TROUBLE BREWING

The temperature dropped forty degrees in two hours here this afternoon. The arctic front literally came howling in and even now the high pitched keen of the relentless wind wails so loud as to rattle the windows. They say it will last for a few days. It's a good night to begin catching up on the drug war news.

The big news of course is the huge grow bust in the abandoned Molson brewery in Barrie, Canada. And we do mean huge.

The scale and sophistication of the operation with its production, packaging and distribution centres and even a dormitory for workers inside the huge building that stretches nearly one-kilometre is "beyond words," Crate said.

"It's so big that it took me more than an hour to walk through. It's twice as big as we initially believed."

A kilometer big would be just over half a mile for the metric impaired. That's a lot of pot. The town is buzzing over how this grow was operating right under their noses and they hadn't suspected a thing. There's a lot of speculation as to who could have been backing such a sophisticated operation and it's no doubt true there had to be some big money behind it and the people working the grow are not likely the ones who had it. The police aren't saying.

I think the real point however, is being missed in the excitement over the enormity of the bust. This is a perfect illustration of one my biggest arguments for the legalization of this herb. An operation of that size went virtually undetected for so long because cannabis consumers (and cannabis farmers) make good neighbors. No one noticed because they didn't cause any trouble and I would bet they actually contributed to the betterment of the neighborhood.

Thanks to Tim Meehan and Cannabis Culture, for the photos.





Just think of the tax revenues this crop could have generated had it been a legally allowable enterprise.

I wonder what's going to happen to all those plants now. I hate to think they will just be destroyed. It would make a lot of sense for the Canadian government to at least appropriate the crop and distribute it their already certified medical marijuana users and also to their scientists wishing to do effectiveness studies on medicinal use.