Yesterday – 11th of October – the Cobourg Police issued a press release read it here. The short version is simple; after a tip in the Summer an investigation was started. Yesterday a combined operation with the Port Hope Police Service and an OPP canine unit dog the Cobourg Police Service picked up a person on Division St. This led to a raid on a house in the Chipping Park area and items seized. Quote from the release: “A seizure of two loaded handguns, ammunition, approximately 475 grams of cocaine, 250 grams of methamphetamine and $10,455 in Canadian currency”. Three young men were arrested, two of them under the age of twenty-two.

This may have been a release about a success in the war against drugs in Cobourg, but it leads to a few questions about the big picture. Surely an aggressive media would be asking them as well.

• The BIG question – how did two people that young operate an operation this big on their own?
• When will the Second Tier suppliers be apprehended
• How did the drugs come into Town

These three questions leads one to conclude that this successful operation may be part of a bigger, yet undisclosed, ongoing operation. The fact that one of the alleged criminals was picked up after surveillance indicates that the suppliers should also be on tape. So chase it up!

Another fact out of this is that because the amount of money seized was large, more than just nickels and dimes, one should realise that the drug problem, in Cobourg, goes beyond a couple of dozen alleged drug users in the encampment. Obviously a great number of people with a great deal of money like to use drugs too! Moving on to that observation it would seem that while Cobourg moves in on local stuff the supply chain is not our jurisdictional problem. And if that is the case then we should be looking to the OPP to follow up.

Also considering the amount of time money and resources within the OPP devoted to drugs and organised crime perhaps we should be questioning the efficiency of the ‘war on drugs’. I know this is defeatist but there is a considerable amount of thought out there that thinks that ‘nothing will happen – THEY have all been bought off!’

We have to be positive, the drug epidemic can be beaten, but only if we insist the Police do their jobs. This latest success will be seen as a failure if nothing comes out of it. We cannot be satisfied with taking a couple of young men off the streets, seizing a couple of guns and removing drugs from their customers.

We have to do better!