HEY, WHAT ARE THEY SMOKING?

Ted Smith's marijuana conviction hasn't slowed the flow at the Cannabis
Buyers' Club.

The Johnson Street storefront is still open to the 1,400 or so people who
say they need marijuana for medical purposes. A sign on the wall advertises
a potluck (pun probably not intended) to mark this month's ninth anniversary
of the club, the oldest such organization in Canada.

At the reception desk sits a stack of flyers urging attendance at a rally to
"protest Health Canada's rules which make cannabis legal for medical
purposes but consider food and skin products to be illegal." That's a
reference to club founder Smith's Jan. 7 conviction for selling ointments
containing cannabis resin. He got a nine-month suspended sentence.

Smith was convicted again this week, this time for passing out joints at a
pro-marijuana meeting at UVic in November 2000. Those gatherings have grown
since then, with maybe 70 people joining in a circle at 4:20 p.m. every
Wednesday to smoke dope and expound on its benefits. You can say this for
Smith and friends: They're not hiding from the law, not trying to profit
from breaking it.

That's unlike the commercial growers who have turned B.C. Bud into a
multibillion-dollar industry. Those guys try to stay high-tech but low-key.

Not that they have much to fear from the law. The Vancouver Sun reported
last week that just one in seven convicted B.C. growers gets any jail time
at all. Most don't even get fined. And remember, that's just those who get
convicted, let alone charged, let alone arrested. No wonder the wholesale
price of pot has plunged; without fear of retribution, every man and his dog
has a grow lab in the basement (including one at a municipally owned
property in Saanich last weekend).

That must drive the police nuts. They bust their butts busting growers, only
to see judges mete out sentences of two hugs a day and a week without
television. The cops and courts seem to be at cross-purposes. Your tax
dollars at work.

Politicians don't provide much clarification. Ottawa made a big deal about
doubling the maximum sentence for growers, but stayed silent on a minimum.
The B.C. government huffs and puffs about getting tough with organized
crime, but cut this year's adult prison budget by $14 million.

All of which reflects the public's ambivalence toward marijuana, in which a
certain indifferent benevolence toward the likes of Smith -- who, on the
Threat-O-Metre, ranks well behind Osama bin Laden or, apparently, Luminara
- -- muddily merges with the fear and loathing evoked by the organized
criminals who have woven pot production into their cocaine-smuggling,
meth-brewing, gun-running, tax-dodging, money-laundering, murderous ways. If
our feelings are all over the map, it's because we've tossed casual tokers,
the Hells Angels, 13-year-old stoners, cancer patients, the Fabulous Furry
Freak Brothers and otherwise-upstanding dope-farmers into the same stew.

Meanwhile, the federal government's decriminalization bill, which would
provide for traffic-ticket-type fines but no criminal record for possession
of small amounts, inches through Parliament. Liberal MP Keith Martin favours
going even further, legalizing and regulating recreational use in the same
way we regulate alcohol or tobacco. "That would be the worst news for
organized crime," he said Friday. Take the profit out of prohibition. As it
is, we haven't been nearly tough enough with organized crime, he says.

You can agree with Martin's solution or not, but few will deny something has
to change. Either apply the law or alter it, but don't pretend the current
approach is having much effect.

"The status quo," says Martin, "is not working for anybody."