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 — 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?