Thirty years ago, approximately 60 per cent of the Canadian population smoked. Now, thanks to the efforts of Garfield Mahood and others like him, that percentage of smokers has declined to about 30 per cent - great! But wait a minute! Now the federal Liberal government under the direction of someone who has used marijuana is rushing to legalize and promote the use of this drug, mainly by smoking or adding it in some other form for "recreational" purposes. It is also being touted by the premier of Ontario, who claims she has never used the stuff, and while you need not be a chicken to know what an egg looks like, she apparently has no clue about the dangers and cost associated with the use of recreational drugs. [continues 303 words]
Now that Kelowna has reversed its position on where to allow the growing of medical marijuana, don't expect to see lush fields of green popping up all around the city. A more likely scenario will see productive farmland covered over with concrete bunkers and lined with razor-wire fences. Council agreed to allow the production of medicinal weed on agricultural land on a case-by-case basis. This reversed its earlier decision to restrict medical grow-ops to industrial properties, as West Kelowna has decided. [continues 195 words]
If last year's gang assassination in Kelowna wasn't enough to remove the blinders from your eyes, perhaps this week's major drug bust is. Kelowna is not the sleepy little vacation hollow it used to be. We live in one of the biggest centres for organized crime and the illicit drug trade in Western Canada. And when it comes to marijuana production, the Okanagan is Ground Zero in a massive international criminal network. Pot grown here pays to bring every other drug under the sun into our community. And unless municipal leaders allocate the resources necessary for effective enforcement, it's only a matter of time before there are more killings and we see the advent of designer drugs like bath salts on our streets - along with the gruesome toll they take on the addicted. [continues 116 words]
It's shocking that of the 15,000 Canadians licensed to grow medical marijuana, not a single one has been inspected. So it comes as no surprise that police chiefs across the country are concerned about organized crime involvement in medicinal pot. A 2010 report for the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police found more than one-third of studied cases involved trafficking or the production of more plants than permitted. The complete failure to manage this growing area of medicine is proof that neither Health Canada nor individual Canadians should be in the business of growing dope. [continues 159 words]
Eight B.C. mayors (including four from the Okanagan) are calling for the legalization and taxation of marijuana to end gang violence associated with the drug trade. That's a noble idea. But it's also a naive one. Since we're talking about gangs, we urge you to think like a gangster for a minute. Suppose you run a conservatively sized grow-op of about 100 pot plants, each capable of producing a pound of B.C. bud every few months. At $1,000 a pound, that's a haul of $300,000 a year, assuming a crop harvest every four months. [continues 246 words]
When Oscar Wilde said that J. M. W. Turner had invented sunsets, he was joking, but he wasn't only joking. He meant that Turner had made the sunset into a subject of art, and therefore people were now looking at, talking about, and thinking about sunsets in a new way; thanks to Turner, all of us now see sunsets differently. In the parlance of contemporary critical theory--often a barbaric dialect, but sometimes a useful one--Turner invented the "discourse" of sunsets. It is in this sense that Marcus Boon, in his theory-afflicted but nonetheless lively study "The Road of Excess" (Harvard; $29.95), says that Thomas De Quincey, with the 1821 publication of "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," "invented the concept of recreational drug use." More precisely, De Quincey invented the discourse of recreational drug use: the whole way of thinking about drug-taking as a hobby and an escape into what Baudelaire, writing about drugs in 1858, was to call our "artificial paradises." What's nice about that phrase of Baudelaire's is the way it packs three ideas into two words: that drugs are "paradise," i.e., they make you feel good; but that the paradise is fake; and that, in any case, paradise was a place we were expelled from. Drugs can be fun, but they ruin people's lives. This we know. [continues 3292 words]
I AM continually baffled by how many people aged over 30 have a naive attitude the drug problem that is apparent in Australia (Daily Telegraph, June 28). When will they realise that marijuana and other soft drugs are in constant supply and are very widely used throughout the community? It is not just used in the dark alleys by teenagers at Kings Cross, but in your normal everyday household on every day of the week, by people of all ages. Since this is the case, why should The Daily Telegraph be astonished that drugs are being dealt on the street and there is no action taken about it. JOANNA WINCHESTER, Kincumber [end]
When will they realise that marijuana and other soft drugs are in constant supply and are very widely used throughout the community? It is not just used in the dark alleys by teenagers at Kings Cross, but in your normal everyday household on every day of the week, by people of all ages. Since this is the case, why should The Daily Telegraph be astonished that drugs are being dealt on the street and there is no action taken about it. JOANNA WINCHESTER, Kincumber [end]
