FOCUSING ON POT MISSES THE POINT

Editor, The Gazette:

Re: Pot industry grows out in open (June 19, 2002)

The RCMP are becoming increasingly obsessed with their war on greedy
gardeners to the exclusion of all other priorities, despite the fact that
their own study by the University College of Fraser Valley has just proven
it to be a futile waste of tax dollars against an industry whose
uncontrolled growth can only be compared to home distilling during alcohol
prohibition.

Ever since the RCMP declared war on cannabis growers a few years ago, the
amount of heroin the police have seized has dropped by more than half
nation-wide. That is according to their own 2001 Drug Situation in Canada
report.

What is worse, according to the statistics from the Canadian Center on
Substance Abuse website, in 1999 one in 35 Grade 8 students in Ontario had
tried heroin in the previous year, or 2.8 per cent. These are 13- and
14-year-old kids, and approximately one in every class had tried "junk"
before the apparent police surrender on heroin to go after a plant!

British Columbia teens generally use all drugs at comparable or higher
levels than teens in Ontario, according to smaller B.C. studies on the same
website.

This at a time when over two-thirds of Canadians support cannabis
decriminalization, and approximately half of Canadians support the outright
legalization of cannabis, a figure that rises to 56 per cent in B.C., which
is the tried and true historical solution to putting the criminals who
profit from prohibition out of business.

With grow-ops and the cannabis black market eliminated by legalization, and
sales of cannabis to adults in public where the police can easily keep an
eye on teen access, police might actually have the resources available to
do more than pay lip-service to keeping teens away from alcohol and
nicotine, as well as cannabis and heroin.

Chris Donald, Dartmouth, N.S.