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A Windsor judge mused aloud Monday about whether he should be lenient with a drug trafficker given “changing public opinion” on marijuana.

“Let me poke the elephant in the room,” Superior Court Justice Thomas Carey said at the sentencing hearing of a man caught with 10 kilograms of marijuana in his car and another 1.5 kg hidden above a ceiling tile in his home.

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Our current federal government was elected on a platform that included the decriminalization of marijuana, and it’s already legal in some countries and U.S. states, Carey said.

“How does the changing attitude toward marijuana affect what I do here today?”

Benjamin Herta, 28, was arrested on Nov. 14, 2012, after backing his BMW into a ditch along a rural property on Concession Road 8 in Amherstburg. In the backseat were bins of pot totalling more than 10 kg.

Tracks in the frost led police to a horse barn on the property where police found another 212 kilos of marijuana.