TOKING A TRIP AROUND THE WORLD

Pot Planet: Adventures In Global Marijuana Culture

By Brian Preston

Grove, 298 pages, $24.95

Loaded: A Misadventure on the Marijuana Trail

By Robert Sabbag

Little, Brown, 332 pages, $34.95

Vancouver journalist and marijuana fancier Brian Preston sets himself an
enticing task: As a book project, he is to toke his way through 12
countries, sampling the local grass and hash. "A global gourmet-ganja
holiday," is how he puts it.

But that's not how it turns out, at least in the beginning. He wanders
Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, looking for dope or -- afflicted by
tourista -- the nearest latrine. For this reader, hard content about
marijuana is thin, and most of the people he encounters are not very
interesting.

Preston, however, is a good reporter, and when he gets down to business, he
writes an engaging and informative book. It happens in Australia. We've
been at Nimbin in New South Wales, "the great citadel of cannabis culture
Down Under." It's Mardi Gras -- peace, love and the hard sell. The price of
pot doubles, then triples. But then Preston visits a third-generation
farmer named Kog, a family man who has done time in jail for growing cannabis.

"So Brian," Kog asks him, "is writing this book the most important thing
you've ever done in your life?"

The question gives Preston pause. "In the beginning, this book had almost
seemed a lark. Pure pleasure," he tells us. But after meeting so many
people like this man who had been persecuted and jailed, "I understood I
owed these people something."

Though Preston never says exactly what that something is, in England, the
next stop on his tour, we begin to meet marijuana activists who are not
merely passionate about pot, but also eloquent and deeply thoughtful.

In dreary Luton, of all places, an hour west of London, we visit the Exodus
Collective, whose dedication to love and community is so idealistic that
Preston warns us his account "is likely going to sound very hokey." But
who's to argue with success? Working on the belief that cannabis promotes
conscience, Exodus holds pot raves on land provided by a sympathetic Duke
of Bedford. In six months, attendance jumps from 100 to 10,000, local crime
rates fall and Luton breweries complain to police and government about lost
pub business.

Just weeks ago, Britain reclassified cannabis, easing penalties for
possession and smoking. Belgium and Portugal have now decriminalized it
(which falls well short of legalizing). The Swiss are liberalizing, and
even cautious Canada is once again making permissive noises 22 years after
the justice minister at the time, Jean Chretien, promised to decriminalize
pot. (An idea soon scotched by a lobby of parents and teachers from
vote-rich Ontario.) But, as Preston explains in a fascinating chapter on
Amsterdam, all these pseudo-solutions cause more difficulties than they
resolve.

The vaunted freedom of the Netherlands' 1,200 cannabis coffee shops is, in
fact, a sham. Yes, you can buy grass or hash and smoke it on the premises.
But Dutch legislators, like their counterparts everywhere else, could not
bring themselves to legalize commercial production and distribution. So the
police must connive in illegal activity, looking the other way while
supplies are hustled through the back door, a standing invitation to
manipulation and corruption.

Caught in the pinch between the law and reality are coffee-shop owners and
growers like Ben Dronkers, a pioneer breeder of new varieties, who has been
arrested more than 80 times. "I don't want to be a pain in the ass any
more," he tells Preston wearily. "I want what I do to be accepted."

But that's not likely to happen, as Pot Planet explains in a review of
marijuana court cases past and pending, including a split decision from the
B.C. Court of Appeal that's headed for the Supreme Court. The issue, as
always, is where to draw the line between the power of the state and the
rights of the individual.

As we in Canada know all too well, it's American drug-war fundamentalism
that drives the statist cause around the world. In California, Preston goes
to see Dennis Peron, founder in 1991 of the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers
Club, prototype for clinics -- including a number in Canada -- that supply
prescription marijuana to patients with medical conditions that respond to
cannabis.

Peron is also the man who organized the 1996 state ballot that endorsed
medical marijuana in California. It's the law now, sanctioned by the state
legislature, yet the federal Drug Enforcement Administration persists,
raiding clinics and finally driving Peron away to his farm. He still faces
charges.

Near the end of Pot Planet, a woman named Watermelon makes a plea for
activists to remember that they represent "hundreds of thousands of users,
white-collar and blue-collar regular folks." With some skipping over the
groovy bits, such regular folks will find much of interest on Preston's
tour. Pot-heads will love it all.

It's hard to imagine anyone getting off on Robert Sabbag's Loaded, a pot
pot-boiler that tells the story of Allen Long, an American who made and
lost millions smuggling Colombian marijuana into the United States in the
1970s. The names are changed, but the usual cast of cliches remain -- plane
crashes, suitcases spilling cash, machine guns and alligator cowboy boots,
all unredeemed by Sabbag's hyperventilating prose.

Given such elements, Loaded doesn't have to be dull. But it is. And a big
part of the problem is all those damned meetings. Meetings in motels,
meetings in the jungle, in villages, on boats, planes. If that's what you
have to do to deal dope, it sounds even worse than jail. Long should know
- -- that's where he ended his druggy career.

Sechelt, B.C., writer Michael Poole is the author of Romancing Mary Jane: A
Year in the Life of a Failed Marijuana Grower. He is presently at work on a
novel set in the First World War.

Related Reading

Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, by Dominic Streatfield, St. Martin's,
$41.95

Streatfield, a London documentary filmmaker, offers a comprehensive,
engaging and sometimes cheeky look at the history of cocaine, from 1499,
when Amerigo Vespucci discovered natives stuffing their mouths with coca
leaves in what is now Brazil, to our own time, when the cocaine trade is an
estimated $149-billion per year or more, he points out, than the combined
revenues of Microsft, Kellogg's and McDonald's.