Mission city council goes reefer mad

Mission city council goes reefer mad: "A bit of a rant about reefer madness in the Interior. Mission has completely gone off the deep end, but then, hard to blame them when a good chunk of the world still thinks legalizing pot will destroy families, bunnies and rainbows. From the January 13, 2011 issue of 24 Hours Vancouver.

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I’ve spent the last few days pretending that Mission city council’s draconian new search and fine regime is the big rights issue of the week. The council has been conducting “grow op” searches of Mission residents’ homes that have high power usage, over 300 homes and counting, and billing the owners for any bylaw infractions they can find.



$5,200 for the cost of the inspection is just the start for residents who, among other things, had an empty room for a baby (indication of a grow op), a hook in their ceiling (indication of a grow op), grew cucumbers in the basement (non-permit installation), had a badly wired hot tub (bylaw violation).



But it’s not just Mission. Surrey, Richmond, and Nelson too have all flirted with similar regimes. Often at the behest of police forces who find it too challenging to assemble the evidence needed for search warrants for grow ops, and prefer the lower standard the law requires for searches by bylaw officers.

Blame police? Blame the municipalities? Yes, both deserve blame for trying to circumvent the basic privacy rights of Canadians, but it’s not that easy. Both are trying, in their own dysfunctional, illegal ways, to deal with the fact that Canada still, despite every common sense argument to the contrary, insists on criminalizing marijuana production and possession.



The new International Centre for Science in Drug Policy has more than 16,000 names on their petition supporting the Vienna Declaration, a demand for governments to follow an evidence-based illicit drug policy. The CSDP’s suggestion is that politicians should look at health, economic and rights data and evaluate drug policy against this framework instead of, well, setting drug policy based on what the Americans are doing.



Except it’s not even what the Americans are doing any more. The debate over California’s near miss on a referendum to legalize marijuana entirely ignored the fact that the state is already awash in “medical” marijuana, with prescriptions easy to obtain from private doctors and green pharmacies everywhere. Denver, Colorado has taken medical marijuana to new heights with my Google map showing more than 20 dispensaries in a city of just over 600,000 people, roughly equivalent to Vancouver. Vancouver currently has 3 dispensaries.



Financing gangland lifestyles and directing money to police forces instead of community centres, the continuing war on pot makes less and less sense with each passing year. With most Canadians now support the legalization of marijuana according to Angus Reid, more than 1.5 million Canadians now smoke illegal marijuana recreationally according to the Canadian Medical Association.



Is the real issue here Mission city council’s illegal cash grab searches? Well, perhaps for the voters of Mission and possibly the courts, but otherwise, no. The real issue here is why our government is overwhelmingly supporting invasive and failing law enforcement that is expensive, makes us less safe by supporting organized crime, and results in a very profitable enterprise growing B.C.’s most lucrative cash crop, untaxed and unregulated, in basements across the province.

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