Pubdate: Tue, 09 Aug 2016
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Page: S1
Copyright: 2016 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Mike Hager

MOST GROWERS AREN'T GANGSTERS: ADVOCATES

Group Warns That Overestimating the Role of Organized Crime in the 
Illegal Pot Industry Will Simply Perpetuate the Black Market

Contrary to common RCMP wisdom, organized crime groups play a 
relatively small role in Canada's underground cannabis trade, and the 
majority of people behind the country's illegal grow operations and 
dispensaries are otherwise law-abiding, a group of academics and 
small-scale marijuana businesses have told the federal legalization task force.

A written submission co-authored by a prominent criminologist on 
behalf of a drug-policy advocacy group cites government data that 
showed just 5 per cent of marijuana criminal cases over an eight-year 
period had links to organized crime or street gangs.

And the groups warn that overestimating the role of organized crime 
will create a new regime that will be too restrictive and simply 
perpetuate the black market.

The federal Liberal government is soliciting input from across the 
country as it prepares to introduce legislation next spring to 
legalize recreational marijuana, which it says is necessary to stop 
young Canadians from getting easy access to the drug and to stop the 
flow of profits to violent criminal gangs.

"A lot of this comes down to your definition of organized crime. If 
you think three people acting together and potentially making some 
kind of profit necessarily means that these are organized criminals, 
then, of course, everybody in the cannabis industry is an organized 
criminal," said Neil Boyd, a professor at Simon Fraser University and 
co-author of the report that the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition is 
sending to the federal task force this week.

"But if you think along the lines of the Justice Canada website, 
where the focus is on corruption [and] the use of force or violence, 
you'll find very few people in the marijuana industry are properly 
defined as organized criminals," Prof. Boyd said.

Ottawa should allow a variety of these independent, small-scale 
growers and dispensaries to participate in the emerging legal market, 
not just restrict the commercial production and sale of cannabis to 
the two dozen companies now licensed for Health Canada's medical 
marijuana regime, Prof. Boyd added.

He said gangs definitely play a role in the production and sale of 
the drug, but the Mounties have never proven to what extent, and all 
available research shows that most of those in Canada's cannabis 
industry are non-violent and do not commit any other crimes.

In 2011, the Department of Justice pulled 500 random marijuana 
production cases from the files of the Crown prosecutor and the RCMP 
dating back eight years and found just 5 per cent of offenders had 
links to organized crime or street gangs, Prof. Boyd's report notes. 
An RCMP-funded study of B.C. marijuana grow operations found that 6 
per cent of the sites analyzed had guns, the report notes.

The role of organized crime in the cannabis trade also came up during 
a recent Federal Court case that focused on whether rules established 
by the Harper government that prohibited medical marijuana patients 
from growing at home were constitutional. The court ruled against the 
government, which had argued, among other things, that allowing 
patients to grow their own marijuana often leads to diversion into 
the black market.

In February, the Federal Court judge who heard the case questioned 
the credibility of the RCMP's expert witness on illegal marijuana 
cultivation. In his ruling, the judge noted that the Mounties had no 
hard data to back up their claims that home growers licensed under 
Canada's old medical system were magnets for violent thieves and 
organized crime. The RCMP witness also stated that it is very 
difficult for the force to know the extent to which organized 
criminals were able to penetrate the previous system because of the 
secrecy surrounding most of these groups.

The RCMP was unavailable for comment on Monday afternoon.

Staff-Sergeant Lindsey Houghton, spokesman for British Columbia's 
anti-gang task force, said very few gangsters are ever charged with 
or implicated in marijuana offences.

"We've had a few, but it's not the majority," he said.

A report submitted to the federal task force by the Cannabis Trade 
Alliance of Canada, which represents owners of legal and illegal 
marijuana businesses, recommended that Ottawa create different 
licensing and security requirements for a range of cannabis 
businesses, including seed and clone nurseries, commercial growers 
both large and small, processors of oil and extract, cannabis 
wholesalers and dispensaries.

Including all of these players would give the government more 
leverage to control them and stamp out objectionable activity, the 
group argues in its report.

Sarah Campbell, director of the Craft Cannabis Association of B.C., 
the other trade association that submitted a report, said most 
business relationships between suppliers and dispensaries are built 
on face-to-face contact among average people such as herself.

Ms. Campbell, who has a commerce degree and quit the self-publishing 
industry several years ago when her company moved to the United 
States, makes edible cannabis products on Vancouver Island and sells 
only to local dispensaries run by "people that I know and trust and I 
know have integrity."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom