Reefer Madness: Not!!!

Bruce Aleksich is a Prince Rupert commercial fisherman who must find commercially grown tomatoes as bland and tasteless as I do, so he decided to grow his own. But the growing season was poor, so he opted to move his 400 or so plants indoors to a warehouse and grow them under lights.

The plants were apparently coming along nicely. Then Mr. Aleksich received an unexpected visit from 15 or so RCMP officers. They had their guns drawn. They mistook tomato plants for pot plants. Maybe they wondered what those round green and red things attached to the ‘pot’ plants were. They pondered that for over an hour, while Mr. Aleksich, two employees and two guests lay face down and handcuffed on the floor. The brave but busy police also found time to ransack their cars.

So, a police raid, guns drawn. No pot. Only tomatoes. So did the police profusely apologize for their stupid (and potentially deadly) mistake?

They did not. It was a bad day, and they don’t want to talk about it.

More and more the RCMP seems to behave not as a trained and disciplined police force dedicated to protecting and serving the public, but as a self-serving gang with criminal tendencies. Violent. Unaccountable. Sometimes deadly.

In 1995 in Houston, BC, 22 year old Ian Bush was caught holding (for someone else) an open beer outside a hockey arena on the day of a game. Attending RCMP officers routinely intercepted other individuals on the scene and poured out their liquor and left it at that.
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But perhaps because of a past minor encounter with Mr. Bush and an old score to settle, the latter was given a ticket, was taken into custody, and was later given a fatal bullet in the head.

Then Mr.