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Current Affairs 2007 - Consequences (58 items)
| Jul 1, 2007 | High Time IN handing a grow operator a conditional sentence last month, North Vancouver provincial judge Doug Moss expressed frustration the court could not do more to curb his activities.
We share Moss's frustration, but we believe it is misdirected. ...Drugs - marijuana included - should be legalized, regulated, and restricted internationally, much the way cigarettes are. Drugs cannot be vanquished, but the criminals who pedal them can. The dangers of legalized drugs are manifold, but they are nothing compared to the dangers of the status quo.
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| Jun 28, 2007 | Punting Pot Inmates Use Footballs And Baseballs To Smuggle In Drugs
Guards at the Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre foiled a bizarre attempt to smuggle drugs in a football.
On Saturday night, a prisoner doing cleanup duty triggered an alarm when he got too close to a fence line at the jail, sending guards scurrying to the scene, where they grabbed the inmate and discovered a football filled with tobacco, said Solicitor General spokesman Christine Skjerven.
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| Jun 27, 2007 | Marijuana Grower Deported Authorities have deported a man convicted for his role in a network of more than a dozen Calgary-area marijuana grow ops.
Canada Border Services Agency officers handed over Lai Guan Tan, 34, to foreign officials last week.
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| Jun 21, 2007 | AB: AB: Pot Advocate Sick In Jail - Family The condition of notorious medicinal marijuana crusader Grant Krieger - -- incarcerated at the Calgary Remand Centre since Monday -- is "rapidly deteriorating," according to his friends and family.
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| Jun 19, 2007 | Pot Used To 'Control' Girl's Hyperactivity Judge Calls It 'Extreme' Abuse, Sentences Mother To Nine Months Of House Arrest
A Sarnia woman who used marijuana to control her eight-year-old daughter's hyperactivity was placed under house arrest for nine months Monday.
The 34-year-old mother pleaded guilty in Sarnia court to marijuana trafficking because she gave the marijuana to her child.
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| Jun 14, 2007 | SN: Rally Held in Support of Free Speech Rights The residents of Wawota, population 500, were surprised to see protesters waving signs and shouting into a megaphone Tuesday....
Student Kieran King is the focus of the activity in Wawota. He was suspended from school for three days after disobeying the school's lockdown order during a walkout protest.
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| Jun 13, 2007 | Children Who Call Grow Ops Home At Risk ...But there is another element about illegal drug growing operations which causes concern. These operations do not run by themselves. There are people behind at each of those plants. Some may be taking the risk entirely on their own; however, sometimes there are innocent victims - children living in these homes. Children living in grow-ops can be exposed to chemicals, electrical fires and mould. It is clearly not a healthy environment. The Alberta government has taken the lead and recently laid the first charges against parents whose children were allegedly found living in homes with marijuana grow operations. Called the Drug Endangered Children Act, it allows police to immediately remove children from homes where drugs are sold or produced. A current case involves charges against the parents of a four-year-old and an 18-month-old.
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| Jun 13, 2007 | SN: Student Suspended For Opinion On Pot REGINA ( SNN ) -- Kieran King says he has never smoked pot, but his views on marijuana have led to his suspension from Wawota Parkland School.
King said he was threatened with police action by principal Susan Wilson after telling friends at the school that marijuana was less harmful than alcohol.
"In my opinion, cannabis is safer than they say, it is not worse than alcohol or tobacco," said King, a 15-year-old Grade 10 student. Wilson accused King of using and selling marijuana at school, according to a media release issued by the Saskatchewan Marijuana Party. King has offered to submit to a voluntary drug test to prove otherwise.
"I've never smoked marijuana. I've never even seen it," said King, an honours student.
[Incredible courage by a young person who chose not to conform. ] |
| Jun 8, 2007 | Unpaid Pot Bills a Chronic Problem Any other terminally ill patient in Canada would have all his prescriptions covered by the Canadian health care system.
Jason Wilcox owes so much money for his medication, Health Canada has cut off his supply and threatened to send a collection agency after him.
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| Jun 8, 2007 | BC: Judge Nixes Cops For Hydro Inspections "We only use police for safety issues," she said. "If they don't like the fact that it's the police that are working with our firefighters, then that's fine; we'll have somebody else.
"But at the end of the day we want to make sure our firefighters are protected and are safe and that whole team of B.C. Hydro personnel as well, their safety is first and foremost. That's the reason why we had the police there, and the only reason. The police aren't there to lay charges; the police aren't there to execute warrants. We're there because it's a fire safety issue."
[Talk about mixed messages..it is a legal issue when the police alone shut down cannabis cultivation, but it is a fire safety issue when other civil servants are enforcing prohibition] |
| Jun 7, 2007 | Wanted: Tokers In Suits Time For Greying Potheads To Come Out Of The Closet And Back Anti-Prohibition Battle In 1977, only 18 per cent of cannabis smokers were over the age of 30, but in 2001 the percentage shot up to 49....
Considering this changing demographic, it's surprising that our drug laws haven't been reformed and liberalized. Most people blame the looming presence of the U.S. "war on drugs," but I think we've failed on the road to rational drug law reform because aging drug users rarely come out of their smoky closets to enter the political debate.
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| Jun 5, 2007 | AB: Parents Charged in Drug Den Cases PARENTS CHARGED IN DRUG DEN CASES - Police Use New Law for First Time..."Police officers wearing full protective suits with respirators are walking into rooms with kids playing, watching television, with no protection at all. The moulds, the smells, the risk of electrical explosions . . . you just shake your head."...The Southern Alberta Marijuana Investigative Team found 120 pot plants...
[Reefer Madness on steroids] |
| Jun 4, 2007 | Missing Teen's Mom Stopped At Border Glendene Grant said she was not allowed to enter the U.S. this week as she tried to board a plane for Las Vegas. Grant was bound for the Nevada city to meet with investigators and others there about the disappearance of her daughter Jessie Foster....Grant said she has a criminal conviction for possession of a small amount of marijuana from 21 years ago, and wonders if that was the reason she was denied entry.
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| Apr 25, 2007 | A Few Trips Decades Ago Put An End To This One Mr. Feldmar took his last hit of acid in 1974.
Thirty-two years, however, turned out to be but an instant in the long, unrelenting U.S. war on drugs. Last summer, in an incident that has just come to light, Mr. Feldmar, now 66, was banned from entering the United States because of his long-ago use of LSD.
Because Mr. Feldmar had never been charged with possession of the once-popular illegal drug, privacy advocates are even more alarmed by the way U.S. border guards at the busy Peace Arch crossing near Vancouver found out about it.
The guards simply looked up Mr. Feldmar on the Internet and discovered his own article about using LSD, written for the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal Janus Head. ...
Given the United States' "almost fanatical position on drugs," Mr. Oscapella said, even a teenager who simply writes in a blog about smoking marijuana is now vulnerable to online scrutiny by U.S. border guards.
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| Apr 5, 2007 | Higher, Faster, Stronger ... And Higher ...Few athletes, officials or spectators would ever argue that competitors trying to gain an edge by using illegal and potentially dangerous steroids or other capability-increasing drugs ought not be exposed and severely punished.
But when it comes to substances that do not seem to have any performance enhancing qualities-chiefly marijuana-there is growing debate among anti-doping officials.
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| Apr 5, 2007 | Crime Stoppers Needs Funding Or It's Finished Cornwall Ont - If the city police can't find close to $12,000 a year for Crime Stoppers, the local agency may be forced to fold....
Johann said the group has relied heavily upon the sale of pull-tab tickets, commonly known as Nevadas, to fund their operations.
[A program that relys on gambling revenue to reward snitches - what a stupid society we live in] |
| Mar 30, 2007 | Marijuana Advocate Pleads Guilty to Pot Possession Driving a car plastered with marijuana leaf logos and stickers is bound to catch the eye of police -- particularly if you're on the way to the annual Hempfest celebration.
That's what happened to a Montreal man nearly seven years ago, a Sault Ste. Marie judge heard Thursday.
Marc Boris St-Maurice was leader of the Marijuana Party at the time of the July 21, 2000 stop. Since then he has joined the Liberal Party and plans to seek the nomination in a Montreal riding, he says.
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| Mar 23, 2007 | Bylaw Leaves Homeowner In The Cold An Abbotsford homeowner says a city bylaw meant to weed out indoor marijuana gardens has put him out on the street and is forcing him to prove his innocence.
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| Mar 17, 2007 | Number Of Criminal Groups Growing The number of organized crime groups in B.C. grew for the third year in a row in 2006 -- to 124, up from 108 identified the previous year, says a 2006 RCMP report obtained by The Vancouver Sun....The graph in the report looks alarming, starting in 2003 with just 52 groups and rising in each of the last three years. But the report also says better record-keeping and analysis of crime groups accounts for some of the increase...
[Duh... when the government abdicates responsibility to regulate and tax this plant like everything else from liquor to pet food, or allow individuals to grow it like tomatoes and petunias, then the only group left to grow and distribute it is the criminals, so why is this news not surprising or unpredictable? Until citizens demand the government create an alternative to the current system by using the existing wine, tobacco or liquor model or creating a new model, things will get MUCH worse before they get better.] |
| Mar 15, 2007 | Alberta Grow-Ops Growing In Size
"The number of grow-ops we're busting in rural areas is way down, but the size of each bust is way up,"...
Gillan said the surge finds police busting fewer and fewer grow-ops with less than 100 plants. Most seizures these days net about 50 kg of marijuana, harvested from as many as 5,000 plants.
[More proof that home cannabis gardeners are being squeezed out by criminals thanks to "get tough" government policies... and the public goes along with discarding common sense to support US global drug policy] |
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