Pubdate: Wed, 20 Aug 2008
Source: Times & Transcript (Moncton, CN NK)
Column: City Views
Copyright: 2008 New Brunswick Publishing Company
Contact:  http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2660
Author: James Foster
Note: City Views appears daily, written by various members of our 
staff. James Foster is editor-at-large. His column appears every Wednesday.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis - Canada)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

IS SOCIETY BENEFITING FROM THE WAR ON POT?

By all accounts, Mike McCormick minded his own business and never 
hurt another soul.

He lived off the land, hunting, digging clams and cutting his own 
firewood. And he grew pot. Lots and lots of pot. In fact, when police 
stumbled across McCormick's shack in the woods behind his house, 
there were 243 plants growing inside it.

That's a lot of dope, yet police found none of the usual evidence 
that McCormick was peddling the stuff. No baggies. No scales. No 
paper trail of transactions. Nothing.

Police valued the pot at almost $400,000 in keeping with their usual 
way of calculating the value of marijuana by tallying what it would 
be worth should it be sold in the most expensive manner possible, by 
the joint or by the gram. While that bears no relation to the actual 
value of the dope (who sells $393,000 worth of pot $5 at a time?) the 
courts accept this method without question, and so be it.

What does one do with $393,000 worth of pot? Why, they smoke it. 
McCormick is a daily dope smoker, much like another person might get 
home after a hard day at the office and relax with a six pack. His 
wife also uses it to ease the pain of her multiple sclerosis -- it's 
the only thing that works, she says.

McCormick's pre-sentence report was quite favourable, except for the 
fact he'd been busted for pot before, a highly aggravating factor 
along with, of course, the sheer volume of the stuff he got caught 
with, something McCormick said was because he had lost an entire 
previous crop and wanted to lay in ample stores to last him a long time.

Given the law and legal precedents, the judge sentenced McCormick to 
15 months behind bars.

The bottom line: a victim of MS has lost her only means of support 
for more than a year and two kids have lost their father for that 
time. Society is out close to $1 million, accounting for the full 
cost of the trial, legal fees, the investigation and the cost of 
incarcerating the man as well as that of maintaining his name on a 
firearms-ban database for 10 years. We won't include the cost of 
putting his family on welfare because there's no indication if 
they've applied for it.

Now, flip this around as if Canada realized long ago that its war on 
pot was a waste of time, money and precious policing resources.

McCormick would be home, tending to his family. The tax on his and 
his wife's daily pot intake would have added mightily to tax coffers. 
Two kids and a sick wife wouldn't be missing their dad/husband until 
late 2009. McCormick's jail cell would be empty and the ensuing costs 
would have been saved. Canada would have one less man branded for 
life as an ex-con.

If we want to save society from itself, far better to throw drinkers 
in jail, if anyone, than pot smokers. And to push drug abuse 
education on both consumers. And to tax the heck out of both.

Anyone with a little insider knowledge can probably find enough funny 
mushrooms on their own front lawn to get them high for a week. Or 
they can pop 'round to some of Moncton's smoke shops and ask about 
Salvia. If you think pot gives your head a twirl, you ain't smoked 
nothing yet from what I can read about it. And that stuff's perfectly 
legal. So why pick on only the pot smokers?

Putting someone in jail for smoking pot is akin to Napalming your 
lawn because you saw an ant.

Meanwhile, the harvest season is upon us again in New Brunswick.

To get some sort of scope of how mainstream marijuana has become in 
this province, consider that potatoes are the most lucrative legal 
crop in New Brunswick, accounting for about one-quarter of the 
province's total farm receipts.

Pot is worth at least five times that, according to the police's own 
best guesses, and the quality of it surpasses that of the famous "BC Bud."

Some smarty pants once defined insanity as doing the same things over 
and over again but expecting different outcomes.

You'd think someone would take that to heart. After almost a century 
of a war on pot, weed is now more accessible and lucrative than ever 
before in our history.

I'm not sure legal pot is a good thing. Not a bit. Not for a minute.

But it's got to be better than what we are doing now, hunting people 
down at huge human and taxpayer expense, solely because their drug of 
choice comes from a cigarette paper instead of a bottle, because the 
revenue goes elsewhere than government pockets, something that is easily fixed.

Other than lawyers, who benefits from criminalizing pot smokers?
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom