SHOW REVEALS BUSINESS SIDE OF MARIJUANA

Documentary Tracks Growers And The Police Who Pursue Them

(CNS) - Marijuana is believed to be a $20-billion industry in Canada.
But most discussion about the drug is centered around the moral issue
of whether to legalize it.

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 at 9 p.m.

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," which is a broad subject.

He decided he needed to focus on a single community, and chose Grand
Forks, an idyllic West Kootenay town.

"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.

"I thought if I could focus on one town, rather than try to find a
dealer in Nova Scotia and a cop in Toronto, maybe I could see the
business as it's actually working, and maybe see its connection to
the local economy."

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

Taylor 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 much more sophisticated
indoor grow-op.

The RCMP let Goddard film them searching for marijuana fields from
helicopters, and chopping plants down when they discovered them.

One of his key subjects was the victim of a "grow-rip," and teared up
when discussing it, perhaps the most poignant moment of the film.

The growers don't come across as hardened criminals -- they're more
like an old hippie neighbour who likes to garden.

"It's weird," said Goddard.

"There's almost an innocence in the heartland of marijuana, and
there's a sense that something is being lost. There almost is a sense
of pride there, of tradition, that people are mourning.

"I'm not sure if people understood that it existed in the first
place, because [growing pot] was illegal. But it's a counter-culture,
it's a way of life, in that area of the province. And it supports the
towns there.

"We like to drive there as yuppies, to have these little towns to
drive through and pick up our ice cream and fresh vegetables and have
a bed and breakfast to stay in. But people should realize that town
probably wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the marijuana industry,
or at least be in the shape that it's in."

CannaBIZ is half of a marijuana double-bill tonight 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.