Re: Cannabis cultivation questioned (The NEWS, March 6).
Jack McLean apparently advanced the same tired old arguments that have marked discussions around cannabis over the last eleven decades.
The usual suspects are the flocking of “bad elements” to Errington and Coombs and the overtaxing of police resources. I am surprised that he concedes that “the community” would have no objection to cannabis being grown in the industrial park. Anyway, whatever their views, the Parliament of Canada does have the authority to drag area F into the 21st century.
Cannabis has been subject to legal sanction since about 1908 in Canada, with very little of positive value to show for it. Lives have been ruined, billions of dollars have been spent running around after pot heads and jailing millions of them; our civil liberties have been curtailed to allow wiretaps and searches that make no sense and have the result of increasing the already obscene amount of social control the traffickers need to make their business profitable.
There have been four separate commissions or enquiries since Le Dain in 1969, all of which came to the conclusion that cannabis did not need to be controlled, yet every time some courageous politician dares to say that the prohibition of marijuana is unproductive and unnecessary, the public (misguided by a few ignorant medical and police “experts”) has shied away from sanity and doubled down on prohibition.
Now, parliament has spoken and spoken clearly. Get over it.
We live (still) in a democracy and resources do need to be used to combat real dangers, such as opioids. It would be silly to divert one cent of those resources to continue the stupid prohibition of weed.
Michael Scott
Parksville