Gardeners grow by nature

Here's this week's grow-op bust illustrating the illogic of prohibition. They start out telling you about how the grow-ops are proliferating.

In the year 2001, 33 were discovered and dismantled in the City of Toronto. Last year, 2003, 140 grow operations were dismantled. In just the first 6 months of 2004, 168 operations have been dismantled within the City of Toronto.

Then they tell you that organized crime is involved.

"Grow operations generate vast profits for Organized Crime. These profits provide the resources for Organized Crime to engage in all manner of illegal activity, including the importation of Heroin and Cocaine. The illicit drug trade is the gasoline that fuels the engine of Organized Crime and ultimately results in addiction, death, violence and all forms of crime and disorder," said Staff Insp. Dan Hayes.

And then they list the dangers of unregulated grows.

Grow operations are located in our neighbourhoods. They present many risks to public safety, such as: fires, explosions, booby traps, mould, and noxious chemical exposure. In some cases, young children are living in homes that are being used for Grow Ops.

The prohibition profiteers want you to believe that this justifies their budgets and their methodology but doesn't this really illustrate why we should legalize? All these hazards are a direct result of an unregulated black market. Eradication, interdiction and incarceration have had decades to solve the problems and have obviously failed.

The grow-ops increase in numbers and size, the technology that allows for larger grows creates the profit margin that attracts organized crime and the ensuing health hazards occur because the ops have evolved from small grows for personal use to huge industrial operations that tap illegally into power sources in order to avoid detection and pump chemicals in order to increase potency and yield and who are willing to use violence to protect their investment. The people making the profits on these huge operations are not the ones working the grows. Children end up exposed to these hazards because there is no legitimate business that pays its workers that kind of salary. Think about it, kids were exposed to the hazards of bathtub gin during Prohibition I as well but do you hear of children hurt in bottling plants today?

The bottom line is the grows will grow unless and until you take the profit out of it.