PUFF PIECE: BRIAN PRESTON'S POT PLANET

The King Of 'You-Get-Paid-For-That?' Journalism Publishes His First Book --
And What A Long, Strange Trip It Was

After six months in Nepal, Australia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, England,
Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Morocco and San Francisco, Brian Preston
returned in November 2000 and duly turned in what reviewers have since
called a "surprisingly lucid" account of his journey, and pro-legalization
polemic. (Peter Blashill, Vancouver Sun)

A Nepalese sadhu (holy man) on the streets of Kathmandu lights up a thick
one. (Special to the Vancouver Sun)

Relaxing in the HempBar, in the tiny town of Nimbin -- a hippie time warp
in the rainforest of southeastern Australia -- Brian Preston is watching a
short barman named Cannabis Dave inhale marijuana in a bong-like device
called a chillum.

"After a massive sucking intake, he looks like a cartoon teakettle about to
blow, holding his breath as long as possible before disgorging a cloud huge
and heavy enough to show up on a satellite weather shot."

Preston has spent days here among the denizens at the epicentre of
Australian pot culture, and he is so happy here, in this moment, that it's
easy to forget he's on the job. His journalistic m.o.: to wait like a frog
on a lilypad, so unobtrusive as to become invisible.

"Unlike Nepal or Southeast Asia, here I can sit on my ass, get baked on
fine weed and let the story come to me, in the form of locals and tourists
wandering in for a doob and a chat."

In some lines of work you're summarily fired for using drugs. In this one,
it's mandatory.

Here's 40 grand: go tour the world smoking weed with folks; have fun, be
yourself, remember to write. Those were basically the instructions of the
venerable New York-based publisher Grove Press when it sent Preston off to
research his just-released book Pot Planet: Adventures in Global Marijuana
Culture.

After six months in Nepal, Australia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, England,
Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Morocco and San Francisco, he returned in
November 2000 and duly turned in what reviewers have since called a
"surprisingly lucid" account of his journey, and pro-legalization polemic.

"Surprisingly" since, for almost the whole trip, and indeed for much of the
writing of the book itself, he was high.

Stoners of the world may genuflect before their new apostle, the Bard of
the Bud, the guy with the dream job. But for Preston, it was just one more
gig that happened to fit his recreational interests. Check in on him next
year and he'll likely be provoking envy in an entirely different group of
people.

He has, you see, perfected the art of what might be called
You-Get-Paid-For-That? journalism.

Over the last decade, the 45-year-old from Victoria has claimed a niche
within the ever-shifting domain of experiential non-fiction that has
permitted him to travel, party and commit himself to what much of the world
would describe as "goofing off"--all on the dime of some of the top glossy
magazines in North America. A brief sampling:

For Vancouver magazine, he documented the city's nascent rave culture by
hanging out with his 20-year-old deejay roommate and his crowd.

For Saturday Night, he travelled to the Philippines with his old pal, Kid
in the Hall Scott Thompson, to revisit the village families that put them
up in their Canada World Youth days.

To justify the assignment, he convinced his editors that he had lined up a
meeting with then-recently widowed Imelda Marcos, on the strength of a
letter of introduction from Pee Wee Herman. ("When I got the assignment, we
had to figure out a way to actually meet her," he recalls. They did.)

Vogue sent him to villages in French Polynesia and the Irish coastal Aran
Islands to check whether, as his old psychology textbook claimed, these two
societies represented the extremes of human sexuality (the first so
permissive adults have tutorial intercourse with their children; the second
so repressed that even dogs caught licking themselves are beaten). He asked
people if it was true -- they said no.

Details paid for him to spend a week at a Phoenix retreat schooling himself
in Tantric sex techniques, with a view to heightening intimacy and
producing hour-long orgasms -- with plenty of practice sessions with his
partner as part of the package.

Playboy paid him to have phone sex.

Even some of Preston's less obvious boondoggles would be considered dream
assignments by a certain kind of person.

Details let him, for a handsome American per-word rate, do the very thing
he used to do as a younger man for fun: tour the continent with no money.
The point was to simply go wherever the wind -- and the odd deve in a
Peterbilt -- took him.

He was a modern-day Siddhartha, relying on the kindness of strangers and
forswearing all worldly comforts -- at least until day five, when he broke
out the credit card the magazine insisted he take as insurance, and got a
hotel in Reno.

Early on in his career, he turned his stint as a Vancouver cab driver -- a
job he held briefly after graduating with a master's in creative writing
from UBC -- into a string of anecdotal pearls for Vancouver magazine, a
sort of pre-Taxicab Confessions confessional that played to his budding
strength as a sympathetic and non-threatening listener.

He even managed to turn masturbation -- not usually a remunerative pastime
- -- into an essay in Details that established his reputation as a fearless
truth-teller unafraid to expose himself for the sake of a story.

Jewelryless, tattooless, affectationless, he is this morning wearing a
T-shirt and shorts -- the kind of outfit journalists wear while being
profiled by other journalists so as not to give away anything from which
personality inferences can be drawn. I happen to know that Brian always
dresses like this. I know this because I know Brian -- well enough to have
given him a gag wedding present (though not well enough to have given him a
real wedding present).

And you should know that I know him because when I say his book, while not
flawless, is an excellent snapshot of global pot culture, laced with solid
reporting and some genuinely nutty writing, the assessment comes from a guy
who can't be objective.

In fact, Brian and I work the same street, if not the same corner. If he
has claimed You-Get-Paid-For-That? journalism, I have settled into what
might be called You-Couldn't-Pay-Me-To-Do-That! journalism (from fasting to
public humiliation to experimental dental surgery), chiefly because, for
predictable reasons, there's less competition in it.

His kind of reporting is vastly more appealing but is in fact very
difficult to pull off. Which is why every fry cook and securities lawyer
doesn't quit their own job and take it up. Or if they try, they don't last
long.

"People have a lot of envy, but they don't realize the work involved,"
Preston says later, as we walk the comma-shaped beach of Gonzalez Bay, near
the Victoria bungalow he rents with his wife. "There are a lot of elements
that aren't that fun. Brian Taylor [the former mayor of Grand Forks, who
flouted the cannabis laws, and appears in Pot Planet] thought, what a lark
you're going on! Then he read the book and it was like, man, you actually
were suffering some of the time.

Though he might have trouble eliciting sympathy from desk-bound wage slaves
for a complaint about pay, the fact is the magazine rates have fallen in
real terms to levels that make full-time freelancing almost impossible.

For a stretch in the mid-'90s, Preston was one of Canada's most successful
magazine writers; yet only once in the last 15 years, he reckons, has he
made more than his father earns annually from his military pension. Some
years, after taxes, he made $16,000.

"I'm kind of feeling like I'm getting out of the magazine business
entirely," Preston says now. "If I can't get another book deal, it's over,
man. The magazine business just does not pay. Plus we're trying to get this
TV thing going."

"This TV thing" springs from a pitch Preston wrote for a 13-part television
series, and if it comes together it may just trump the pot book for
You-Get-Paid-For-That? boondoggledom.

Brian and his pal Scott Thompson voyage to remote corners of the world to
find the funniest people across cultures. At the Banff Television Festival
in June, Thompson and producer Hilary Jones-Farrow presented the idea, and
it won first prize -- $50,000 in development money.

"The premise is I'm a journalist out to save the world post-Sept. 11,"
Preston says. "I'm trying to bring people together through humour. The
first episode is in Canada and the first person I come across is Scott.
He's living in a remote corner of Vancouver Island raising donkeys. He has
gone into retirement and he's terribly bitter because his genius is
unrecognized in his own country. I tell him about my quest and he asks to
come along. So then off we go travelling, me -- the professor to his
Gilligan -- asking serious questions and him sort of mucking everything up,
and testing his humour against theirs."

If the TV deal comes through, all those contacts from spiked stories will
be invaluable. And the king of You-Get-Paid-for-That? will have the last
laugh once again.

Bruce Grierson last wrote for Mix about left-wing humourists.