Pubdate: Sun, 08 May 2016
Source: North Shore News (CN BC)
Copyright: 2016 North Shore News
Contact:  http://www.nsnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/311
Author: Trevor Lautens

MARIJUANA 'MARE'S NEST' DESERVES MENTION

Hey, let's have some benefit to show for West Van's fat 6.87 per cent
property tax rise.

First, restore the trash cans - why were they removed? - at each
littered end of the 5400-block Marine Drive. Sure, that's my block,
and why not exploit my dandy print pulpit for selfish interests now
and then?

Second, bring back the portable toilet during baseball season at
Cypress Park and other such sites. I've sometimes been obliged to take
a whiz in toilet-scarce West Van woods, inviting charges of exposing
myself. Which would be embarrassing, considering my dignified age and
status, harrumph.

* * *

The North Shore Zone Festival of Plays at Presentation House Theatre
is an annual week-long treat that deserves higher recognition - and
attendance: Affordable, and no bridges to cross. The intimacy and
yakking of the festival crowd come at no extra cost.

It's not too late. Tonight's play is Art, tomorrow's a stage reading
by West Van secondary school students of Crushed, and announcement of
awards.

Weird: West Van Theatre just closed a second edition of Fawlty 
Towers, a sold-out smash - but for years hasn't taken part in the 
festival. Why? Fear of winning. Can't afford to go to the provincial 
competition (this year in Chilliwack, Jill-of-all-theatre-trades Anne 
Marsh reports). There's a film/play comedy script lurking in there.

* * *

Mayor Michael Smith is delighted that the Grosvenor development will
include an Earls restaurant - which will grant a reprieve to the
mellow Hollyburn Sailing Club. Not his original vision, but the pieces
fell neatly into place.

"Earls is a positive step for Ambleside and makes a development at the
sailing club less of a priority," Smith notes. "I would expect the
facility to remain as it is for some time. Earls will bring a lot of
people into Ambleside ... a key part of our plan to develop a
restaurant offering."

Any jubilation was stepped on by the coincident protest over the Earls
chain switch from Alberta beef suppliers to U.S. sources with greener
practices - cleaving the Canada-first left from the environmentalist
left.

* * *

A touch of irony: While Park Royal Shopping Centre was making
ill-considered moves in the Big Chess Match that became nation-wide
news of an unwelcome kind, the West Vancouver Chamber of Commerce
anointed the centre's longtime executive Rick Amantea as its Business
Person of the Year.

Amantea - who was not, repeat not, the exec who ordered the chess
players to move out - is publicly sensitive to Ambleside business
concerns, personable, and always accessible to the undersigned. A
worthy choice by his chamber peers.

* * *

All praise for Vancouver Coun. Kerry Jang - in real life, note, a UBC
psychology professor who teaches and does research on the causes of
mental illnesses - and rare kudos from this observer for Vancouver
authorities too for not backing down from the city's closure notices
to aberrant marijuana shops.

Of course the protesters defy the law. It's what they
do.

Hardened law-breakers. As the marijuana business wafts upward from
small-fry shops past ex-police chiefs and old pols who have seen the
light, like Kash Heed and Mike Harcourt, toward greedily waiting
"respectable" corporate oligarchs and stuffy banks offering marijuana
business loans, what a farce that what the media call "activists" are
plain and simple business operators and promoters. Is the president of
Ford an activist for car ownership, or just selling cars?

Predictably, pot legalization is in a confused legal and health
snarl.

The claim that the "war on drugs" was a failure that wasted police
resources is as hollow as the drug-pushing mind: The cops will have
plenty of employment patrolling under-age kids, stopping stoned
drivers, and chasing a continuing, I'd predict expanding, illegal market.

On that point: A long-time regular but light pot smoker told me he
opposes legalization - because prices will explode under state
regulation and government employees' union wages. Bizarrely, the stuff
he buys illegally costs about the same as legal but maxi-taxed pipe
tobacco - 50 grams of which, about two ounces, cost an astonishing
$55, nearly $500 a pound, at Victoria's elegant 1892-founded Morris
Tobacconists.

Where is legalization-pusher Vancouver Sun columnist Ian Mulgrew, now
that we really need him to defend the mare's nest of consequences of
the normalization of marijuana as just another consumer commodity?

Maybe he feels outflanked by his and my former colleague Pete
McMartin, who recently urged legalization of all drugs. All? Including
the currently in-the-news killer ones?

To resurrect the once-trendy question: What have you been smoking,
Pete?  
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D