STIRRING THE POT AT CITY HALL

High noon at Nathan Phillips Square.

Three thousand dopers, tokers, hempsters, punks and hippies. A few bemused
cops. One gleeful pizza man.

Me, I figure the second-hand smoke might ease the emotional trauma the
Maple Leafs are putting us through.

The rally is run by the Marijuana Party. You probably can guess it wants
pot made legal.

I am startled to find my old man is a hero of the revolution. A Che Guevera
of hemp.

"You're Joe Strobel's son?" exclaims Larry Duprey, 57, the party's Toronto
chairman. He sells hemp products.

"Your dad is one of the most important figures in this movement," Duprey
tells me. "He's an icon."

Well, I knew my old man was Canada's first legal hemp farmer. He got an
experimental licence in 1993 and grew 4 hectares of hemp on the family
tobacco farm near Tillsonburg.

Mounties and OPP hovered. Maybe they feared a doper would stumble onto the
crop and die of excitement. The plants grew to 4.5 metres.

Industrial strain

But it was industrial cannabis, a hemp strain with almost no narcotic. You
make clothes, wallboard, even candy out of it.

You'd have to smoke a tonne to get a buzz. Your lungs would implode first.

But cannabis is cannabis, and my dad became a legend. There was even a
song. The Ballad of Joe Strobel.

At harvest, he told media the bales were in a secret, guarded hideout. In
fact, they were in the neighbour's garage.

Two strokes later, my father's out of the hemp business.

Not forgotten

But not forgotten, apparently.

"Your dad's one of my heroes," says Mark Benvenete, 46, of Shelburne. "He
was the first person the government recognized who wasn't a crackpot, so to
speak."

Benvenete compares him to the guy who invented warp drive on Star Trek.
Aromatic smoke billows past us.

My dad called the potent kind of cannabis "the goofy stuff" and was
constantly explaining his stuff had different uses.

Benvenete, for instance, feeds hemp seed to his poultry. Says it adds four
pounds to chickens, 10 pounds to turkeys.

There is lots of "goofy stuff" in Nathan Phillips Square on this sunny Sunday.

Gingerly, I approach a young woman who wears leather and metal, black and
red lipstick, a studded dog collar and an earring shaped like a man hanging
from a noose.

She is Taryn Dickson, 17. The lad with her is "Spike."

What's this scene all about, Taryn?

"Letting yourself go free," she says. Her blond hair is part Mohawk, part
pigtails. She's pretty, if you ignore the earring.

"Weed is a natural antidepressant," she says. "You need nothing else in
life if you have weed."

Where you from, Taryn? "Wherever I end up," she says.

Six teens from Burlington roll a massive joint at a table.

"Called that a doobie when I was a kid," I tell one of them. "What do you
call it now?"

"A doobie," she replies dryly.

I spot a greying figure. Robert "Rosie" Rowbotham, 51. He was Canada's
most-punished soft-drug dealer, who became a symbol of the cannabis crowd.
He got out of jail in '97 and went to work at the CBC. He's a radio producer.

"I served 20 years for being a marijuana warrior," he says. "So I think
I've earned the right to walk in this parade."

Oh, yes, the parade. Everyone piles out of Nathan Phillips and marches
along Queen St. W., joints and pipes in hand.

Go Leafs Go, says one sign. With a pic of a marijuana leaf.

Queen St. W. Brilliant planning. Drivers honk support. People wave from
groovy stores.

But, across the street, I hear someone grumble, "Ridiculous."

Sea Cadet Kyle Gordon, 15, watches the parade with two other uniformed
cadets. HQ is HMCS York.

"This is completely outrageous," he says. "They all probably just came from
a rave."

"Hey, Scully," he yells at a schoolmate in the parade, then ducks his head.
"Gawd, now he'll know I'm a sea cadet."

The throng marches back to City Hall.

The pace picks up. There are few snack bars among the trendy shops of Queen
St. W.

Walter Amato, 43, waits with open arms, a broad smile.

And 60 massive pizzas.

Lines form instantly.

"I support people who smoke marijuana," says Amato, who owns six parlours
and is a rally sponsor.

"Alcohol and tobacco are much worse," he says.

"With marijuana you can eat all the pizza you want."

That's very funny, Walter, I say with a giggle.