Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to just speak a little bit with regard to marijuana. Just to qualify that, I was 20 years with the RCMP. I was qualified as an expert before the Supreme Court of British Columbia, knowing how much is required for trafficking in marijuana and being able to identify marijuana without its being analyzed. I can tell you from three years of drug work that marijuana is not the benign drug everyone believes it is. It has come a long way since the 1960s and the open crops of California.
The THC levels in marijuana have gone from 6% and 7% up to as high as 40%. The highest I have ever seen is 38%. You get a pretty good bang for your buck at 38%. When you're growing it at those levels, you're doing something right.
I want to just give an example of why I believe minimum sentences need to be in place, and I want to provide the rationale behind that. With regard to the testimony I used to provide, I'll give that to some degree.
On average, one marijuana plant will produce approximately six ounces of marijuana. It can go up and it can go down, but this is the average. It depends if it's outdoor, indoor, sea of green—it all depends. If we equate that and we assume that every person rolls a joint of a half a gram—and that's being fairly nice because normally it's a little lower, but let's go to half a gram—and everyone smokes four joints a day, which is quite a lot considering you have to be working sometime, that would equate to 13 days per ounce. Now equate that to six ounces times 13 days. That's 78 days that you get from one plant. And from that you grow six plants at six ounces. So now you have 36 ounces at 13 days. So you have 468 days worth of marijuana at four joints a day, and that's not missing a day.
The problem is that your THC levels are dropping as you keep it off the plant. So now you're either forced to smoke really crappy marijuana or you're going to sell it, one of the two. In all likelihood you're going to sell it. Female plants grow over a 16- to 18-week cycle. That means you can grow a crop from two to three times year. So now we're not just talking about six plants; we're talking about 18 plants. And I've never met any individuals who had only grown six plants and then said they were stopping because they had had their fill and were moving on. It doesn't happen. I've never seen it, and I never will.
The largest thing that concerns me is the misconception that marijuana is not a gateway drug. I have never in my life met a heroin addict who started at heroin—never, and I never will. They always start at the lowest denominator and work their way up. That's the way the system works.
With regard to some of the minimum maximums we're talking about, those who have been around for a while, like Mr. Harris and Mr. Rathgeber, will recall the days of the NCA and the FDA, where we had minimum sentencing for importation of drugs at seven years. We took that out in the late eighties, I believe.