TRACING THE BIG BUSINESS OF THE CANADIAN BUD

Television Preview

CANNABIZ

Time and channel: Tonight at 9 on CBC

Marijuana is believed to be a $20-billion industry in Canada. But
most discussion about the drug is centred around the moral issue of
whether to legalize it or not.

Lionel Goddard thought it was high time somebody looked at marijuana
as a business, not a social issue. The result is CannaBIZ, an
hour-long documentary airing on CBC-TV's DocZone tonight.

Goddard is a former CBC reporter-turned-documentary filmmaker. He was
approached by the network to do a film on "the state of the marijuana
industry in Canada."

He decided he needed to focus on a single community, and chose Grand
Forks, an idyllic town near Nelson, B.C.

"It's in the Kootenays, in the heartland of marijuana, where the
hippies came in the '60s and planted the first B.C. bud," Goddard explained.

Grand Forks leaped to mind because it achieved national notoriety in
the late 1990s for having the "marijuana mayor," Brian Taylor.

He not only admitted smoking marijuana, he wanted Grand Forks to
become the centre of a new marijuana/ hemp industry. He wound up
being defeated in 1999, but was undeterred, becoming the head of the
B.C. Marijuana Party for the 2001 provincial election and campaigning
around B.C. in a "cannibus."

Taylor lost, but kept running for Grand Forks mayor. As luck would
have it, he was running again while Goddard was filming in 2008,
which provided a natural storyline.

Grand Forks turned out to be the perfect place to shoot. Goddard
found a young guy who let him film him planting his crop outdoors and
an older grower who let him film his sophisticated indoor grow op.

The RCMP let Goddard film them searching for marijuana fields from
helicopters and chopping plants down when they discovered them. The
growers don't come across as hardened criminals -- they're more like
an old hippie neighbour who likes to garden.

"There's almost an innocence in the heartland of marijuana and
there's a sense that something is being lost."

The loss of innocence is partly because marijuana has become such a
big business, gangs and organized crime have moved in. Cocaine is
being exchanged for pot, partly because it's easier to transport and
cash is harder to launder.

CannaBIZ is half of a marijuana double-bill Thursday night on CBC. It
will be preceded at 8 p.m. by The Downside of High, an hour-long
documentary on The Nature of Things about new research that finds
teenagers under 16 who start smoking pot are "four times more likely
to become schizophrenic" than those who don't.