The Castlegar RCMP detachment burned a large amount of marijuana outside the Castlegar Fire Department on Friday.
The marijuana had been seized on Friday, Jan. 6 and needed to be disposed of, so the fire department setup a large pit with bark mulch and snow to burn it.
One Castlegar resident phoned the News to complain that the smoke had irritated his eyes and throat.
Asked if it’s normally considered okay to burn marijuana in the middle of town, Sgt. Laurel Matthew said, “No, of course we don’t normally burn it. We had a safe place to burn it because the ground is frozen.”
“It’s not something obviously we do often, but it needed to get disposed of because there was a lot of it,” she added.