POT EDWARD ISLAND

Canada's Most Picturesque Province Is Surprisingly Also The Fertile
Center Of An Underground Marijuana Explosion

In 2004, a newspaper report appeared in the Guardian - the biggest
daily newspaper on Prince Edward Island (PEI) - that was at odds with
the outside world's image of the idyllic Canadian province. Two
bullets had hit local resident Kenneth Rae MacFarlane while he was
home alone in the midst of a blizzard. With the help of snow-plow
operators, an ambulance and a police team eventually reached him. He
survived the attack, but ended up in court with some explaining to do.
It seems in the course of investigating the shooting - so rare on the
island that emergency-room physicians are routinely sent for training
to Baltimore, where such injuries are a dime a dozen - police made an
unexpected discovery. MacFarlane's home housed an elaborate indoor
pot-growing operation, with two rooms dedicated to cannabis
cultivation and a third undergoing conversion.

When you think of PEI, you probably come up with crisp, clean-cut
tourist-brochure images: lush and rolling hills, tranquil ocean
beaches, villages of whitewashed cottages and, inevitably, the smiling
face of the island's indefatigably cheery heroine, Anne of Green
Gables. But while Lucy Maud Montgomery's fictional Edwardian character
maintained her Pollyanna disposition on the strength of nothing but
her spunk and a cheerily romantic vision of how life should be, it
seems modern-day islanders have discovered another way to smile
through the summer and avoid the blues during the bleak local winters.

A recent issue of the Guardian, for instance, featured the headline
POLICE SEEK HELP FINDING MARIJUANA GROWERS, followed by a lurid story
about local pot cultivators and a warning to the populace to be on the
lookout for suspicious activities along country lanes and farm fields.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) spokesperson Sergeant Denis
Morin, located in the capital of Charlottetown, admits that there is a
something of problem - and his statistics prove it. The number of
plants seized through the end of May (250) in areas of RCMP
jurisdiction - excluding the island's four small cities, which have
their own independent police departments - already exceeds the 200
plants seized in all of 2007.

To be sure, PEI - where Canada's province-by-province alcohol
prohibition started first and ended last, in 1948 - is still largely a
bastion of clean-cut, yesteryear values. A number of island
communities remain defiantly dry. But it is also home to a thriving
cottage industry that includes both indoor hydroponic pot production -
aided by the inexpensive electricity the island imports from Quebec -
and a more daring coterie of growers who take advantage of the
island's perfect summer climate and endless fields of spuds, soybeans,
and corn to pursue small-scale cultivation en plein air.

Live and let smoke

Getting an authoritative picture of the province's pot industry is
difficult. The island is largely rural with a relative lack of crime
that translates into a thinness of policing. In fact, outside of the
cities and a few larger towns, police are almost invisible. Perhaps,
too, there's an Anne of Green Gables-like refusal to admit to
inconvenient truths.

This past year, a study on the island conducted by the PEI Health and
Education department revealed that almost half of the 3000 island
high-school and middle-school students surveyed are drug users, and
almost 40 percent of graduating seniors had smoked marijuana. Those
results were backed up by additional RCMP figures, which show that,
outside of growing operations, the RCMP and other island police forces
together seized 1443 grams of marijuana in 2007 and 2608 grams so far
in 2008.

Needless to say, the survey was greeted with horror by authorities.
But not everybody was alarmed: those same figures and survey results
also suggested a greater acceptance of drug use among the population
at large - something that may be deep-rooted in the largely
libertarian attitudes of PEI and the Maritimes in general.

While lacking the bombast of similarly persuaded Americans, islanders
- - largely descendents of a prickly mixture of French-Catholic
Acadians, Scots-Irish Protestants, and migratory New Englanders - are
an independent lot, and "Live and let live" is an unspoken credo.

Indeed, more than three quarters of the reader responses to the pot
article in the Guardian (which boasts that it "covers PEI like the
dew") were strongly against enforcing pot laws. "This war on pot is a
total national disgrace!!!!," wrote a commenter with the handle
Downeaster at home. "My heart goes out to the young folk that [are]
regularly criminalized for this activity." Frank W chorused: "I'm
personally encouraging all citizens of PEI to turn a blind eye to
marijuana cultivation."

Officialdom is not immune to such sentiments either. In July 2003,
when Marc Emery, a Vancouver activist on a crusade to make pot legal
in Canada, performed his trademark stunt of getting high in public,
Charlottetown police looked the other way and refused his invitation
to arrest and prosecute.

Even more significant, Ralph C. Thompson, a Provincial judge in
Summerside, PEI's second largest city, gained national notoriety - and
helped spawn a flurry of enforcement action in Ottawa - by tossing out
a routine marijuana case in March 2003.

Thompson argued that marijuana prosecutions nationally were conducted
unevenly, and medical-marijuana use, it seems, had provided an out for
a number of Canadian smokers in previous trials across the country. So
in his lengthy ruling, he concluded that "All residents of Canada,
wherever they are situated, are entitled, in fairness, to expect a
uniformity of approach from the Federal Crown, wherever it performs
its prosecutorial function. Until such time as the law is changed by
Parliament, or the higher courts provide a ruling which will enable
such approach," he continued, "this charge involving the simple
possession of marijuana will not proceed in this court."

As for the Mounties and the rest of island police, they're left
collecting the bags - and wearing the badges of the perceived bad guys.

Border Patrol

Canadian agricultural policy adds further complexity to the picture.
Unlike its neighbor to the south, which adamantly refuses to legalize
the production of hemp, marijuana's tame cousin, Canadians have been
free to grow the pot look-alike for its fibers and soil-enhancing
properties since the late 1990s. At least a few island farmers - Mike
Nabuu, executive director of the Prince Edward Island Federation of
Agriculture, has no idea how many - have given the low THC crop a try,
which conceivably could make it easier for others to hide marijuana in
plain sight.

"I have heard that, in the past, pot plants would sometimes be
intermingled with tobacco plants, because they're tall enough to hide
the pot plants from aerial surveillance," says Nabuu. He notes,
however, that tobacco is no longer grown on PEI, so guerilla growers
have had to become more imaginative.

Many of the mainstream farmers Nabuu represents - for the most part a
prosperous bunch in this "Garden of the Gulf" - aren't paying much
attention to the burgeoning industry. Potatoes are big business here
in PEI, not to mention dairying, and berrying. The group's members are
more concerned about rocketing fuel costs and new provincial
crop-rotation mandates, says Nabuu.

But PEI's pot production could have wider consequences. Though not
specifically focused on PEI, a 2007 DEA report, "The National Drug
Threat Assessment," states that New Englanders are getting more and
more marijuana from north of the border. In an ironic reprise of the
States' Prohibition era, when enterprising Maritimers made a good
living supplying the US with gin and whisky, the DEA says pot and hard
drugs are now coming south by land from such places as Quebec and New
Brunswick, and via ocean shipments emanating from the Maritimes in
general.

For now, PEI's contribution to this aspect of international trade is
still below the radar. But one thing is clear: PEI pot is no longer
small potatoes.