THE ROUNDUP

title borrowed from Grades of Honor

The roundup took weeks of planning and coordinating,addresses and residencies checked and doubled check,manpower schedules cleared and traded.In all over eighty people would be paid thousands of hours of high priced labour to orchestrate the roundup,an event that would take only three hours to bring to fruit.Perhaps I will turn things over to the local media to explain a bit better-my commentary will follow this:

Police Crack Drug Ring

The StarPhoenix
Saturday, July 01, 2006

Undercover police in Saskatoon believe they have cracked a drug ring in the city.
The Saskatoon Integrated Drug Unit has charged 15 people with 51 offences ranging from possession of drugs to drug trafficking, according to a police news release.
All 15 people were arrested on Thursday and will appear in court on Tuesday. They remain in custody. Warrants have been issued for 12 more people on 22 additional charges.
"During the course of their undercover investigation, officers purchased the following substances: cannabis, marijuana, cocaine, crack cocaine, methamphetamine, morphine, Ritalin and Dilaudid," said the release.
Saskatoon police and RCMP worked with the federal justice department over 16 months in three separate investigations, which are continuing.
© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2006

If you are at all familiar with this type of press release you may make note of one major difference between this and other drug busts.Take note that NO drugs were seized-no cash,no weapons-nothing to indicate that this was an active "drug ring"
Add to that the fact that none of the fifteen have any criminal connection to each other and the story really falls apart.As for my part I stand accused of three counts of trafficking in marijuana,the charges stemming from Feb-March of 2005.It was easy for me to remember the incidents that lead to these charges-as only once in the last two years have I had anything to do with drugs or people involved with them.More on the way I was set-up later.

One of the "suspects"of this so called drug ring was arrested for having in his possession 180 Ritalin tablets.What the police failed to note was that the pills were in a prescription bottle-addressed to the suspect!He had just left the pharmacy and was stopped when he asked for directions at a red light.(he asked the driver in the car next to him-who was being followed by police in a vain attempt to see him sell drugs(he had none)
That case was thrown out and the judge severely reprimanded police-that story will never make the news.
My lawyer feels that I should be cleared on the grounds that I did not receive speedy justice-that the police held those charges for two years in the hope that they could use them as a lever against me when the made a real drug bust on me-but since I am clean now they just added me to the pot-threatened me with penitentiary time(over two years-in fact they said they will be asking five years-but if I wore a wire and made some major buys for them all charges would be dropped.
I am sure all 15 of us were offered the same deal(money is great-they pay you 1/3 of what you buy or caused to have seized-I could easily retire in a week!) I can only hope that no one took them up on their offer.Don't take me wrong-I do believe the police force is necessary and that cracking down on drug dealing is a benefit to society(though I have doubts about some of the penalties-more on that later) but I think we are moving to far to the right in our paid informants programs.Shades of Stasi(East German Secret Police before the fall-they were famous for paying people to spy on their neighbours).
I just received a phone call,must dash-will continue tomorrow