Book by B.C. researcher says media, police not talking straight on pot

By James Keller, The Canadian Press
OttawaCitizen.com
Dec 25, 2013

A demonstrator smokes a marijuana joint on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 20, 2010. Police would have the option of ticketing people for a range of minor offences, instead of laying criminal charges, under a plan that could yield significant savings for the cash-strapped justice system. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Pawel Dwulit

VANCOUVER – As it turns out, Nov. 6, 2012, was a big day for marijuana laws.

Voters in Colorado and Washington state approved initiatives to legalize pot, setting the stage for the regulated production and sale of the drug. Several other jurisdictions in the U.S. have since followed suit.

In Canada, the same day two American states were effectively abandoning part of the war on drugs, provisions of a new federal law came into effect that imposed strict mandatory minimums for drug-related crimes, including marijuana production.

The contrast, says University of Victoria professor Susan Boyd, could not have been greater.

“This new law and our revived war on drugs in Canada is so contrary to what’s going on around the world,” says Boyd, who specializes in drug law and drug policy.

“It seemed like Canada was veering towards a very punitive model while the rest of the world was taking a closer look at mandatory minimums and abandoning them.”

But the revisions to Canada’s drug laws — contained in the Safe Streets and Communities Act, or Bill C-10, as it was previously known — did not happen in a vacuum, says Boyd.

Instead, Boyd argues in a forthcoming book that Canada’s recent tough-on-crime approach to drugs is, in part, the product of decades of skewed media coverage and police messaging that has routinely exaggerated the dangers of the marijuana industry and its connection to organized crime.

For the book, titled “Killer Weed: Marijuana Grow Ops, Media, and Justice,” Boyd examined 2,500 articles from four major daily newspapers in British Columbia from 1995 to 2009.

She found news coverage about cannabis enforcement in B.C. frequently contained inaccurate information or exaggerated claims about the size and scope of the underground marijuana industry, the sorts of people associated with grow-ops, and the industry’s connection to gangs.

Assertions by police – particularly the RCMP, which is responsible for policing in much of B.C. — were left unchallenged, she says, and politicians, in turn, relied on such misinformation to push for stricter drug laws.

For example, the news articles she examined repeatedly asserted marijuana grow-ops are inextricable linked to gangs and other criminal organizations. Police spokespeople were frequently quoted explaining that modern-day grow-ops are not “mom and pop” operations.

But Boyd says the federal government’s own research does not support that claim.

She cited a Justice Department study that was completed in 2011, obtained by a reporter through an access to information request, that examined a random sample of 500 marijuana grow operations. Of those, just five per cent had apparent links to gangs or organized crime.

“This study wasn’t released by our federal government, and you could see why,” says Boyd.

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[h/t: Easton Ellis]