ROLLING STONE'S SAM BROWN SAGA HITS SHELVES

'Death of a Freerider': Pop culture giant's latest issue chronicles
the fascinating life and drug running demise of local 24-year-old

Alongside exclusive stories on Michael Jackson's final days and U.S.
president Barack Obama's latest mega-reform, the new issue of Rolling
Stone magazine provides a stark and in-depth investigation into the
life and death of Nelson's Sam Brown.

And there is more nationwide press on the 24-year-old's tragic tale -
along with Nelson's evident infamy as a burgeoning drug centre - due
in the next few months.

Rolling Stone's latest issue, on magazine stands across most of the
U.S. and Canada as of yesterday, contains a 10-page, 6,500 word
feature on the local mountain biker-and-logger's life up until the
hours after he committed suicide in a Spokane jail cell, four days
after being arrested by hiding U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officers
awaiting a $2.5 million marijuana delivery via a chopper Brown was
piloting on the evening of February 23, 2009.

"I was very pleased with the story," says Rolling Stone senior editor
Sean Woods. "I thought we did a really solid job of reporting and
told a tale most Americans didn't know about."

While the yarn may rivet many of the magazine's 1.5 million readers
worldwide who know little of Nelson or Brown, it will sit uneasily
with some locals, as it casts the West Kootenay in a salacious and
familiar glare.

Salt Lake City-based writer Jesse Hyde describes the Heritage City as
"the weed capital of Canada, a centre for booming pot culture and a
sort of marijuana Shangri La," and claims "many of the Slocan Valley's
5,600 residents have taken to growing high-grade marijuana," some
families for the third generation in a region with "little discernible
industry or source of income."

Admitting that the labels "mightn't be entirely fair" Hyde points out
that he compiled a 78-page reporting memo of the story to Rolling
Stone's editors, including multiple interviews with two dozen sources,
many anonymous and "well-plugged in," and sourced a wide array of
background from the DEA, Internet and books including West Coast
Smoke, written by former Nelson Daily News managing editor Drew Edwards.

"It seemed that nearly every single person I talked to knew someone
who was in the business," Hyde told the NDN Wednesday.

Despite its unsettling detail, Woods points out that the story - which
will not be posted on Rolling Stone's website - provides indirectly
favourable press for the region.

"The descriptions of the landscape made me want to go," he says, on
the phone from Rolling Stone's offices on the Avenue of Americas in
downtown New York City. "The place has a lot going for it, and a lot
of interesting sub cultures."

"Nelson is a town that looks like something out of a storybook," Hyde
writes, "with steep streets, glowing streetlamps and a castle-like art
museum...a magnet for granola and counterculture types."

The writer describes the valley as "a string of postcard perfect
villages built on lakeshores and riverbeds."

While an apt characterization of the region's aesthetic appeal, Woods
feels the story reveals much larger truths about the underworld drug
culture across North America and its entrenched prevalence here.

"Nelson is like a lot of towns across the continent," he explains,
"drugs are everywhere. I don't think that's a secret."

But further, he adds, the facts behind Brown's unsettling tale debunk
the region's supposed mom-and-pop pot business.

"If it's organized crime, it's not that organized," local drug defense
lawyer Don Skogstad told Rolling Stone. "It's far more fractured and
disjointed than you think."

Woods doesn't entirely agree, warning that judging by Brown's saga,
pot produced and delivered by comparatively small-time local
grow-shows are in fact only one step removed from the American
gangsterism and international cartels that define North America's
mammoth illicit drug trade.

"It's very easy to forget what happens in the next step," he says,
adding that like a lot of communities in America, traditional
industries in parts of Canada are dying." And something needs to fill
the vacuum. People need to work."

As Hyde discovered whether he needed it or not, that path was Sam
Brown's fate.

Starting with his bucolic upbringing in New Zealand and the day a
13-year-old Brown was left to fend for himself, dropped off by his
father at a Kaslo hostel, Hyde chronicles all aspects of the alluring
young man's spirited 24 years including his family's ups and downs,
near legendary outdoorsmanship, romances, his career as a contract
logger and his eventual acquaintance with drug traffickers well-known
and surveilled by DEA and RCMP.

Including photos from local shooters Doug LePage and Matt Scholl, the
story paints a wild two-year tale of maverick helicopter drug runs,
uncharacteristically high rolling lifestyle and five-figure pay-offs
which ended after Brown was tracked by law officials and eventually
set up by a criminal insider who will in all likelihood says Rolling
Stone's Woods, never be revealed.

"I wished for some conclusivity," says Woods. "I think ultimately
these are questions that'll never be answered. But we certainly
raised them. Sam's story has been told."

And not for the last time.

Canada's longest-running investigative news program, the CBC's Fifth
Estate, is planning an equally in-depth TV segment on Brown's story.

Nelson CBC Radio reporter Bob Keating, who broke the story of Brown's
suicide and assisted Rolling Stone in its research, is helping the
program's investigators with the segment. It will be covered by
veteran Fifth Estate journalist Lindon MacIntyre, and is slated to air
this fall. The Associated Press has already filed a story. Hyde says
Bike magazine and Outside were also pursuing the tale.

With his four-month assignment now complete, Hyde says he felt as
though he owed Brown's family, as they were gracious with their time
and willing to talk about something so painful and so recent.

"Sam was a once in a lifetime character," says Hyde. "It was most
important to me to try and do him justice."