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Pro-pot members criticize media
By: Brookes Merritt, Edmonton Sun (CN AB), 03-06-05

Pot activists are criticizing the media for sensationalizing the recent killings of four RCMP officers in northern Alberta. They say reporters are ramping up anti-pot sentiment by spinning the story toward grow-ops and failing to ask how a dangerous offender was repeatedly overlooked by the courts.

The officers were killed earlier this week in a botched raid at the farm near Rochfort Bridge of James Roszko. They were attempting to recover stolen goods and investigating a marijuana grow-op.

"Marijuana is the background scenery of this tragedy," said Alan Young, a York University law professor and marijuana advocate. "This is about police safety and the proper procedures for executing a warrant."

Young said the massacre is uncharacteristic of grow-op busts. "Police have taken down hundreds of grow-ops in the last two years without ever encountering such violence."

Marc Emery, leader of the B.C. Marijuana party, said media frenzy over the grow-op has incited outrageous hysteria. He speculated Roszko's trigger finger was bent by problems far greater than too many pot plants.

"(Roszko) was a notable misanthrope raised as a Christian fundamentalist, who loved guns and whose own father described him as a wicked devil, but everybody is jumping on marijuana as the focus of this tragedy."

Federal Marijuana party Leader Blair Longley blamed the ordeal on statistics rather than soft drug culture.

"Roszko must have felt terrorized by society to do what he did; the mentality of marijuana culture isn't one of 'shoot the police.' "

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