HOW B.C. STANDS TO GAIN FROM MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Changes In The Law Could Help The Province's Growers Cash In On Their Expertise

NELSON -- Those who live among the rugged canyons and valleys of
southeastern British Columbia call it "the transition economy."

With growing support for medical marijuana and a rising clamour for
decriminalization, in the heart of B.C. Bud country they're readying to
cash in on their expertise growing, harvesting, processing and adding value
to the staggeringly large and currently illegal provincial cannabis crop.

Even the recently elected Liberal MLA, a tough-on-drugs prosecutor for
eight years, boasts that he tried to orchestrate a bid for a federal
contract to grow a national supply.

"We had a nice secure building," Nelson-Creston MLA Blair Suffredine said.
"We use cocaine and its derivatives for medicine, why in the world would we
discount marijuana as a potential medicine?"

Indeed, Health Minister Allan Rock's medical marijuana initiative -- which
could be in place by August -- has police wringing their hands while in
these parts people rub theirs in anticipation of potential pot profits.

The cops fear medical marijuana is a stalking horse for decriminalization.

In Washington, D.C., where the just-say-no forces hold sway, the federal
government went to the Supreme Court to establish its right to forbid
states such as California from sanctioning medical marijuana. The U.S.
administration argued, as police in Canada now maintain, medical marijuana
spurs de facto decriminalization by making law enforcement impossible.

Nevertheless, Rock is pressing ahead with regulations that will make
marijuana a legal substance to grow, possess and consume if you are
suffering from a range of ailments.

In the backwoods and ranch country of the Kootenay Mountains, renowned for
producing some of the finest pot on the planet, Rock's proposal is being
hailed not just as a bold compassionate gesture, but as a potential
economic windfall.

Growers hope to cash in on knowledge gleaned from years of planting,
nurturing, cloning and cutting. They're also pushing byproducts like keef,
hashish, oil, and marijuana edibles such as cellophane-wrapped "turtles"
laced with THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana)
that look as delicious and professionally made as anything from Purdy's.

After running as leader of the Marijuana party in the most recent
provincial election, Brian Taylor is back at work in nearby Grand Forks
manufacturing cabinets for sale as "personal grow units."

"Up until now, around here growing marijuana was a mortgage helper,"
explained the 55-year-old ex-mayor who sports a cowboy hat over his long
greying ponytail.

"Once the regulations come into place and Rock says medical marijuana is
okay, we're expecting a real boom."

Law enforcement agencies in North America peg the illicit provincial pot
market at $8 billion, which is larger than the output of the logging and
forest product industries.

If it's even only half that, at $4 billion it's nearly double B.C.'s total
agricultural production.

And that's an illicit market. Consider the size of the legitimate medical
market if even a small percentage of those who suffer from AIDS, cancer,
chronic pain, arthritis, premenstrual syndrome or degenerative diseases
like multiple sclerosis seek relief from marijuana.

"My sister has leukemia and she's a user," Taylor said. "She's had it for
five years."

His dad used it too, and maintained a personal grow unit in his seniors'
apartment up until he fell seriously ill several weeks ago and died.

Taylor has converted a barn into a workshop where two carpenters produce
the entertainment-centre-sized grow units from Baltic birch. The units are
designed to allow anyone to produce a half-pound of pot every eight to 10
weeks -- about an ounce a week -- with a minimum of fuss and attention.
They are equipped with a single lightbulb, a small bathroom fan and two
tiny pumps -- one for the air and the other for the hydroponic system that
feeds the plants.

"We're building some that are completely wheelchair accessible," he said.
"The only problem [with the standard grow unit] right now is the controls
are too high."

Taylor is optimistic about Rock's proposals.

"Once they give that power to the doctors and it starts to roll, the
doctors will take control and it will be the slippery slide," he insists.
"Because the first woman who comes in and says 'I have menstrual cramps and
I want marijuana right now!' -- the doctor's going to go 'okay' and write
up a prescription for that. It's been used for a thousand years [as a folk
remedy] for that kind of pain. It's a perfect medicine for it. Are you
going to stop that?"

Taylor has a sophisticated vision of the future marijuana industry.

"I would like to see it more like the wine industry where there are certain
strains and varieties grown under specific conditions," he said pulling on
a large spliff of a highly sought-after strain called Bumbleberry.

"That would be the ideal situation. Your personal grow units would be like
making wine at home, but like the local U Brew, you could have a U Grow."

He exhaled a long grey stream of smoke.

"This is very tasty, but there are lots of other varieties -- Sweet Skunk,
Black Mist, Gumby, Chemo, White Widow," Taylor said.

"The sophistication is unbelievable. And the bankers say it's one in two --
50 per cent of the population is directly affected by the marijuana industry."

If the police estimates of the harvest are even close to the mark, it's
entirely plausible.

In a typical home in a Kootenays town, a handful of people who grow
marijuana sit around a kitchen table smoking reefers and swapping tales,
just like farmers everywhere.

Marijuana is no different from any crop and, even if it were legal, growing
it is no more risk-free than cultivating any other plant susceptible to
blights, bugs and blackouts.

Its illicit status adds cops and thieves to those myriad dangers. Even if
you make it to harvest, you can't sell it to just anyone without risking
getting arrested, ripped off or cheated.

These men are intimate with the anxieties. These are the mom-and-pop
producers favoured by compassion clubs who hope to benefit from the
emerging market. They are all weathered middle-aged men who like gardening.

I came to know them through Taylor and I would describe them all as
ordinary middle-class citizens.

One has a crop in the basement, another in a spare room, a third in an
underground bunker.

One has adolescent kids on the honour roll at school, one is just starting
a young family, another is coasting towards retirement in his late 50s, the
kids long grown and the wife moved on.

I can't tell you their names because the legal repercussions for growing,
smoking or selling marijuana remain punitive.

They are small-town marketers who sell to teachers, veterinarians and
lawyers who need a cool place to score and can't buy on the street where
everyone knows your name.

Their backgrounds are typical -- one was born in the Kootenays, another on
the coast.

Peter, 47, originally came from Ontario, settling here with his wife and
two children in 1995 because they liked the lifestyle.

He is using one of Taylor's units to grow a potent Nepalese strain of
marijuana crossed with a Russian variety to induce it to flower faster.
He's happy to show and tell and leads the gang down into the basement where
he keeps the grow unit.

He opens the white cabinet to reveal an explosion of lush emerald plants
and a rush of sweet, pungent air.

If you can program your VCR, you're way too technically sophisticated for
this machine. Once the eight or so plants are in place, set the timer and
turn it on.

Henry, whom I have come to know as a veritable marijuana Mendel, known
because of his wisdom about cloning, is impressed.

He has been breeding cannabis plants for two years and developed about 30
unique strains -- some that provide pain relief, others with tremendous
mood enhancement properties.

The soft-spoken 28-year-old said he was mentored by an older gardener who
taught him about the plant and its idiosyncrasies. He's hoping with the
change in law, he can start a research and development company, The Clone
Man, to market his genetic knowledge.

Taylor has already offered Henry a job as an adviser to those who buy his
personal grow units -- envisioning him as a kind of traveling plant doctor.

If the government proceeds, all of the men in the room would breathe easier
and sleep better at night not worrying about being busted.

And they would be able to start marketing the production processes they've
developed and byproducts such as keef, hash and oil that until now have
been enjoyed primarily by the cognoscenti and connected connoisseurs.

Back upstairs in his kitchen, Peter displayed a one-litre plastic cylinder
with a nozzle, fitted with a lid and a nipple on one end and a tube with a
spigot at the bottom. He filled it with about eight ounces of ground
marijuana, attached a pressurized can of butane to the nipple and filled
the cylinder with the the liquefied gas.

Later, he opened the spigot and released the murky dark brown stew. A
glistening viscous liquid seeped through the tube and spilled into a bowl.
At room temperature, the butane began bubbling, boiling and evaporating
leaving behind a light brown, almost golden-coloured oil.

The half pound of shake, as the undesirable leaf material is called,
produced about 15 grams of oil. You can buy the oil and the keef for about
the same as pot, about $10 to $15 a gram.

Peter, who like the others in the room has a full-time job, said he earns
about $1,000 a month from marijuana sales -- enough to pay the dental bills
for the kids, an illicit mortgage helper.

Jack, who is in his mid-50s, said few people appreciate the hard work
needed to be a successful grower -- and the modest profit margins.

Jack and two partners for about a decade harvested 15 to 18 pounds from 200
plants three times a year from an underground bunker in an isolated hollow.
He estimated that most years he was lucky to make $25,000.

Still the economics are attractive.

Setting aside the initial capital investment in a personal grow unit or
equivalent equipment ($1,800), a crop costs:

- - $10-$50 for a clone depending on the strain (or a packet of seeds can
cost upwards of $200 for 10).

- - About $10 for nutrients for the hydroponic system for the
eight-to-10-week cycle.

- - About $7 a week for hydro on a 12-hours on, 12-hours off cycle.

Taylor figures you should be able to harvest half a pound every
two-to-three months.

In return, local connoisseurs will pay $2,000 a pound for average weed and
$2,500 a pound for triple A marijuana. In Vancouver, the same dope fetches
a couple of hundred dollars more.

Even if decriminalization occurs, Taylor said he doesn't expect the price
structure to change: "We in Vancouver pay the same as they pay in an
Amsterdam coffee house -- about $15 a gram," he noted. (There are 28 grams
to an ounce.) "It's decriminalized there, why would our experience be
different? I think the prices will remain constant."

Already there are booming spin-off cottage industries in products such as
pipes and psychedelic arts and crafts.

Up near the tiny town of Ymir, transplanted Torontonian Earle Nestmann has
established Thunder Mountain Glassworks.

He and his partner Chris Beaver are would-be cannabis-culture Chihulys.
They have created a thriving business blowing multi-coloured goblets,
paperweights, pens, inkwells, Christmas ornaments, beads, jewelry and
sculpture.

"We can't keep up with demand really," Nestmann said.

Every month, the company ships across Canada and the U.S. hundreds of
pipes, some featuring glass dioramas and vibrantly coloured seascapes that
cost upwards of $400.

Beaver, 30, just moved to the area from Rhode Island to work with Nestmann
who has begun training his neighbours in glassblowing to meet demand.

Down the highway in Nelson, at the Holy Smoke headshop on Hendryx Street,
the proprietors paint a similarly rosy picture of counterculture capitalism.

Paul DeFelice, Dustin Cantwell and Alan Middlemiss founded the landmark
paraphernalia dealership in 1996. They have since relocated to a larger
location and hired a part-time sales clerk.

"We started the store more as a political act rather than a business,"
DeFelice said. "But it began to support itself and surprised us. It took
off and we moved from a basement on Front Street to this big pink house. It
tripled our overhead, but sales keep increasing."

The true intended beneficiaries of Allan Rock's new policies, however, are
people such as Justin Spalek, a 23-year-old who says he may have only three
to six months to live.

Sitting in his trailer-park home on the Salmo highway, skin jaundiced from
Hepatitis C, grey sacks under his eyes, and rake thin, Spalek looks close
to death as he tokes from an elaborate glass pipe.

Some days he smokes as much as a quarter ounce of marijuana to deal with
his migraines and stimulate his appetite.

"I get sick in the morning, lot of pain in my abdomen and hands," said
Spalek, who used to work as a mechanic.

"I've been dealing with it for three or four years without knowing I had
all this stuff, until it got so bad about six, seven months ago and I ended
up in emergency. Now I can't work no more."

Like thousands of others across the province, Spalek relies on the local
compassion club for his marijuana.

Philip McMillan, director of the registered non-profit Nelson Compassion
Club, supplies pot to about 100 people in the region who are ill and find
it alleviates their suffering.

His club, one of a handful across the province supplying marijuana to sick
people, just began to meet its $2,000 a month overhead after running a
deficit for a year.

"We don't have 1,400 members like Vancouver," he quipped.

McMillan buys marijuana from mom-and-pop producers and sells it to his
members with a 30-per-cent markup.

"We are definitely into organics -- being Nelson, of course," he said. "So
we push or show favouritism to anyone who is into the organics and growing
hydroponically. Our prices vary from $20 to $30 an eighth [of an ounce], as
little as $100 to $200 an ounce. Of the money we generate, seven-eighths
goes back to the growers, the way things cost now."

When he opened the club, McMillan said he thought there would be more young
people among his members.

"My average age is probably about 50," the long-haired 26-year-old former
social worker said. "The demographics have shocked me."

If you are diagnosed with cancer, AIDS, hepatitis, MS, fibromyalgia,
epilepsy or glaucoma, you automatically qualify for membership in the club.

Otherwise, you need to provide a doctor's note that says you have disclosed
your marijuana use. A typical note, he said, would read:

"John Smith has chronic pain due to a herniated disc and has advised me he
uses cannabis to treat his condition -- or has found benefits from the use
of cannabis."

"I'm very lenient when it comes to the prescription part of it," McMillan
said. "The basic list for a [compassion] club is about seven illnesses -- I
have more than 100. And I'm also one of the only ones who will accept any
mental health issues. I've taken notes from psychologists and psychiatrists
for bipolar, manic-depressive and schizophrenic [disorders]."

And, unlike the entrepreneurs, he's not persuaded Rock's regulations will
work. He disagrees vehemently with an exemption and licensing process.

"Somebody with no criminal record must be willing to grow and must be
willing to come forward and basically expose themselves to the federal
government," McMillan explained.

"People who have sent in samples have been arrested, people that are
waiting for exemption process -- their names were leaked from Health Canada
to the RCMP and they got busted. What makes them think a grower that
actually made it this long growing without getting busted is going to go,
'Oh, I grow, here I am! Here's my name and number and address, come on down
and bust me right now!'

"All the growers who have read the regulations -- and they were all getting
excited about these new regulations -- but finally they are here and not
one single person is willing to sign on to this."

If his members required the maximum amount of marijuana allowed under the
regulations -- five grams a day or about four pounds a year -- that's about
400 pounds, he calculated.

"We would need 100 growers and 33 locations," he complained.

And he's vehemently against the idea of the government or the bureaucracy
deciding who should qualify for access to a medical treatment and who
shouldn't.

"It's up to you and your doctor," he said. "The new regulations are just 49
pages of crap."

Yet he remains optimistic that change is on the horizon.

"It's an uphill battle -- but it's going to come," McMillan says
passionately about the end of pot prohibition.

"It's just about the money and who is going to make it -- the small
independent producer or the giant pharmaceutical company," he said. "With
most of the patients I talk to, do you think they want to smoke some
government chemically grown pharmaceutical weed?"

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN OTHER AREAS DECRIMINALIZED MARIJUANA:

The defacto or outright decriminalization of marijuana for personal
consumption, including medical purposes, has occurred elsewhere in the
world. There is no evidence such legal and law enforcement tolerance
triggered a general increase in rates of consumption of the drug.

- - The Australian state of South Australia decriminalized marijuana in 1987.
Two neighbouring states didn't change their laws and marijuana consumption
in all three remained relatively stable.

- - Similarly, in the 1970s, 11 American states decriminalized marijuana
without significantly affecting rates of marijuana use compared with
neighbouring jurisdictions. When some of those states re-criminalized the
drug, it did not reduce consumption.

- - In much-talked about Holland, marijuana possession was made de facto
legal in 1976 and, in 1980, regulated "coffee shops" were permitted to sell
the drug. The Dutch rate of marijuana use continues to be one of the lowest
in the western world.

- - Some states and cities in Germany decriminalized or embraced de facto
legalization in the early 1990s. Italy, Portugal and Spain are moving in
the same direction.

Ran with factbox entitled "WHAT HAPPENED WHEN OTHER AREAS DECRIMINALIZED
MARIJUANA:" which is appended to the end of the story.