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Opinion

PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Ex-cop Bill VanderGraaf says Canada would experience a smooth transition to looser pot laws, as did the Netherlands.

Once, as a staff sergeant of detectives, Bill VanderGraaf was a warrior leading Winnipeg's version of the war on drugs. Now, the retired former cop is the leading local voice on the decriminalization and regulation of street drugs. Pot in particular.

So what happened to VanderGraaf between then and now?

He is half an hour into an explanation of the journey to smoking joints as a way to help deal with a life and a career laced with psychological booby-traps when he says this: "Police work is always about doing things you don't necessarily like having to do. And the Morgentaler clinic was one of those investigations."

What has a raid he led on a Winnipeg abortion clinic way back in the 1980s got to do with VanderGraaf's view on the legalization of marijuana?

Well, for one thing, it's about how much he regrets being part of the raid.

But then, in retrospect, he has a lot of regrets about his days as a cop.

-- -- --

It is the week before a police raid that will close the doors of an unlicensed medical-marijuana dispensary on north Main Street, and VanderGraaf and I are starting where it started.

Growing up in East Kildonan.

And, like so many of his generation, trying pot as a kid.

He was 16 the first time he lit up.

Unlike most kids, though, his extended family was full of cops.

But his father was a firefighter. And while he was battling fires, his mother was battling depression that lead to shock treatments.

Eventually, VanderGraaf chose to become a cop instead of a firefighter.

But he didn't have a choice in the depression he inherited.

He was 21 when he joined the Winnipeg Police Service, where his legendary uncle, Peter VanderGraaf, served. He recalls being introduced early on to the limitations of what cops can do. It also may have been the beginnings of his insight into finding a better way to deal with street drugs than to leave it to bike gangs to dispense in their deadly way.

The young rookie cop was called to transport a prisoner to the methadone clinic at the St. Boniface Hospital, an addict he immediately recognized as a kid from his high school.

"I had a bit of a sympathetic streak for that fellow," he said. "And about six or seven months later, I read that he'd died of an overdose."

Over the years, VanderGraaf would see at least six police colleagues die by suicide in ways that still haunt him. And he would encounter other addicts -- some who recovered, some who didn't, and some who weren't given a chance because their futures were criminalized over a minor pot charge.

"A policeman I arrested in about '85, we ruined his life, totally."

The cop was caught buying pot while in uniform.

"I was in internal affairs at the time, so I had to become involved. There were wiretaps and a whole bunch of other BS," VanderGraaf said.

I ask how he felt back then.

"I felt crappy. Because I told them we should be taking the kid aside and saying, 'What's the problem?' And helping him. We do that with drunks. We do that with impaired-driver cops that get nabbed. We don't effing fire them. He lost his wife and everything."

VanderGraaf can relate to the cop he busted for pot purchases in another way. In 2007, after he retired, VanderGraaf's home was raided, and he was arrested for growing five pot plants. He said they were to make marijuana cookies to alleviate his chronically ill father's pain, and the court granted him a conditional discharge. VanderGraaf ended up applying for, and receiving, a licence for medical marijuana.

The pot helps him cope with his own addiction.

"Yes, I have a drinking problem, and marijuana keeps me away from the alcohol. I can limit myself much better than I used to do. And I find it very effective for the issues that are bothering me."

Issues related in part to post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by bodies he has seen and seen again in his nightmares. He remembers one in particular; the 1987 Christmas Eve heroin trade-related massacre of a mother and her five-year-old daughter.

"In homicide, we're cleaning up all the leftovers on the war on drugs. We're cleaning up the mess left behind."

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he says this. "But did we hurt people? We certainly did."

He's referring now to the Morgentaler clinic bust back in the 1980s.

"I'd like to apologize to all the doctors and nurses that we detained in custody. As well as the patients that I was told to harass and bother over this."

He mentions Morgentaler, not just because of post-arrest regrets, but because of the connection he sees between the abortion clinic that was already well on its way to legalization, and the medical-marijuana store police just raided and shut down.

"It's the same as medical dispensaries," VanderGraff says. "It's a social-health issue. It has nothing to do with policing. It should never have anything to do with police."

But, if I may, there's another similarity between a woman's right to control her own body and a pot smoker's right to put whatever he likes in his or hers.

It should be a choice.

Bill VanderGraaf has already made his choice with his personal crusade for cannabis legalization.

"I do not do this for my personal benefit; it causes me stress. I do it because I think it is the right thing to do."

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca