Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Drug War Front: Vancouver

There are plenty of jokes about hippy Vancouver pot heads, but the reality is that drugs are big business over here. BC Bud sells in large quantities down in the US. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who has a grow op. As always, when illegal smuggling is highly profitable, people end up getting killed. It's not quite as bad as Mexico, YET.
The rash of violence in the Vancouver area, which has had 12 shootings in 16 days, is a result of "disorganized" and "reckless" gangs that have exploded in the province over the last decade, says a criminology professor.

Prof. Darryl Plecas of the University of the Fraser Valley said the number of gangs in B.C. has grown from about a dozen ten years ago to more than 100 today, a growth fuelled in part by an expanding drug trade.

This summer, I came home from work and my street was cordoned off, cops were everywhere, including in the sky in helicopters. It turns out somebody was gunned down 25 meters from where I live. A gangland "hit". Seeing the alley behind my apartment on the television news was surreal. Another time a body was found in the trunk of a car parked right outside my living room window. Cops even came to my door to ask if I had seen anything suspicious.

5 comments:

  1. Yes, one does not see too many gun battles over a case of Labatts.
    I wonder how many more Presidents and Prime Ministers that were former pot smokers, have to be in office, before they make it legal?

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  2. Indeed. Obama and W did. (It's pretty much a given that W did coke as well.) Clinton did. Somehow I think that Harper actually didn't.

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  3. Others Include; Al Gore (he invented the defense speech),Sarah Palin, Trudeau, Paul Martin said his wife made brownies, Stockwell Day, Tobin, Kim Campbell, and the list keeps growing.

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  4. You can also add George Washington, who grew and smoked hemp on his farm.

    There's also the irony of when George Bush Sr. got shot down in the Pacific during WWII, his parachute was made of hemp. This is a great material for such things, particularly paper, instead of clear cutting forests. But you aren't allowed to grow the crop because of the drug prohibition. It's madness.

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  5. Levis Strauss made his first jeans out hemp material, and Columbus`s sails were made of hemp.
    The commercial crop can also be grown on very marginal land, kind of like a weed (pun intended).

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