B.C. -- A POT-FRIENDLY, POT-PROFITABLE PROVINCE

News flash: A new poll has found British Columbia is the most pot-friendly
province in Canada.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who remembers the flower-power era
of the 1960s, when Vancouver was the Canadian equivalent of hippie mecca
San Francisco. Out of the haze of the Easter Be-Ins and psychedelic music
scene emerged a B.C. pot culture that has only grown en stronger over the
years.

Pot has become an entrenched part of the provincial economy. Depending on
who you talk to, growing marijuana is a $1-billion to $8-billion business
in British Columbia. Some argue it contributes more to the economy than
forestry.

According to a recent poll by the Toronto-based Strategic Counsel, 56 per
cent of British Columbians want marijuana use decriminalized. Quebec is the
only other province where a majority (51 per cent) of the populace want pot
use decriminalized.

Hippies are growing it, but so are lawyers, accountants -- even
journalists. Grow-ops are relatively cheap to set up and easy to run, and
can be incredibly lucrative. If you have a green thumb, the right strain of
high-grade pot and good connections to sell it, you can pull in upwards of
$50,000 a year -- tax free -- with a small grow-op in your basement.

Vancouver has developed a worldwide reputation as a pot valhalla, the North
American counterpart to Amsterdam. Pot tourists show up by the thousands
each year to smoke a joint in North American's only marijuana cafes, the
Blunt Bros. and the New Amsterdam, on West Hastings.

"Most people don't even sit down," says Megan, a Blunt Bros. employee.
"They walk in, go, 'Oh my God, look at this!,' take pictures and walk out."

Comedian Tommy Chong visited the Blunt Bros. recently, and smoked a joint
in the designated smoking room.

"That was quite a shock," said a bemused Chong, who keeps homes in West
Vancouver and Los Angeles. "It was so much like Amsterdam it blew me away."

The cafes flank the storefront headquarters of the B.C. Marijuana Party at
307 West Hastings. Pot guru Marc Emery's multi-million dollar marijuana
seed empire is also located above the Marijuana Party offices. The
concentration of marijuana businesses has given the block numerous
nicknames: the Pot Block, the Green Block and Hemp Town.

The ever-enterprising Emery's latest scheme is to open up a retail outlet
"like Starbucks" to sell B.C. bud to tourists. He hopes to open it in
Gastown, Kitsilano or on Commercial Drive this spring or summer.

"You'll have 20, 25 varieties," he said. "If they're smoking it there,
fine, if they're buying it to take away, you vacuum seal it and off they go.

"If I don't do it, someone else is going to do it real soon anyway."

Emery has been charged 10 times for marijuana-related offences, but doesn't
seem overly concerned that he might run afoul of the authorities again.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "If you get busted, they take your pot, they
put you in jail. Judges are hard-pressed to say you're a bad person
because, after all, the majority of British Columbians favour
decriminalizing it. They don't think it's a crime. How much of a crime is
it if you provide people with marijuana under good safe conditions at a
reasonable price?

"That kind of makes you a bit of a folk hero, not a criminal, and the judge
will see it that way. He'll be hard-pressed to give you more than a
financial penalty, which realistically you'd have to be prepared to pay anyway.

"The lawyers will cost you more than the fine you're going to get. Your
real fee is $20,000 in legal fees, $5,000 max in fine. You're not likely to
go to jail."

Emery's brazen attitude shows how far B.C.'s pot culture has come from the
'60s, when possession of even a minuscule amount of pot could land you in jail.

Peter Trower found out the hard way -- he was sentenced to a month in the
old Oakalla Prison in Burnaby in July, 1967, when the police found a joint
in the brim of his hat.

"I was the first person ever busted on the Sunshine Coast, which is nothing
to be proud of," recalls Trower, 72.

Trower is a B.C. original, a critically lauded poet/writer who spent much
of his life working in logging camps. His novel Dead Man's Ticket is set on
the Hastings strip in the late 1940s and early '50s, and relates the tales
of loggers coming to town to blow their money on booze, drugs and women.

Trower knew the scene because he lived it, both as a logger and a bohemian
writer. As such, he was among the first people to be exposed to marijuana,
then known as reefer, in the early 1960s.

"I heard rumours about it back in the late '50s," he relates. "Apparently
the porters were bringing it in on the trains, the black porters. But apart
from that, it was very hard to get, so we never even looked for it. I heard
the odd person managed to score some, but it was very difficult to get.

"It didn't become available to any degree at all until the early '60s. Then
it started coming in from Mexico. A lot of it was pretty poor quality; I
remember trying some and I couldn't even get off on the stuff. Then of
course things kind of got rolling."

In 1967, Trower scored a job on a survey crew with a pair of "devout
potheads." "We smoked a good deal of herb on the job," he chuckles.

Unfortunately for Trower, a female acquaintance gave the RCMP a list of pot
smokers on the Sunshine Coast, and they swooped down on the unsuspecting
potheads. The bust was conducted house to house, and Trower was tipped off
by a friend before they got to his place. He hid out at his mother's, but
the police found him.

"They come chargin' in there," he recalls. " I always wore a cap, and I had
a joint stashed in the brim of this cap. I forgot all about this joint, but
they searched me and got it. Then they went to my place and found these
tobacco tins which had traces of pot in them.

"So I was the first person ever busted in this area, which was pretty
embarrassing, because everybody up here thought pot was like heroin, and
everybody thought I was selling to kids, which I wasn't. I wasn't selling
to anybody."

He feels the judge at his trial decided to make an example of him.

"They brought in a magistrate from Nanaimo who was the brother of Harold
Winch, the socialist," he says. "But this guy was right wing. He was the
absolute opposite of Harold Winch. I brought in character witnesses who
said I was getting steady work, because I was really getting bum-rapped on
this.

"And this right-wing judge dismissed all this stuff and said there's some
suspicion that you may have been dealing. I was scared. Finally he gave me
a $1,000 fine and a month in Oakalla Prison for possession of a minuscule
amount of pot. It was just draconian . . . it was just ridiculous.

"So I did a month in Okey, and paid this damn $1,000 out of a little
inheritance. The only good thing that came out of the whole escapade is
that I got some good jail poems from being in Okey. The only way to get
stuff like that I guess is to go to the source."

One of the big factors in the B.C. pot explosion in the mid-1960s was the
large number of draft dodgers who fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War.
Many draft dodgers settled in the Kootenays and the Gulf Islands, where
they put their gardening skills to use.

"They couldn't get legal jobs, and a lot of them were marijuana-friendly
people in the first place, and so they started growing pot in B.C.," says
Dana Larsen, editor of Cannabis Culture magazine.

As it turned out, B.C. was a great place to grow pot.

"B.C. is lush, has cheap hydro, lots of water, and lots of sunny slopes on
hillsides," says pot activist David Malmo-Levine, who will be taking his
fight to smoke pot to the Supreme Court of Canada this spring.

B.C.'s forests also make for great cover growing outdoor pot.

"You don't grow that much pot outdoors in Saskatchewan because it's flat,
and therefore the pot is visible," says Emery.

"But in British Columbia, we have a canopy of forest covering virtually the
entire province. It not only heralds good growing conditions, but good
stealth conditions, to be able to get away with growing it."

Chong says growing pot in B.C. just made sense in the 1960s and today.

"What else are you going to do when you're an unemployed lumber worker, or
a farmer?" says Chong. "You can grow a crop you can harvest every other
month and make enough money to keep your kids in clothes and food. It's
just a survival thing."

The late '60s and early '70s were a wild time in Vancouver. Hundreds, even
thousands of long-haired young people would turn out for events like the
Easter Be-Ins at Stanley Park, where you were encouraged to come out and
just "be."

Pot fuelled the emerging counterculture.

"It was like the intoxicant was the lubricant for creativity," says Jim
Allan, who managed '60s rock bands like Spring and the Poppy Family.

"The Easter Be-Ins were just huge smoke-ins, celebrations of music and
dope. It was a wonderful time to be around, I'll tell ya.

"One time we were planning a Be-In at the Commodore Ballroom. We were
passing around joints and one guy's beard caught fire. It wasn't my beard.
Our reaction time was a little slow, but he was doused eventually."

Cheech and Chong caught the vibe and turned it into a career. They first
got together at the old Shanghai Junk nightclub in Chinatown, and Vancouver
references remained in their act long after they transplanted it to
Hollywood: The cop forever trying to bust them was based on a member of the
Vancouver narcotics squad.

Chong was originally a musician (he co-wrote the '60s R&B hit Does Your
Mother Know About Me by Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers), but switched to
comedy when he took over the Shanghai Junk strip club and turned it into an
improvisational comedy venue.

The catch was, he left the signs for the strip club up outside, so the
customers didn't know what was going on.

"It was very funny," says Chong. "Especially when we'd start the show off
with a mime artist. That was pure theatre; I've got to do that in a movie.
All these bikers and loggers and miners who have been in the bush and want
to see some women and all of a sudden a mime artist comes on picking a
flower out of the air."

But the authorities weren't amused by Vancouver's reputation as a
counter-culture mecca. The naivete of the giant smoke-ins was shattered on
Aug. 7, 1971, in Gastown, when police -- some on horses -- attacked
hundreds of pot smokers in the infamous Gastown Riot.

The counterculture faded, and pot went back underground. In 1980, the metal
halide light was invented, which allowed gardeners to grow things
hydroponically indoors. Pot growers quickly realized the benefits of this,
and started the first grow-ops. Then growers in B.C. and California started
experimenting with plants, producing high-grade, powerful strains.

"Once we were growing indoor hydroponic, all of a sudden pot went from $20
an ounce in 1973 to $200 an ounce in 1983," says Emery. "It was all because
it went indoors. It required power, expertise and a lot of care.

"People say the pot from the '60s wasn't as powerful, but actually it was.
But it wasn't grown very well. It was grown with Old World techniques, the
way marijuana was grown 100 years ago: you throw seeds out, it grows, it
pollinates, they cross-breed and you get a whole bunch of seedy, stemmy pot
growing tall.

"Well, the modern-day indoor grower doesn't let it have seeds, so it's
three times the yield. It's all smokable, where in the old days a lot of it
was seeds and stems and had to be thrown away."

The quality of B.C. bud started getting a buzz in the pot underground.
Marijuana compassion clubs sprung up to serve people who argued they needed
to smoke pot for medical reasons, and Emery arrived from Ontario in 1994 to
begin his pot crusade.

Emery's own attempts at a grow-op were a bit of a bust (one crop was ruined
by spider mites, and he gave up), and he closed his first big marijuana
restaurant, the Hemp Cafe, after numerous run-ins with the police. He has
also run for election several times under the Marijuana Party banner, but
so far has been rebuffed by the voters.

But his seed business has blossomed, supporting ventures like Cannabis
Culture magazine (which has a circulation of 70,000, mostly in the U.S.)
and Pot-TV (an Internet television channel).

"The seeds generate $3 million in total revenue [annually]," says Emery.
"About $1.2 million goes to the growers, our advertising is $500,000, and
then a lot of the rest of it I give away or use to support activism."

Emery says he makes a salary of $300,000. About $145,000 goes to taxes, the
rest he spends as quickly as he can. He's had his worldly possessions
confiscated several times in arrests; now he says he prefers not to own
anything.

"Believe me, the police do more damage when they seize all your assets,"
says Emery, noting his biggest fine to date was $2,000.

Other people involved in the above-ground marijuana industry are a little
less outspoken, preferring to just go about their business and let
high-profile advocates like Emery take the flak, and the busts.

Employees of the Blunt Bros. Cafe, for example, have been told not to give
out their last names. This seems to be the standard for the industry: when
interviewed, few people will give out their full name. At Westside
Technologies Inc.'s hydroponic store downtown, the manager's card reads "Jer."

Hydroponic stores have been the big winner in the pot boom: there are 84
B.C. hydroponic stores listed in the back of Maximum Yield, a hydroponic
gardening magazine. By comparison, there are 69 hydroponic stores listed
for Ontario, which has three times B.C.'s population.

In a brazen bit of marijuana marketing, Westside called its on-line branch
Terra Hydroponics Corp., or THC -- the active ingredient in marijuana.

THC's big seller is The Cage, a $2,500 pre-fab grow-op that's 170
centimetres tall and 121 centimetres by 121 centimetres across. It has its
own reservoir and timing system, holds up to 72 small plants, and is lit
with four 250-watt light bulbs, or four 400s, which gives you 1,000 to
1,600 watts of light.

The rule of thumb is that 1,000 watts of light will produce one pound of
pot, every six to eight weeks. A pound then wholesales for $2,300 to
$3,100. Because The Cage is so efficient, it can produce up to six pounds
in one growing cycle, or approximately $14,000 to $18,000 worth of pot
every six to eight weeks.

THC has now come up with a bigger, better pre-fab grow-op, The Coliseum,
so-called because it's shaped like the Roman Coliseum. The $3,500 system is
213 centimetres tall, holds up to 300 plants, and runs off four 400-watt
bulbs or two 400s and two 600s.

The Cage is small enough to operate in an apartment closet. The Coliseum
requires a bigger space, such as a high basement.

They seem quite substantial, but Emery considers any grow-op with less than
eight lights small.

"To make it lucrative, you need 40 lights or more," he says. "That's when
you go to an industrial mall. Nobody has 40 lights in a house, unless
they're stupid, because it's so immediately obvious you're going to be in
trouble soon. People notice. You can't hide the light output; it'll leak
through windows. You won't be able to hide the temperature, houses aren't
really built for that kind of thing.

"It's way easier to go to some industrial mall and have a front guy with an
arc welding machine, which is what most people do. They have an arc welder
guy or some guy who can justify a lot of power, a lot of smell and weird
hours. That's where the big ones are."

The majority of grow-ops are small operations, but Emery has been in one
that had a staggering 120 lights.

"It was two feet underground," he says. "Get this: it required 10,000
litres of motor fuel every month to run the generator that powered the 120
lights.

"It needed bricks two feet thick to keep the sound from the generator
contained. The noise it made was phenomenal, and it sucked up phenomenal
amounts of air because it was underground. So they had to draw in the air
from an underground pipe near a riverbed nearby which wouldn't be noticed."

Grow-ops of this size cause some unusual problems, such as when the roof
collapsed one night and the growers had to patch it up before morning lest
it be discovered. But they can also be quite profitable: Emery says the
eight people involved hoped to produce 150 pounds of pot per harvest.

Because of the black market nature of the pot industry, no one's really
sure how much is grown, how much it's worth, and where it goes to.

American officials have said that up to 95 per cent of B.C. bud goes south.

"The United States government has sought to so vilify Vancouver and B.C. as
being the major exporter of marijuana to the entire hemisphere," states
Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML (the National Organization
for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) in Washington, D.C.

"There is an American-sponsored pure lie that B.C. bud is traded pound for
pound for cocaine. This would make the cocaine dealer the dumbest marketer
on the face of the earth, considering their product is worth five to seven
times the value of marijuana. But it doesn't stop the American government
from basically driving that propaganda home."

The irony is the American government seems to have convinced many Americans
pot is legal in B.C.

"I get e-mails all the time: 'I hear pot's legal in Canada,'" says Cannabis
Culture editor Larsen.

"I'm like, 'Not yet,' and I have to explain to them what's going on. But
they see the headlines in the U.S., and compared to America, it is kind of
legal."

Tommy Chong concurs. He thinks the growing movement for decriminalization
is a good example of Canadian "common sense."

"I think part of it is the Canadian social movement, the way Canadians are
socialistically inclined," he says. "We take care of our own up there.
Canada's always been sort of that workers' paradise, in a sense.

"Even though they're unemployed," he laughs.

The World Of Pot

Some facts and figures about marijuana and B.C.:

- - According to a recent poll by the Toronto-based Strategic Counsel, 56 per
cent of British Columbians want marijuana use decriminalized, and only 38
percent want it to remain a criminal offence. Quebec is the only other
province where a majority (51 per cent) of the populace want pot use
decriminalized;

- - The West Coast is North America's most pot-friendly region. "Oregon had
the first decriminalization law. California led on medical marijuana," says
Richard Cowan of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
(NORML). "There's something about the left coast, a cultural continuum from
San Francisco to here."

- - Possession of marijuana was made a criminal offence in Canada in 1923,
but the first pot bust in Canada wasn't until 1938, in Toronto. Pot guru
Marc Emery says the modern craze for marijuana began with students at
McGill University in Montreal in the late 1950s, then spread to Toronto and
Vancouver.

- - Emery says most grow-ops are small operations by individuals, not giant
operations by organized crime. He also says most growers don't get rich:
"Most farmers are terrible money managers. They're always broke. Two-thirds
of the way through their crop they're crying the blues."

- - A pot plant doesn't have to grow tall to be worth a lot of money. Many
indoor plants are kept to about 60-centimetres tall.

- - The key to how much pot you can grow isn't in the number of plants; it's
in the number of lights. The rule of thumb is that you can grown one pound
of pot for every 1,000 watts of light.

- - Small grow-ops don't use much electricity, therefore there's no need to
bypass BC Hydro meters to avoid detection. "The suspicious thing is when
you move into a house that has a $50 electrical rate and you're now at
$750," Emery says. "But stealing power usually gets more people in trouble
than it helps them to save money and/or avoid detection."

- - B.C. Bud is not stronger than pot grown elsewhere. Because a lot of pot
is grown hydroponically indoors, the key to making stronger pot is getting
the right seed, which Emery sells via his mail-order seed empire.

- - Cannabis Culture magazine is published six times per year and has a
circulation of 70,000. The centrefold is a series of soft-focus closeups of
pot plants.