Pubdate: Fri, 19 Jun 2009
Source: Langley Advance (CN BC)
Copyright: 2009 Lower Mainland Publishing Group Inc.
Contact:  http://www.langleyadvance.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1248
Author: Dan Grice

TAX POT TO REDUCE SERIOUS CRIME

Dear Editor,

Langley MP Mark Warawa and the Conservatives are again engaging in 
retail politics, rather than using our taxes wisely.

Despite more than half of Canadians feeling that pot should be 
privatized, the Conservatives insist that taxpayers should fork out 
hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for more prisons, judges, and 
police to prosecute pot smokers and small growers.

Yet, nearly every expert recognizes that organized gangs will 
continue to make billions in tax free profits.

Bill C-15, recently supported by Mark Warawa, sets minimum prison 
sentences of six months in jail for someone who grows as few as five 
pot plants. This will further clog up our courts and result in longer 
waits to try dangerous offenders such as the Bacon brothers, while 
forcing the provinces to build more remand centres in our communities.

Where are our politician's spending priorities? This money would be 
better spent on hiring more doctors to care for seniors and creating 
new after-school programs to keep teenagers out of crime.

With deficits soaring, in the next few years governments will be 
forced to cut services or increase taxes. Instead of raising income 
taxes and cutting hospitals, it only makes sense that we should 
follow California's lead and consider taxing cannabis and reducing 
the amount of non-violent offenders whom we choose to imprison.

Privatizing pot would help cut the federal deficit, put gangs out of 
business, and keep taxes lower for non-pot smokers.

It is time that fiscal conservatives demand that the federal 
government use our tax dollars responsibly.

Dan Grice, Langley
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom