five months. Now that ought to
scare the poop out of anyone thinking of getting into the grow-op biz.

Even previous convictions related to drug production or trafficking seemed
to make no difference to the judges.

An offender with one prior cultivation or trafficking conviction spent an
average of five months in jail. Someone with eight previous such
convictions ended up in the slammer for five-and-a-half months.

Out of curiosity, the study's researchers compared the offenders' sentences
with what they would have received if they'd been tried across the border
in Washington state. There, 48% of the criminals would have received
minimum five-year jail terms. Here, more than 80% of them were spared prison.

Even the B.C. fines imposed were negligible. They even dropped, from an
average of $2,017 in 1997 to $1,845 in 2000. The largest fine was a mere
$18,000 - small potatoes to the movers and shakers in the drug world.

The police are now seizing about two million marijuana plants a year in
Canada - up from 238,000 a decade ago, and there are an estimated 15,000 to
20,000 grow-ops in the B.C. Lower Mainland alone.

You have to wonder why our police departments spend millions of dollars on
drug enforcement when we let the growers and traffickers off with a slap on
the wrist.

The optics are terrible here. Ottawa says it reviles drug barons but that's
not reflected in sentencing. Ottawa doesn't have the will to mandate
minimum sentences for grow-op offenders. So we might as well completely
legalize pot and be done with it.