Get out? Do you really think this guy will do time? I doubt it.

You know, if they would grow it under glass they wold not need so much electricity.

Oh well. It appears that the USA may decriminalize it shortly and allow each state to “control” the growing and selling of it. The Government will thus join the “traffickers” ..

It is about time.

Canada then will either have to put up a 5,000+ km fence on the border or join the crowd.

It is virtually impossible to fight popular practices and, most certainly very costly for some very questionable social benefit.

Is a pot head was a social benefit? I guess alcohol is also a social benefit.
cheers

Going after potheads is not a socila benefit …. it is no different than going after those who drink alcohol.

Going after potheads has cost the North American economy billions of dollars over the last half century, to no benefit other than those who work in the enforcement, justice, and jail business and those who service that business.

It is called a war and wars are typically of negative value to society and cost many lives.

So, war avoidance is a social benefit.

Your turn.

As of now it is an illegal activity despite what your opinion is on pot. He should get a year per 1000 plants, hence 7 years. The problem is. the $700,000 it would cost to feed an cloth him in prison. Ah let him go, cheaper for tax payers.

With full spectrum LED grow lights being available there isn’t a need to consume copious amounts of electricity to grow pot anymore. Heck throw up a couple of 500.00 panels with some deep cycle batteries and grow away. It’s going to be harder to track down these grow ops as the growers go hitech.

I’m with gus. Prohibition doesn’t work. The War on Drugs is not only costly, but it makes it more difficult to help people who abuse drugs, has overloaded courts and prisons, reduced civil liberties, funded organized crime and terrorism, and caused a great deal of violence. The cure is much worse than the disease.

One time, many years ago, the former BC Highways Minister “Flying” (some would say “lying”) Phil Gaglardi was asked about how his government could justify being so restrictive in its liquor laws when the government was taking in so much money on the distribution and sale of alcohol.

And he replied that if all the social costs just TO the government alone from the abuse of alcohol were added up, they would dwarf all the revenues it received from its sale.

And that was JUST to the government. Not the additional detrimental costs to any families, or businesses, or individuals as such.

Yet here today we have people that are proposing that the taxation of marijuana production and its legalisation, followed undoubtedly by its promotion, is going to be the great fiscal cure-all this Province and government needs. Have we gone stark raving mad?

what would the social costs be? what is the social cost of incarcerating non violent offenders? or what is the social cost of criminalizing a medical issue?
hmmmmm what are to costs of prohibition to JUST the government NOW, cops, judges, jails, legal aid, probation programs, task forces,ect ect…
we are stark raving mad as it is

To those who want to continue the war on marijuana- put up or shut up.

That operation cost at least $1,000,000 to set up. Undetected, it would provide $7,000,000/year to its owner. You would have to catch every single grow op to make them uneconomic. The VPD estimate that they catch 10% of grow ops.Unless you are willing to increase funding to cops, judicial system, and prisons by a factor of 10, you are wasting everyones time and money. The present situation simply favors the large organizations that can handle the loss of the occasional grow op.

In effect, the present laws on marijuana encourage the development of large organized crime. Think about that the next time you vote Conservative. Think about what kind of society you are leaving the next generation.

7000 x 100 doobies,a good day in BC …

“And he replied that if all the social costs just TO the government alone from the abuse of alcohol were added up, they would dwarf all the revenues it received from its sale.”

So it came out of the mouths of a politician …..

Hopefully I made my point!!!!!!!

that is both his left and right mouth …. ;-)

How many people are in jail for violent crimes after getting drunk, LOTS and booze is legal. So many drunken idiots out there.

How many people are in jail for violent crimes from smoking pot, minimal if any.

Legalize it already, tax it to help pay for infrastructure.

The RCMP can also concentrate on the crimes against decent people.

Really don’t want to fight with any-one on here about my opinion, cause it is all mine.

How many people are in jail for violent crimes after getting drunk, LOTS and booze is legal. So many drunken idiots out there.

How many people are in jail for violent crimes from smoking pot, minimal if any.

Legalize it already, tax it to help pay for infrastructure.

The RCMP can also concentrate on the crimes against decent people.

Really don’t want to fight with any-one on here about my opinion, cause it is all mine.

Fine, gus, but when employee’s come to work half-stoned and get hurt on the job, in a jurisdiction that now views EVERY accident as the EMPLOYER’S fault, who pays then?

The employer, you say, because he should have known his employee was a pot-head. And would have if he’d been truly diligent and imposed mandatory daily drug testing on every one of his employees before they’d be let on the worksite, and ‘documented’, (that’s the favorite new buzz-word for the bureaucracies that enforce safety regulations), the results?

Maybe he could do a complete strip search, too, to make sure no one is carrying any pot on them that they can smoke during a coffee break, or at lunchtime, or even while they’re actually working? Isn’t it bad enough now, just think what it’ll be like if pot were fully legal?

Already there’s been one case in Ontario where some workers engaged in window washing high rise buildings plunged to their deaths when a swing stage they were standing on malfunctioned.

The company that employed them had an impeccable safety record, had done all the required training, but hadn’t realised that the foreman who was on the stage that day, and some of the others that were killed, too, were all pot heads. An autopsy revealed they had all recently ingested marijuana. And a high likelihood that this was the cause of an error in judgement that caused the swing stage to plummet multiple stories to the pavement below.

But it was the company that was hit with a quarter million dollar administrative fine. Levied by the quasi-judicial agency in charge of workplace safety.

To fight that fine could have easily cost that company more than that in legal fees, which they would have been out of pocket for even if they’d won. You don’t get legal ‘costs’ back from appeals like that. So they paid it. But that established a precendent that now can be used against EVERY employer all across Canada in similar cases where workers ‘stoned’ on the job get hurt or killed.

Are we all prepared, as a society, to pay for those kind of additional costs? Because if the employer is to stay in business he has no choice but to pass them on to the consumers of his product.

Extrapolate that through into a whole host of other human endeavours, carried on every day, in which drug, and marijuana is a drug, induced impairment can have catastrophic results, not just to the impaired, but to others, and start adding up the costs.

I have worked beside quite a few alcoholics, and a few potheads. Alcoholics are far more terrifying, because their level of risk- taking varies with how much they drink. Potheads generally just slow down.

I would not want either potheads or alcoholics as workmates on high rise window washing. For that matter I wouldn’t want to work beside insomniacs, or someone with a bad toothache either.But that is totally irrelevant to the question of whether we should legalize marijuana.

I quite agree with your first part above, herbster. I’ve noticed the same thing, though just ‘slowing down’ can have some unfortunate consequences,too.

I well remember one pot-head I once worked with in a sawmill missing a cant with his pickaroon, which then flipped out his hand and went down onto a feed belt to the chipper. Though the ‘stop’ button for that belt was right close to him, his reactions were too slow to stop the belt before the pickaroon hit the chipper knives, which certainly didn’t do them, or the chipper itself, any good, to say the least.

I don’t think it’s irrelevant as to the arguments for or against legalisation at all. Being illegal does tend to limit the amount carried, and thus consumed, since fewer want to risk the chances of being tried on a possible charge of trafficing vs. that of simple possession of a small amount for personal use. So it does reduce its use somewhat. Personally, I think we’ve already got enough legal vices as it is, and legalising marijuana would just open the door to further substance abuses of an even more serious nature.

If the ‘reality’ of their day to day life is so horrible that people seek to escape from it this way, wouldn’t we really be further ahead to correct the problem why that is at the source, and actually modify the ‘reality’ they’re trying to escape from? That would be far more beneficial, I think, than further encouraging people to go off into some chemically induced fantasy world that really accomplishes nothing beneficial to actual change whatsoever.

sorrento is not on okanagan lake, it is on shuswap lake. Someone needs to do better research.

Legalize pot!! Yeah! Hehehehehehe! Then lets double up the taxes on junk food ! Let them get the “munchies”.Hehehehehehe!

Simple socredible. Random drug test…..thc in your system…you’re fired!

“The company that employed them had an impeccable safety record, had done all the required training, but hadn’t realised that the foreman who was on the stage that day, and some of the others that were killed, too, were all pot heads”

So, socredible, are you telling me that cannabis is legal in Ontario? News to me. So, unless it is legal, this happened under laws which make possession and use illegal.

Here is what happened in a country which legalized use and possession for personal use.

In 2001, Portugal became the first country in the world to decriminalize the use of all drugs, and started treating drug users as sick people, instead of criminals, although you can be arrested or assigned mandatory rehab if caught several times in possession
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world’s harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.

High time we got our heads out of the sand and dealt with the real cause.

This appears to be details of some countries which have a leval of legal marijuana use.

Spain – Growing the plant on private property for personal use, and consumption by adults in a private space is a constitutional right and hence not illegal.

Switzerland – As of January 1, 2012, the cantons Vaud, Neuchatel, Geneva and Fribourg have allowed the growing and cultivation of up to 4 cannabis plants per person, in an attempt to curb illegal street trafficking

Netherlands – Cannabis products are only sold openly in certain local “coffeeshops”, other types of sales and possession are not permitted, although the general legal approach toward cannabis was before de facto decriminalization

USA – Illegal at the federal level (but legal at the state level in Colorado and Washington)
Decriminalized in 14 states (at the state level) and in Detroit

Kiro 7 News from Seattle will be broadcasting a segment of how high is too high for purposes of driving.

The “conversation” as our mayor would say, is starting. Much better than remaining silent and costing billions and making matters worse rather than better.

There is nothing in our modern world that’s “simple” any more, NoWay.

One could easily imagine what would happen if a random drug test revealed thc in some worker’s system and he was summarily fired in our modern times here in BC.

Unions would insist he only be ‘suspended’ instead, and likely that his employer then pay to have him sent to some drug rehabilitation program. And pay his wages while he was off getting ‘treatment’ to withdraw from his addiction, too. Recidivism to result in another suspension, and further treatment.

In workplaces that were non-union, some human rights advocacy group would take up his cause. And the heartless employer who fired this poor, sick employee who was only trying to escape from the reality that he had to work to try to make a living that was perpetually inadequate to meet his every actual need and comfort no matter how hard he slaved away, and sought the only escape available from the harshness of his condition, would be pilloried mercilessly in the press.

Already, as I’ve related above, the window washing company in Ontario which had a good defense for the accident that cost several workers their lives as most likely being the sole result of employee impairment, realised the futility of even trying to argue that case in the current environment, where every accident is deemed to be the employer’s fault whether it is or not.

My point isn’t to make a case against marijuana use, even though it is a practice that I personally abhor. What people do in the privacy of their own homes is of no particular concern to me, even if that’s getting zonked out of their skulls on pot, or other drugs, or alcohol, or whatever. That’s their business, or that of their families. What concerns me is when their actions under the influence put me and others at risk of actual or financial injury. When they get stoned from pot that is now more freely available due to its legalisation, and drive their car down the road and run into someone who could be me. When they cut a finger off, or a hand, because their reaction time was too slow even on equipment that had been made as safe as humanly possible, and I, as their employer am held liable. Things like that. And the list of potentialities of that nature is long, and far from being ‘simple’. And we should consider them all very carefully before throwing the door wide open and legalising one more unnecessary problem.

Impairment is impairment, regardless if it comes from alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, prescription drugs, cough syrup, or even sugar.

I think a fair sentence is to make him smoke every single plant he grew.