TECHNOLOGY MARCHES ON

The Doc 40 comment system has just been put in place, courtesy of the excellent Rich Deakin who pilots the Funtopia website. It’s a little discreet link over on the top right of the page, just below “the horror, the horror.” Hurry and you might just be the first. Email to byron4d@aol.com is also still very welcome.


THOSE WACKY CANADIANS

The following story was carried by the wire services and also forwarded by Henry Beck.

BARRIE, Ont. (CP) - A marijuana "factory" concealed within a sprawling old brewery just steps from one of Ontario's busiest highways is proof Canada's pot problem has reached "epidemic proportions," police said Monday. The former Molson brewery in Barrie, Ont., plainly visible from Highway 400, one of the province's busiest commuter routes, was raided on the weekend by some 100 city and provincial police officers acting on a tip. Inside, police found marijuana with what they said had an estimated street value of $30 million, along with a grow operation of staggering proportions - the largest and most sophisticated in modern Canadian history.
"This is not a ma-and-pa operation," Barrie police Chief Wayne Frechette wryly told a news conference in this central Ontario city an hour's drive north of Toronto.
Across a 5,400-square metre complex the size of a football field, police found more than 25,000 pot plants growing everywhere - even inside the cavernous indoor vats once used to brew beer.
Citizen Beck enlarges on the story...“This was in effect a hydroponic Silent Running space station, a luxury liner, Battlestar Cannabis, with a crew the cops speculated might have been brought in blindfolded or under the cover of night, because loose lips sink ships. And they say nobody thinks big anymore.”

Meanwhile I rather question the use of language in the story, and especially the reference to Canada’s epidemic “pot problem.” From where I sit in Los Angeles, a city where BC bud is a welcome import, Canada hardly seems to have a “pot problem”. Indeed, it would appear to have a highly organized, high-tech, marijuana agri-business what is only waiting for full legalization to yield beaucoup revenues and tax benefits. Compared to the US, with its hundred of thousands of incarcerated reefer felons, its massive and costly drug enforcement industry, and its chicken-shit politicians too tremulous and self-serving to speak out against the seventy-year total failure of the War on Drugs, Canada hardly has a problem at all. And before anyone starts screaming the late Maude Flanders’ scream of “what about the children?”, consider, if marijuana was legalized, how many resources would be freed up to educate kids that maybe they should hold off on smoking dope at least until they have learned to read and tie the laces on their sneakers.


QUESTION OF THE DAY

Is it cruel to laugh when Ted Nugent hacks himself up with a chainsaw?

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CRYPTIQUE – You know who are.