D7

James Foster
City Views

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By all accounts, Mike McCormick minded his own business and never hurt another soul.

He lived off the land, hunting, digging clams and cutting his own firewood. And he grew pot. Lots and lots of pot. In fact, when police stumbled across McCormick's shack in the woods behind his house, there were 243 plants growing inside it.

That's a lot of dope, yet police found none of the usual evidence that McCormick was peddling the stuff. No baggies. No scales. No paper trail of transactions. Nothing.

Police valued the pot at almost $400,000 in keeping with their usual way of calculating the value of marijuana by tallying what it would be worth should it be sold in the most expensive manner possible, by the joint or by the gram. While that bears no relation to the actual value of the dope (who sells $393,000 worth of pot $5 at a time?) the courts accept this method without question, and so be it.

What does one do with $393,000 worth of pot? Why, they smoke it. McCormick is a daily dope smoker, much like another person might get home after a hard day at the office and relax with a six pack. His wife also uses it to ease the pain of her multiple sclerosis -- it's the only thing that works, she says.

McCormick's pre-sentence report was quite favourable, except for the fact he'd been busted for pot before, a highly aggravating factor along with, of course, the sheer volume of the stuff he got caught with, something McCormick said was because he had lost an entire previous crop and wanted to lay in ample stores to last him a long time.

Given the law and legal precedents, the judge sentenced McCormick to 15 months behind bars.

The bottom line: a victim of MS has lost her only means of support for more than a year and two kids have lost their father for that time. Society is out close to $1 million, accounting for the full cost of the trial, legal fees, the investigation and the cost of incarcerating the man as well as that of maintaining his name on a firearms-ban database for 10 years. We won't include the cost of putting his family on welfare because there's no indication if they've applied for it.

Now, flip this around as if Canada realized long ago that its war on pot was a waste of time, money and precious policing resources.

McCormick would be home, tending to his family. The tax on his and his wife's daily pot intake would have added mightily to tax coffers. Two kids and a sick wife wouldn't be missing their dad/husband until late 2009. McCormick's jail cell would be empty and the ensuing costs would have been saved. Canada would have one less man branded for life as an ex-con.

If we want to save society from itself, far better to throw drinkers in jail, if anyone, than pot smokers. And to push drug abuse education on both consumers. And to tax the heck out of both.

Anyone with a little insider knowledge can probably find enough funny mushrooms on their own front lawn to get them high for a week. Or they can pop 'round to some of Moncton's smoke shops and ask about Salvia. If you think pot gives your head a twirl, you ain't smoked nothing yet from what I can read about it. And that stuff's perfectly legal. So why pick on only the pot smokers?

Putting someone in jail for smoking pot is akin to Napalming your lawn because you saw an ant.

Meanwhile, the harvest season is upon us again in New Brunswick.

To get some sort of scope of how mainstream marijuana has become in this province, consider that potatoes are the most lucrative legal crop in New Brunswick, accounting for about one-quarter of the province's total farm receipts.

Pot is worth at least five times that, according to the police's own best guesses, and the quality of it surpasses that of the famous "BC Bud."

Some smarty pants once defined insanity as doing the same things over and over again but expecting different outcomes.

You'd think someone would take that to heart. After almost a century of a war on pot, weed is now more accessible and lucrative than ever before in our history.

I'm not sure legal pot is a good thing. Not a bit. Not for a minute.

But it's got to be better than what we are doing now, hunting people down at huge human and taxpayer expense, solely because their drug of choice comes from a cigarette paper instead of a bottle, because the revenue goes elsewhere than government pockets, something that is easily fixed.

Other than lawyers, who benefits from criminalizing pot smokers?

* City Views appears daily, written by various members of our staff. James Foster is editor-at-large. His column appears every Wednesday.