VANCOUVER TOURISM: GONE TO POT?

Vancouver is world renowned as a vacationing stoner's paradise.

It is a reputation that has taken many years to cultivate, feeding on the
growth of a vibrant marijuana industry, a tolerant legal atmosphere and
active promotion by commercial ventures looking to profit from visiting
cannabis aficionados. Yet even though Vancouver is known as the Amsterdam
of the Pacific Northwest, reefer related businesses have a tenuous
existence, operating as they do under the cloud of prohibition. Even though
B.C.'s economy has become dependent on the marijuana trade, the law still
makes the sale and possession of marijuana technically illegal.

Even the recently unveiled federal marijuana decriminalisation bill -
legislation that, in any case, is still a long way from being passed - does
not alter the legality of the trade.

The full extent of Vancouver's pot tourism is impossible to know. "I'd be
naive if I didn't say that people aren't interested in coming here because
of that [marijuana], but how many, who they are, what type of person and so
on, that's not something we would keep track of, or have any stats on,"
says Walt Judas, Vice President of Marketing, Communications and Business
Strategy for Tourism Vancouver. Vancouver's main neighbourhood pot cafes,
Blunt Brothers and the New Amsterdam Cafe, however, both advertise in High
Times magazine - the (in)famous American marijuana culture publication with
a circulation of over 200,000. The cafes hope to attract foreigners to our
shores and through their doors.

Our pot tourism received a big boost last summer when High Times picked
Vancouver over Amsterdam as the best place on the planet to smoke up. The
magazine cited the quality of B.C. bud, its availability, and its price -
half of what it costs in Amsterdam. "It is a very tolerant atmosphere," the
magazine's executive editor Dan Skye said at the time. "You could walk down
the street smoking marijuana and no one bothers you." And it's not just
pot-focused publications that have remarked on Vancouver's popularity as a
haven for tokers.

Wired magazine published a piece called Getting Dot-bombed in Vancouver
about recently laid off techies living in Silicon Valley who are coming up
to B.C., "looking to slack off until the economy improves" by indulging in
our primo weed while taking in the spectacular scenery.

Meanwhile, the Lonely Planet - a.k.a. the backpacker's bible - features a
sidebar in their British Columbia guide under the heading "B.C.'s Booming
Pot Industry" and notes that "it's certainly not uncommon to smell wafting
pot smoke on the street" in Vancouver.

According to Stewart McKay, a manager at The New Amsterdam Cafe, tourists
are visiting his establishment in droves, having heard about its existence
through advertising and word of mouth. "We're getting a lot of Americans -
mostly Americans, actually.

They're pretty excited, they're paranoid, they're everything! They're very
excited to see something like this close to home, they can indulge a little
bit of freedom when they come here." You have to love the irony of people
from the land of the free having to travel in search of freedom.

News of the federal government's recently tabled legislation to
decriminalise the possession of small amounts of marijuana is getting lots
of media attention all around the world.

If passed, the legislation calls for possession of less than 15 grams to be
punishable by summary fines of $150 rather than by jail time. Workers at
downtown youth hostels already have to caution inquiring backpackers who
erroneously believe that pot is legal in these parts.

While passage of the legislation would likely further enhance our
Vansterdam image and thus result in even more marijuana-seeking tourists,
McKay is not a fan of the proposed legislation. "I don't like
decriminalisation, I think it would have an adverse effect, because then
they'll be handing out tickets to everyone and once people start getting
tickets, then that's the end. It won't take long for word of mouth to get
around." If it starts to be seen as a heavily policed pothole, more
tourists may start to avoid Vancouver.

The ultimate answer for McKay is legalisation, "so it's more like
Amsterdam." Legalisation, according to McKay, would stabilise the legal
environment and eliminate many of the criminal elements.

This is a position echoed by the B.C. Marijuana Party in a document called
A Vision For the Future: "The B.C. Marijuana Party envisions a prosperous
future for growers in a legalised cannabis economy." It sees the nature and
value of the marijuana industry in ways that make it very similar to the
wine industry, "in which chateaus produce wines of various qualities and
characters." The party envisions a situation where "there will be thousands
of coffee shops, at least one in every town, hamlet and city, selling
dozens of varieties of marijuana," resulting in a windfall for the B.C.
economy.

While decriminalisation will not bring the legalised utopia craved by the
Marijuana Party and its supporters, neither are McKay's fears likely to be
realised. The police already allow that stretch of Hastings Street occupied
by the New Amsterdam Cafe, Blunt Brothers and other purveyors of marijuana
smoking accessories to operate as a de facto red light district.
Considering how dependent B.C. is on both tourism and marijuana, it is
unlikely that this city's power brokers and economic elites are going to
want the police doing anything that would negatively affect pot tourism -
as long as it is confined to a specific zone. The worry for Tourism
Vancouver is that pot tourism will turn off the more conservative, but
bigger spending, tourists who come here for business conventions or on
cruise ships. "We haven't taken a position on that [the establishment of a
red light district], but if that were to happen, then certainly you want it
contained in a specific area. Then you can inform your customers about
where it is if they don't want to encounter that."

In July of 2001, the province's Organised Crime Agency (OCA) estimated the
annual value of marijuana production at more than $6 billion per year,
placing it just behind forestry and tourism - valued at $14 billion and $8
billion, respectively - as one of the main industries driving the B.C.
economy. The Marijuana Party position paper on fiscal policy points out
that since marijuana is itself a major tourist draw, "many of those tourist
dollars should be added to the value of the marijuana crop, which could
make marijuana B.C.'s most valuable resource." On July 14, 2001 a Vancouver
Sun article credited the marijuana trade with directly supplying the
province with up to 150,000 jobs and estimated that when all the economic
spin-offs are taken into account, the trade could account for as much as 15
per cent of B.C.'s economy.

All that illegal money gets washed into the "legitimate" economy when drug
growers and dealers buy legal products like hydroponics equipment, clothing
and cars.

On the face of it, it would seem that Canadian society is moving in a
positive direction.

The liberalisation of our marijuana laws and our popularity as a
pot-positive destination certainly appear to be harbingers of increased
personal freedoms in this country.

But are they? Don't be so sure. Ultimately, having more freedom means
having more control over one's way of life, but how we are able to live is
dependent on how we subsist economically.

Since the 1970s, Canada has been two-stepping along with neo-liberal
restructuring of the global financial system and has been handing the tasks
involved in regulating our economy over to international markets.

The result is that Canada - a state containing all the resources it needs
to be self-sufficient within its own borders - is in a situation where the
economic well-being of its residents is dependent upon the export of
commodities to satisfy the whims of foreign (mostly American) consumers.

Traditionally, Canada has been an exporter of natural resources - notably
fish and wood. Recently, the fishery on both coasts has been almost
completely exhausted by over-fishing, while the American government
regularly initiates softwood lumber disputes, resulting in the export of
forestry jobs to the U.S. and a drop in wages paid for the work that
remains here. Tourism, officially an export industry with its lower paying
service jobs, has filled much of the void left by these declining
industries. According to Tourism B.C., an agency of the provincial
government, the commodities exported by the tourist industry are
"experiences," even though consumers have to come here in order to consume
them.

When our economic health - and thus, our social health - is dependent on
providing visitors with satisfying tourist experiences, then we are in a
position where all our decisions about how to structure our society are
made with an eye to making sure that our landscapes are comforting for
tourists. Public spaces like Gastown become organised in ways so that they
are appealing to tourists, while police actively keep out the poor and
dispossessed. Regardless of the actual reality of our communities, we will
always have to be worried about how other people perceive them and we will
make our choices accordingly.

As Walt Judas of Tourism Vancouver puts it, "There are a few things that
paint us with a black eye. One is panhandling, another is small crime, and
the third is [that] people often stumble into the Downtown Eastside on
their way to Chinatown, or they venture off the Gastown path and they find
themselves in the middle of a very vibrant drug scene.

That is very disturbing to them and, even though one could argue that the
incidences of personal assaults or even safety is really not a factor at
all, it is still unsettling for people."

What worries some concerned citizens is that the sensibilities of tourists
will be given more weight then the rights of residents when important
decisions are to be made. Already, the conversion of single occupancy room
hotels into backpacker hotels has reduced the amount of housing available
to residents of the Downtown Eastside.

Although the global marketplace has decreed that both tourism and marijuana
are to be important foundations of our economy, neither is particularly
stable and they are becoming increasingly intertwined. Even though
Americans consume the vast majority of the marijuana produced in this
province, the American government uses our pot industry as an excuse to
engage in a little sabre rattling whenever it feels the urge, while
tourists remain an incredibly fickle lot. International travel to B.C. in
March was down 13.3 per cent compared to March of 2002 - a decline Tourism
B.C. attributes to SARS and the war in Iraq. If tourism is going to dip
every time the U.S. goes to war, we are in big trouble.

Our ability to feed our families, have universal health care or be a
vibrant nation is becoming dependent on visiting tourists with disposable
incomes who have a hankering to get high. The British Columbian economic
base is becoming less first world and more third world - like Mexico's or
Thailand's - which, if it wasn't for this wonderful buzz, could be pretty
depressing.