WEED-WAR SURVIVOR SUMS IT UP SIMPLY: 'DRUGS WON'

You lift 16 tonnes of hash and here's what you get: glowing character
references from Neil Young and Norman Mailer and 20 years in society's debt.

That is the stranger-than-fiction story of one Robert "Rosie" Rowbotham, far
and away Canada's best-known marijuana offender.

Four years into his newly cherished freedom, Rowbotham doesn't flinch at
discussing the long, strange trip that took him from his native Belleville
to Beirut to, ultimately, more years than he cares to remember behind bars
in Warkworth Penitentiary.

"I always made a distinction between soft drugs and hard drugs. I stuck to
marijuana and hash," he says.

"To some people, that makes me a pariah. To others, a martyr. I'm not really
comfortable either way. As far as I'm concerned, the slate is clean. Nobody
owes me an apology. And I don't owe anybody an apology. I'm moving on."

Indeed he is. Rowbotham, who turns 50 this Halloween, is now firmly
entrenched in a new life as a reporter for CBC Radio's This Morning.

It's a frantic job, but more important, it's legit. Rowbotham embraces his
world of constant deadlines with the knowledge that "I'd better get it right
because I've got more baggage than any other journalist in the country."

He's mindful that The Corp took a huge gamble in taking him on four years
ago when, newly paroled, he was living in a Toronto halfway house.

A perusal of Rowbotham's resume reads like a history of local
counter-culture. Born and raised in Belleville, where like other bored teens
he found the taste for marijuana, Rowbotham made his way to Toronto just as
Rochdale College opened its doors.

The high-rise student residence at Bloor and Huron Sts. became his home and,
soon thereafter, the storied epicentre for the city's flow of soft drugs.

Rowbotham admits he fit better than most, showing a flamboyant flair for
high-living commerce. For the first year or two, he dealt in small amounts.
But his business went exponential, fast.

"A pound of hash, five pounds of pot, then five pounds of hash. Then 10, 15
or 20 pounds and before I knew it, 50- or 100-pound lots.

"Then, one day in 1970, some people came to see me and fronted me my first
tonne of hashish. I wasn't even 20 years old yet and I was whacking it out
wholesale."

He also burned through the proceeds as quickly as they came, flying anywhere
on the planet on a whim, hemorrhaging money for the fun of it. At a party in
Maine in 1973, Rowbotham remembers, he beguiled Pulitzer Prize-winning
novelist Norman Mailer by announcing he had only ever read one book Last of
the Mohicans.

"All these people were aghast when I told them the world has three kinds of
people writers, readers and people like me, who were too busy living their
lives to do either. I told Mailer, 'You need people like me, otherwise you
would have nothing to write about.'

"I was a child, I was an egomaniac, I was a fool, I was out of control. But
Mailer loved it."

Rowbotham's nightmare with the law began a year later, when the RCMP charged
him with conspiracy to import a tonne of hashish seized at what is now
Pearson Airport.

Among the barrage of headlines is one featuring Mailer, who told a Brampton
courtroom jury that Rowbotham was "a fascinating character akin to Errol
Flynn." Calling his arrest a "tragic and disproportionate waste," Mailer
said convicting Rowbotham would be "bad for the cosmos."

Rowbotham was sentenced to 14 years. Just before the judgment, he stunned
reporters with a 40-minute address to the court, declaring marijuana was a
relatively benign target unworthy of the drug war and pleading for
parliamentary reform: "They used to burn witches. Today we laugh at them.
Today we jail people for marijuana. Tomorrow they'll laugh at us."

Rowbotham's sentence was cut to nine years on appeal and by the early '80s
he was again a free man.

Unrepentant. And back in business.

By his own account, Rowbotham's reconstituted drug ring organized the mother
of all imports, trekking to wartorn Lebanon in January, 1981, where it
purchased 16 tonnes of Bekaa Valley hashish through Christian militiamen.

"We loaded the hash on to a ship and covered the smell with $150,000 worth
of dates. There was the blockade the U.S. 6th Fleet and yet we made it
through. To this day, I suspect the only reason we managed to get through
was because the Christians in Beirut had connections to American interests."

They made it to America, where the hash was broken down into smaller
packages for small-plane shipment to an abandoned airstrip in Quebec and
also in the false bottoms of trucks travelling to Michigan. Most was
destined for Toronto.

A little more than a year later, the remnants of that same cache of hash
became headline news in Toronto. Rowbotham and 36 others fell to Operation
Rose, an 11-month project named for Rowbotham himself. Metro police seized a
record $30 million in hash and marijuana, laying 143 charges. Among those
caught in the dragnet was Robert Young, brother to rocker Neil, son of
journalist Scott.

Another show trial unfolded in June, 1985, this time with Neil Young
stepping up for the defence. The Toronto-born artist spoke of how the
accused made the distinction between soft and hard drugs. "There's a moral
line there and they didn't cross it."

Rowbotham was convicted and sentenced to 20 years, Robert Young, two.

Now, with nearly 20 years in total jail time behind him, Rowbotham is out of
the business for good.

He earned two degrees in prison, he's caught up on the books Mailer's
friends urged him to read. He's often asked to speak to schools, where he
maintains a "message of honesty."

"Frankly, my observation is that the war on drugs is over. Drugs won. And
that's the perspective we should be dealing with when you talk about hard
drugs and addiction. It's a health issue first.

"Things in the U.S. don't seem to have changed, but Canada's attitude on
marijuana has become more European. We're starting to mellow out."