HO HUM A CITY SHOP SOLD POT

Twenty four hours before the police raid on the Da Kine Smoke &
Beverage Shop, I joined the steady stream of people of various shapes,
genders, ages and colours filing into the Commercial Drive store. A
cheery young woman, oblivious to the dramatic turn her life would soon
take, greeted us with, "How you doing? Have you registered?"

"Why, no I haven't," I said as I scanned an application form for The
Canadian Sanctuary Society.

This shop has been making headlines across the city and country for
weeks and dealing pot for four months, although not one complaint has
been received by the mayor's office. Until Thursday city cops had
better things to do with their time.

The city's chief licensing inspector told reporters the shop owner
said nothing about selling marijuana when she applied for her business
licence. Imagine that!

I was in the shop undercover. Though nobody ever asked, I had my story
all worked out. I just had to remember not to inhale. I also had to
remember where I parked my car.

I was posing as a middle-aged tourist who, having time to kill before
getting on an Alaskan cruise ship, had lost his way. While frantically
dodging aggressive panhandlers and stoned drug addicts and trying to
avoid the apparent general state of lawlessness on Vancouver's streets
that Darcy Rezac at the Board of Trade says is putting our
international reputation at risk and threatens to wreck the 2010
Olympics-my, my-I ended up in Vancouver's counterculture gulch,
Commercial Drive.

At the shop, folks, who must have registered before I got there, were
lined up at the counter in two rows, four or five deep, waiting to buy
small packets of pot as casually as you would pick up a loaf of bread.
Ho hum. They could also buy individually wrapped hash brownies and
chocolate chip cookies that included a note about the pot content of
each one.

A handwritten menu offering customers Aladdin, Hash Plant, G Spot
(what do you do with that?) and Skunk was passed out by the two young
women at the counter.

You may have seen the two of them led away in handcuffs on Thursday's
TV news.

At the few tables in the shop people were filling in their
registration forms. One fellow in a wheelchair was picking apart a
nice fat bud and rolling up a joint. "How are you?" I asked. "Fine,"
he said.

Most of the people buying pot left with it, some on foot and others by
car.

A shopkeeper across the road had been watching this go on for several
months now. No problem. The only difference, he says, is that the
neighbourhood restaurants may be doing more business. Munch, munch.

There was another difference. According to some of the locals, the
drug dealers who frequented the nearby park and peddled their stuff on
the streets were gone.

And what have local politicians been saying say? Ho hum. Of course we
can't condone illegal activities. But what harm is being done?
Legalize it, says the mayor.

Meanwhile B.C.'s solicitor general, ex-Mountie Rich Coleman, has been
predictably apoplectic. Thursday morning he was in the papers
criticizing local politicians for their "ho hum attitude." He was
confident police would enforce the law.

The city will hold a hearing next month to see if the Da Kine should
get its licence lifted, although the point now seems moot. It is worth
noting though, in that brief few months before the police action, we
were given a glimpse of the civility that could prevail if marijuana
sales were legalized.

Coleman prefers the status quo, the bankrupt American-inspired policy
known as the War on Drugs that has led to a proliferation of marijuana
grow-ops, billions of dollars in the pockets of organized crime and
drug dealers on our streets.