WITH A BONG IN HIS HEART

Head-Shop Owner Has Built A Retail Empire

Dominic Cramer is running late.

But when you preside over a growing retail empire rooted in marijuana,
being time-challenged comes with the turf. Make no mistake, though, Cramer
is no ordinary pothead.

The self-described entrepreneur, activist and philanthropist makes a living
from the retail business of marijuana-related products, with four outlets
and a fifth, an organic fair-trade coffee shop, opening in June in downtown
Toronto. He's also a tireless crusader for the cannabis cause, Ontario
director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
(NORML), active with Canadians For Safe Access and co-founder of the
Toronto Compassion Centre, which supplies marijuana for medicinal purposes
to those with a doctor's prescription.

It's more than just a business: It's a vocation. (And it's why Cramer will
be among the 10,000 people expected at Queen's Park today as part of the
Global Marijuana March across 155 cities in 31 countries in a demonstration
of support for marijuana legalization. It's the sixth year for the rally,
which attracts crowds of 25,000 and more in such places as New York and
London.)

"I was 21, right out of University of Toronto with a computer science and
economics degree, and I was bored stiff," says Cramer, who grew up in
Scarborough, one of a family of six who emigrated from the Caribbean 27
years ago. "I just wanted to do something for the environment. I was intent
on making a difference while making a living."

In 1994, using a $6,000 insurance settlement from a school-bus accident
when he was nine, he opened a 200-square-foot store on a second-floor
walk-up on Yonge Street. He specialized in hemp. "It was really just a
little store to promote the industrial benefits of hemp," he says. "It was
understood you couldn't make a living out of selling just hemp, so the
other stuff, the bongs and pipes, were there as well because that side had
to subsidize the hemp side."

Cramer stands about six feet tall, with his black hair cropped short and a
trimmed full beard. The only nod to his apparent "counterculture" lifestyle
is the tribal tattoo that grows around his right forearm. But even that,
like pot itself, seems pretty mainstream these days.

If Cramer is stressed by the pace and headaches of running several
businesses, articulating a cause and keeping himself together, he doesn't
show it. He admits his career choice is a little odd, though retail came
naturally. He worked at the family business, Midoco, an arts and
office-supplies store on Bloor Street West and on Queen Street East in the
Beaches. Still, he says, his parents and three siblings were less than
enthusiastic about his shop's "crazy theme."

"It wasn't like today with designer clothes," he laughs. "We had very
little. Then it was all tie-dye and hippie frocks. It was pretty rudimentary."

Two and a half years ago, Cramer opened THC, on Yonge Street, one of the
larger head shops in the city. On any given day, things are rocking: Music
blasts out from the sound system, and the place is crammed with posters,
hemp shirts and hemp caps, pipes, bongs, rolling papers, hemp granola and
power bars and floor-to-ceiling shelves ripe with books on how to grow your
own. The register rings up a steady flow of cash from customers as varied
as skater kids in baggy shorts, preppy 30-something couples wheeling
strollers and middle-aged men in suits.

Still, despite pot's encroachment into the mainstream, there's a danger
involved in selling these materials. Though the courts have struck down a
ban on magazines such as High Times and Cannabis Culture, it's technically
illegal to sell pipes and other drug paraphernalia.

"It's a real risk," says Alan Young, an Osgoode Hall law professor and
long-time proponent of legalizing marijuana. "The law is still on the
books, though large urban police forces don't bother."

But Cramer isn't perturbed by the threat of a $100,000 fine or six-month
jail term. For him, it's about the cause.

"I'm always amazed at the people who come in," he says. "From high-school
kids doing projects to little old ladies who want to talk about hemp
cultivation in their home countries, and of course the people who need it
for medicinal reasons."

The latter drove him to help co-found the Toronto Compassion Club, where
1,500 or so members who use pot for medicinal purposes pick up their supply
at wholesale prices. More important, they can get the strain -- much like a
wine varietal -- they find helps them best.

"In the beginning, about 1997, Dom was very much involved, though in the
background," Young says. "Really, then it consisted of Warren Hitzig on a
skateboard delivering marijuana to sick people around the city."

For former corrections officer Alison Myrden, 41, of Burlington, Cramer has
been a rock of support. "I smoke up to 20 grams of marijuana a day for the
chronic pain associated with my progressive multiple sclerosis," she says.
"It has helped me cut back on the morphine and pills. Dom has always been
there, helping me."

Cramer and his co-founders hung in with the TCC through ripoffs and police
charges in 2002, court cases and withdrawal of the charges last year. "If
he was in it just for the money he could have bailed out long ago and left
us high and dry," Myrden says.

Over the years, Cramer has stepped from the shadows to the forefront, Young
says, perhaps driven by his frustration at the slow pace of change."He's
not a wealthy man but he has some resources and ingenuity and is a credit
to the movement, which has been often tarnished by having, can we say
diplomatically, the wrong people in place in the past."