March 2005
by Barry Stagg
It is not often that I write about the members of my own profession but this is one of these exceptions, given the fulminations coming from some defence lawyers after the murder of four police officers in Alberta. Their support of criminal marijuana farming in the face of these mass murders by a psychopathic career criminal calls into question their judgment and their sense of morality.
How can any educated and informed person even begin to parse the details of this tragedy for the purpose of advocacy in support of one of the prime revenue sources of organized crime? The only honest explanation is a profound lack of judgment and its displacement by crass asininity.
The real problem illuminated by this cloying, disingenuous support for profitable drug crime is the Boomer generation's fixation on cannabis as some sort of holy symbol of their era. It is, of course, just another recreational intoxicant, no more worthy of formal veneration than are cocaine or the filth brewed in backroom laboratories. Clever insider attitudes about their own choices for university partying do not form the basis for good social policy. The connective tissue for such narratives seems akin to the revelations commonly uncovered during progressive combustion sessions involving non-medical marijuana. Smoking it then does not equate to a present where marijuana finds its way onto the shelves of the local convenience store, next to the video games and chocolate bars.
The murders in Alberta were monstrous acts and any attempts to deflect the outrage arising from them by defending the right of marijuana farmers to light prison sentences are contemptible. Surely only the benighted, the foolish or the compromised engage in such odious dialogue.
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