BLOWING SMOKE IN VANSTERDAM

Vancouver is known as a pot-friendly North American Amsterdam. Officials
hate that reputation -- but they're tough one moment, tolerant the next.

MURRAY'S DOWNTOWN MARIJUANA speakeasy is no more, and he's a bit bummed
out. His place was quintessential Vansterdam -- a third-floor walk-up with
soaring ceilings and walls filled with good art selling at fair prices.

There was a pool table, comfy seating and music set low enough to feed a
conversational buzz. Tourists mingled with office clerks or Howe Street
brokers. They'd buy pot from a little bar in one corner -- provided they
were of legal drinking age. Murray -- who prefers not to reveal his last
name -- was strict about that. They'd roll a few doobies and solve the
world's problems, working up a killer appetite for dinner.

For nine months, Murray's place was the gentle, nonthreatening face on B.C.
Bud, the potent form of marijuana that, according to the province's
Organized Crime Agency, is a $6-billion annual cash crop, second only to
logging -- but ahead of mining and manufacturing -- among British
Columbia's most valuable commodities. "It was a huge tourist attraction,"
Murray says of his business. "I had people from all over the world coming
here." He and many others in the vocal B.C. cannabis culture have stoked
Vancouver's stature as a pot-tolerant North American Amsterdam. It was
Murray's undoing.

Police hate that reputation.

The authorities leaned on his landlord last summer, and although visitors
sometimes light up at his place, as in other "smoke-tolerant" venues in the
city, Murray now deals nothing stronger than artwork.

No charges were laid, so he's not in a mood to complain.

Still, like many, he's befuddled by what passes for a drug policy in the
province.

Tough one moment, tolerant the next, officialdom goes through wild mood
swings in the enforcement of drug laws, well aware of B.C. opinion polls
that favour decriminalizing the personal possession of marijuana. Far more
troubling than pot for many is the ugly bazaar of hard-drug dealers and
crack-addled hookers operating within view of the Public Safety Building,
the monolithic police substation in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The cost
of crack and heroin in human life and property crime is enormous.

This summer, says Insp. Kash Heed, who commands the drug and vice section,
police have shifted some resources from busting marijuana grows to hit the
open-air drug market.

Even the final arbiters of the law, the judges of the B.C. Court of Appeal,
seem bewildered by the ambivalent views about pot. In a March 29 ruling,
three justices complained: "There are so many differing sentences for
marijuana it cannot be said that there is any common judicial opinion as to
what is the right thing to do." Penalties for pot growers vary from a
conditional discharge to, in rare cases, sentences of two years less a day
in provincial jail.

While police complain about soft sentencing, they've racked up record
busts. Vancouver police raided 388 grow operations last year, seizing
marijuana, equipment and cash that they valued at almost $74 million.

In the first half of this year, the drug squad and the department's
specialized Grow Busters unit hit 299 grow houses and seized more than $77
million in plants and assets.

The squad conducts so many raids that, in many cases, it doesn't spend time
or resources laying charges against the growers, concedes Heed. Instead,
investigators track patterns and similarities "so we can link these grow
operations to various criminal cells."

As for small quantities of marijuana, B.C. police have all but given up.
While they reported 10,094 incidents of marijuana possession in 1999,
barely 17 per cent resulted in charges, according to an analysis by The
Vancouver Sun. That compares with a charge rate of 55 per cent in Quebec,
and almost 71 per cent in Ontario.

The law, in short, is applied in the famously inconsistent fashion that
marked the rise and fall of four years of alcohol prohibition in the
province, from 1917 to 1921. Then, as now, fortunes were made slaking the
market in America, which clung to Prohibition until 1933. Feeding America's
need then was, as historian Alan Morley put it, "one of the finest
assemblages of adventurers, pirates, skilled seamen, gangsters and
downright murderers the eastern Pacific had ever seen." It's no different
today.

British Columbia still drives America to distraction, though the product is
Texada Timewarp, as one of the new pot strains is known, rather than
bootleg rum.

This April, when Rolling Stone magazine catalogued all that is cool, high
on the list was the eastern B.C. ski town of Fernie. Its claim to fame was
an abundance of snow, and another natural resource: "a fragrant green plant
known to aid relaxation and enhance appreciation of, you know, pretty trees
and stuff."

Less enthusiastic are American authorities. The U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration will open an office in Vancouver next year, a move Heed
applauds as a "beneficial" example of cross-border co-operation. DEA agents
will share intelligence with Canadian counterparts -- confirming, in the
view of critics, that drug policy is dictated from Washington.

At the very least, the province's perceived laxity is a concern.

Last December, the DEA produced a seven-page intelligence brief on B.C.
Bud. It notes police in the province raid an average of eight indoor grow
operations a day. Yet there is a steady climb of marijuana seizures at the
B.C.-Washington state border. "The majority of grows are operated by
Vietnamese organized crime groups (or youth gangs) or by associates of the
Hells Angels Motorcycle Club," says the DEA. It estimates the province's
pot trade is a $1.4-billion-a-year industry.

B.C. police say even that figure is low. An estimate released last month by
the province's Organized Crime Agency puts the annual value of the
marijuana trade at $6 billion -- with $4.2 billion of that grown in the
populous Lower Mainland. The agency, which draws on the resources of the
RCMP and municipal police forces, estimates there are 15,000 to 20,000 grow
operations in the Lower Mainland -- more than double its estimate of two
years ago.

Why British Columbia? Police blame soft sentences, and that darn Vansterdam
reputation. "What we hear is people saying, 'Oh, yeah, grow in B.C. because
nothing is going to happen to you,' " says Staff Sgt. Chuck Doucette of the
RCMP's provincial drug-awareness section. There's also plenty of expertise.
Anything necessary to the cultivation, sale or export of marijuana is
available within a five-minute walk from the 300 block of Vancouver's West
Hastings Street -- Vansterdam's main street.

Consider the global reach of potrepreneur Marc Emery, who is president of
the B.C. Marijuana Party, which ran candidates (unsuccessfully) in all 79
provincial ridings in the May election; publisher of the internationally
circulated Cannabis Culture magazine and its information-packed Web site;
and founder of Pot-TV, an Internet operation that streams marijuana news,
music and cultivation tips from its West Hastings centre.

Emery sells marijuana seeds by mail order -- about two million of
"considerable potency and quality" in the past seven years, he says. His
12-page seed catalogue reads like a stoner's version of Wine Spectator. The
Western Winds strain, for instance, has "invigorating high-energy buzz.
Great for conversation, dancing, romance."

Emery estimates gross sales this year at $2.5 million.

Much of the profits finance the magazine, Pot-TV and the Marijuana Party.
The party's latest initiative is to underwrite the start-up costs for 25
"compassion clubs" to distribute medical marijuana to communities in
British Columbia and Alberta.

Watching Emery's effort with some concern is Hilary Black, the 25-year-old
founder of the 1,500-member British Columbia Compassion Club Society, which
sells pot, often with doctors' recommendations, to people suffering from
such diseases as AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis. While Ottawa has
dithered over its medical marijuana plans, the club has operated for the
past four years in a legal grey zone, dispensing pot from its east
Vancouver storefront. The club is so established that judges have even
granted its growers conditional discharges, noting police turn a "blind
eye" to its activities.

While Black welcomes Emery's aim to increase the supply of medical
marijuana, she worries that his confrontational style may provoke a
backlash. Black knows how vulnerable the club is. Last April, she met in
the Hotel Vancouver with a pot grower, her lawyer and Health Minister Allan
Rock, who wanted her assessment of Ottawa's proposed medicinal marijuana rules.

Minutes after Rock left, her cellphone rang with word that another arm of
the federal government, the RCMP, had just raided a greenhouse in suburban
Richmond that was growing pot for the club.

Black doesn't blame Rock, but she wonders if the "Old Boys club in the
RCMP" timed the raid to send the minister and the club a reminder: cannabis
prohibition won't end without a fight, not even in British Columbia.

First Article is posted at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1381/a09.html