MARTIN O'MALLEY:
Let the army bust the grow-ops
CBC News Viewpoint | March 04, 2005 | More from Martin O'Malley
At least one generation of Canadians knows the line, "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation." Pierre Elliott Trudeau made it famous, but the line belongs to Martin O'Malley, who wrote it when he was with The Globe and Mail. He's written eight books, on topics such as the Canadian North, medicine, murder, media literacy and baseball. He wrote it with John Pungente, a world authority on media literacy.
There was something inevitable about the tragedy that happened in Alberta, the shootout that killed four young members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at a marijuana grow operation.
Police and others have been warning us for years that grow-ops in Canada are getting bigger and more dangerous, with the money connected to them rising well into the billions. It is a scourge across Canada, in the biggest cities, the smallest towns, on isolated farms and in basement apartments and suburban bungalows.
It's so big that it's time we used the army to back up police forces across Canada to clean them up, if not the small ma-and-pa operations than at least the billion-dollar operations such as the one in Alberta that had such tragic consequences.
The fact that the deaths of the four Mounties was the biggest loss of life for the esteemed force since the Northwest Rebellion in 1885 should prompt us to look back at other events in history that dealt with – or tried to deal with – the suppression of illegal drugs.
Take Prohibition, the "noble experiment" enforced in the United States between 1920 and 1933, that was supposed to reduce crime and social problems related to the illegal production of alcohol.
Mark Thornton, a professor of economics at Auburn University in Alabama, says that Prohibition, though well intentioned, was a miserable failure.
"The lessons of Prohibition remain important today," Thornton wrote in a policy paper in 1991. "They apply not only to the debate over the war on drugs but also to the mounting efforts to drastically reduce access to alcohol and tobacco and to such issues as censorship and bans on insider trading, abortion, and gambling."
The police have been warning us for years of the dangers of these grow-ops. Former RCMP officer Rene Hamel, who investigated grow-ops in British Columbia – estimated to be worth some $7 billion – said marijuana growers will do anything to protect their operations – including murder.
Grow-ops use bear traps, gas traps and sophisticated weaponry to protect their investments, which are substantial, and growing. The more marijuana is illegal, the more profits there will be, and the more dangerous these grow-ops become.
The grow-ops clearly are out of control and the police do not have the resources to handle it. When Alberta's Anne McLellan was justice minister in 2001 she said she is "quite open" to a debate on both decriminalization and legalization of marijuana. Allan Rock, the health minister at the time, also called for a "frank discussion" on changing the laws prohibiting marijuana.
This is not an argument against marijuana, despite the fact many police forces try to convince us that marijuana is as dangerous as heroin, cocaine, crack or many other genuinely dangerous drugs. Most of the problems associated with marijuana are because it is it an illegal drug.
When young people hear police saying marijuana is in the same league as much harder drugs, they know they are being conned. Worse, when they hear authorities equating marijuana with heroin and cocaine they might be tempted to try them because they know how wrong most authorities are about the dangers of pot.
The latest official statement on the pros and cons of marijuana in Canada came in 2002 from the Senate committee on illegal drugs, which presented a paper that said marijuana is not a "gateway" drug that inevitably leads to harder drugs such as heroin and cocaine.
Those who argue that heroin and cocaine addicts all started by indulging in marijuana are correct only in the sense that heroin and cocaine addicts probably started with beer – or milk.
"Scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that cannabis is substantially less harmful than alcohol and should be treated not as a criminal issue but as a social and public health issue," said Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, who headed the committee.
Many thought Prohibition was working when it first became law in
the early 1920s.
Alcohol consumption did indeed drop in the first few years. When organized crime realized the profits that would be made by illegally supplying alcohol to customers, alcohol consumption increased, as did crime and corruption in high places.
"Prohibition removed a significant source of tax revenue and greatly increased government spending," wrote Thornton, the economics professor at Auburn University. "It led many drinkers to switch to opium, marijuana, patent medicines, cocaine, and other dangerous substances that they would have been unlikely to encounter in the absence of Prohibition."
If Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman could bring in the army to clear snow from Toronto streets in 1999, can't we expect at least as much effort to clean up an illegal operation that is raging out of control and growing exponentially across the country?
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