THE WEED CREED

The smell of pot wafting across the sloping field of Grandview Park is
hardly unusual, but this late afternoon rally has a distinctly festive
feel. The 100 or so people cross-legged on the lawn on a lovely Tuesday
afternoon-some just happen to be there, some came for the rally-are
paragons of Commercial Drive style. Dreadlocks and peasant skirts,
bandannas and piercings are the mode.

The event, billed as a Drug War Remembrance Vigil, is part be-in, part
Tuesday afternoon on the Drive. There are folk songs and dog fights and
some powerful speakers, as well as one elderly man who takes loud exception
to the discussion of marijuana in front of the park's Legion-sponsored
veterans memorial.

Across the field come two men in ties and trenchcoats looking remarkably
like undercover cops. It seems that the pot-smoking-and illegal
amplifiers-are about to be snuffed out. But, wait. It's none other than
Marc Emery, the ubiquitous Vancouver pot guy, accompanied by an American
marijuana activist who looks like Jesse Ventura, but with an angrier scowl.

From the dreadlocks crowd to the suits, they're all here to promote the
latest addition to the B.C. political scene-the Marijuana Party-just in
time for the upcoming provincial election. Perhaps surprisingly, the
Marijuana Party isn't just about marijuana. Sounding remarkably like Unity
B.C. or some new permutation of the Reform party, it promises no new taxes.
It opposes gun registration. It wants school vouchers to allow parents to
relocate their kids if they don't like a school's ideology. It seeks
licensed brothels and a greater use of restorative justice. It wants
smaller and less interventionist government.

In fact, it seems that marijuana could take a backseat to the panorama of
other issues the party is confronting. That's led some libertarian-oriented
people to ask why the party doesn't change its name to make it more
palatable to the mass of British Columbians who don't smoke pot.

Emery, the party's president, major cash backer and Vancouver-Burrard
candidate, doesn't rule it out categorically, but it's not up for
discussion right now.

"When marijuana's legal, we'll think about changing the name," he says.
"But marijuana's symbolic for the oppression we all suffer from the
government in the way they dictate to us."

When a national version of the party ran in the last federal election, some
members were accused of being one-issue candidates who offered little
beyond the pot issue. Stung by the accusation, the coterie of activists who
formed the B.C. wing determined to come up with a comprehensive platform.
The result surprised a few potential supporters. But members say there's
nothing inconsistent about their views.

If there is confusion in the perceived philosophical orientation of the
party, it has less to do with left and right than with urban and rural,
Emery says. To listen to Emery, it sounds like the Marijuana Party has
something for everyone. Pot in every pot, so to speak.

"In the rural areas, things that are important to them are marijuana
legalization, but [also] gun non-registration, vouchers for faith-based
education," he says. "Whereas the legalizing brothels, the ending the drug
war, the prescription of heroin and cocaine-because those affect urban
problems, we get more response to those issues here."

John Gordon, who organized the April 3 rally in Grandview Park and is
running as the party's candidate against Premier Ujjal Dosanjh in
Vancouver-Kensington, saidthe party didn't consider conventional ideologies
when developing its policies.

"We've taken a fresh look at some of the old problems and we haven't
bothered to worry about whether the ideas were left-wing or right-wing or
libertarian as long as they were solutions that we thought were going to
work," he says. School vouchers-seen by critics as a right-wing plot to gut
the public school system-offer an alternative to parents who don't like the
anti-drug education their children receive in public schools through the
DARE program. In fact, the relationship between children and drugs is a
recurring theme among Marijuana Party activists. They point out that
children have been removed from their family homes because their parents
were cultivating marijuana, whereas bank robbers and other accused
criminals do not by definition lose custody of their children.

Gordon also argues that the idea of having police officers teach children
about drug use presents a fundamental conflict of interest. "It makes about
as much sense as police officers teaching sex education."

From this perspective, the party extrapolates the "right" of parents to
select the ideological orientation of their children's schools. "Say you're
from an ethnic community or even a Christian and you want to send your
children to a school that expresses your values-I think you should be able
to do that," says Gordon. "You could take your child and put them in a
school that reflects your values and bring them up the way you want to."

The underlying issue, insists Gordon, is freedom. With drugs, as with gun
registration, he argues, government control hasn't had the desired effect.
"The prohibition on guns has not worked any better than the prohibition on
drugs. It just forces the market underground."

There's another reason for the expanded focus. Just as feminists, gay
liberationists and black civil rights activists learned to join forces,
marijuana activists have learned the value of political coalitions. "The
thing is, if we want people to respect our subculture and our
eccentricities, we have to respect other people's issues and values-people
who use marijuana or people who use guns or Jehovah's Witnesses," Gordon says.

Of course, the core issue remains: the Marijuana party supports a "harm
reduction" model for dealing with drugs-safe injection sites, legalization
of soft drugs, prescriptions for harder drugs.

In a passionate speech to the vigil crowd, Emery argues the logic of the
anti-drug movement is no logic at all. "Harm can't possibly be an issue,
because we all do harm-related things every day. We go skiing, we smoke
cigarettes, we drink alcohol, we have french fries, we eat potato chips.
These things will kill you in time as sure as anything will. We live in an
industrial, polluting society. One-quarter of us will get cancer because we
live in cities. But no one goes to jail for that."

When he's heckled by the elderly man protesting that he's speaking in front
of a war memorial, Emery turns the argument to his advantage. "Many
Canadians died liberating Holland. And now, the irony is to find a place
where they're marijuana-tolerant, you have to go to the country we
liberated, not the country we live in."

But for people like Gordon, the issue goes beyond the freedom to take a
toke like one takes a drink. He's HIV-positive and, like many with chronic
health problems, including cancer, suffers from nausea. "If you try to take
a pill for nausea, you'll throw up the pill," he says. "But if you could
take a few puffs of marijuana, the nausea is lifted instantly."

For people who suffer a potentially deadly loss of appetite, including many
with AIDS, marijuana can be the only thing that spurs their taste buds.

Gordon survives on a disability pension and is candid that he doesn't have
the credentials usually associated with candidates for high office. Though
he co-founded a housing society for ex-psychiatric mental health patients,
his political portfolio is weak. He studied for the priesthood before
changing course and is now an active member of the Compassion Club, a
low-profile agency that distributes marijuana for medicinal uses. But he
says he has little choice but to take up the fight for marijuana rights,
because those with more political credentials are afraid to come forward.
"I'm somebody with nothing to lose. The poor and the sick are standing up
for all the people who have too much to lose," says Gordon, who admits the
drug has benefits beyond the purely medicinal. "I'm not afraid to admit
that I enjoy marijuana. It does give a slight euphoria and that's good for
just common depression."

Though some activists want the right to smoke a doobie for the hell of it,
it's on the issue of medicinal uses of marijuana where the activists' real
fervour shows through. The rhetoric can be close to the bone. Critics
accuse government officials and courts of murder for denying the
chronically ill the right to use a potentiallylife-saving herb. A poignant
part of the April 3 vigil is a memorial for an ill colleague who, denied
legal access to marijuana for extreme nausea, choked to death on his own vomit.

Emery, who runs a marijuana magazine, an on-line "television" station and a
seed distributorship, has coughed up about $125,000 of the party's
anticipated $200,000 campaign war chest. Though he acknowledges that the
party's best hope is likely to come second in a couple of ridings, he has
no qualms about putting up the funds. "All the companies I own are
basically involved in creating marijuana awareness and all the money we
generate goes to the movement."

Though a 20-year veteran of the pot-lib movement, Emery says he wasn't the
right front man for the Marijuana Party. For that, the party needed someone
with elected experience, he says. It turned to Brian Taylor, the former
mayor of Grand Forks.

Anyone who's driven through Grand Forks might get the impression that it's
a deeply conservative place. The immense house-pride and attention given to
lawn edging are eerily suggestive of the idealized neighbourhoods in movies
like Pleasantville or The Truman Show.

Taylor disagrees. "You have the Doukhobors, which are a fairly conservative
group, but in fact, they were the hippies of the Russian culture-they were
the spirit wrestlers of their own culture. Then you have the draft-dodgers,
who are an interesting addition to the community. And all of the
counter-culture that moved out there in the '60s and '70s. There are
loggers and there are rednecks, but I wouldn't call it a conservative town
at all."

Taylor, mayor for one term until the last election, has been a casual user
of weed for years, and shows flashes of anger when he talks about the
"discriminatory, arbitrary choice of what drugs are good and what drugs are
bad."

He also goes where many other fear to tread, taking on shibboleths like
Alcoholics Anonymous. Taylor says marijuana can be a great help to
recovering alcoholics, but the very suggestion infuriates many of that
group's members.

"There is a real fear that if they admit that another drug is replacing
alcohol, that they're eroding the support from their own people. And yet we
all know that alcoholics are addicted to caffeine and cigarettes and
everything else, and so marijuana is a real helper for a lot of people out
there and they're not allowed to admit it at this point."

While people like Gordon use pot to reduce nausea, Taylor admits he uses it
for a different "medicinal" purpose. "Viagra is something the government's
out there permitting and it's advertised on television. But for a lot of
50-year-olds like me and other people, the biggest turn-on around is a joint."

Like other candidates, Taylor acknowledges the Marijuana Party is not out
to win this election and has little chance of even gaining a seat. Nor does
he pretend the party is working toward a future victory. The party's
platform, he says, is just a mixture of things members believe in. "It's
not a blueprint for running the province."

Politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows. For former New Democrats
like Taylor, it may come as a shock to find support for the Marijuana Party
in the Fraser Institute.

The institute, usually described in media as a "right-wing" think tank, is
non-partisan, limiting its views to public policy issues. But it's already
spoken up on a number of issues the pot partiers are proposing.

Fred McMahon, director of the social affairs centre, says the Fraser
Institute has not considered policies like legalized brothels or
restorative justice, but other planks in the party's platform are
consistent with the institute's policies.

"I think drug policy in general has been a dramatic failure," he says,
arguing prohibition takes away a personal right to make individual choices
and has another public policy consequence. By banning narcotics, the
government pushes the distribution underground where it provides revenue to
fund organized crime groups.

Indeed, the libertarian characteristics of the Marijuana Party have not
gone unnoticed by the apparently sizeable bloc of B.C. voters for whom
better government is smaller government, including members who vote
Alliance at the federal level.

The party, in fact, is benefiting tangibly from Alliance's problems.
Matthew Johnston, a former Parliament Hill aide best known for not being MP
Rahim Jaffer, landed softly from his firing to become campaign manager for
the Marijuana Party. Though Johnston's 15 minutes of fame so far involved
wide circulation of a wire photo of him and his former boss smoking
stogies, he says he has never smoked dope with any members of the Alliance
caucus. Nor does he smoke it himself. "I'm the squarest guy on this
campaign," says Johnston.

Because Alliance is emphatically a federal party, its members are free to
select their provincial political affiliation and Johnston, a 30-year-old
Edmontonian, had to come all the way to B.C. to find his. "I have no
provincial political home [in Alberta] and right now I've found it in
British Columbia in the Marijuana Party, of all places."

On Monday, the party shot off a letter to Alliance supporters in B.C.,
claiming to be the moral guardians of the anti-interventionist values that
inspired the old Reform party in the first place. In an open letter from
Emery, the party succinctly outlined comments from Alliance MPs, favouring
drug liberalization.

Johnston thinks the hostility over government intervention has begun to
expand into the social realm. The state has no place in the bongs of the
nation, he believes.

Of course, nobody bothers to mention that the issue is technically moot in
the provincial election, since prohibited drugs are a criminal matter and
therefore fall under federal purview. Nevertheless, for a group of people
whose aim is not so much to win votes as to win minds, Marijuana Party
activists are happy to take their cause to whatever venue they can, be that
Grandview Park or the provincial ballot.

If, by chance, they do find their way into the legislature, you can be sure
the joint will never be the same.