Published Wednesday August 20th, 2008
James Foster
City Views

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?

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