The Underground Church of the Most High

Vancouver's Pot Experiment

Rolling Stone, April 2, 1998
By Brian Preston

Canada's largest West Coast city is testing a new tolerant attitude toward marijuana. Will this hail a common-sense drug policy north of the border, or is it just a Prague Spring for pot activists?

When Canadian snowboarder Ross Rebagliati was briefly stripped of his Olympic gold medal in February for testing positive for marijuana, his reaction seemed to be one of shock. As in: You can still get in trouble for smoking pot? No wonder; Rebagliati lives near Vancouver, the temperate city on Canada’s West Coast that is rapidly becoming known for its tolerant attitude toward marijuana. The drug is being cultivated, smoked and championed in Vancouver more openly than any where else on the continent.

In the Nineties, Vancouver has been home to a thriving community of marijuana activists – idealistic hippies who believe in hemp’s power to save the world. But it took the arrival of Marc Emery, a bluff, energetic entrepreneur with a history of getting involved in hot-button issues, to push Vancouver into its new incarnation: "Vansterdam." The city is beginning to draw pot-loving tourists from around the world – largely through Emery’s Internet activism. As the owner of a bookstore in London, Ontario, he was once charged with violating Canada’s obscenity laws for selling 2 Live Crew CDs and was jailed for opening his store on Sundays, until recently an illegal act in Ontario. After moving to Vancouver in 1993, Emery opened Hemp B.C., a head shop, the following year under the slogan "Overgrow the government." That enterprise was soon followed by a grow shop, a legal clinic, a magazine called Cannabis Canada and a seed business. In July 1997 he expanded again, launching the Cannabis Cafe, a restaurant and smoking den.

I FIRST MET EMERY IN NOVEMBER at his desk in a corner of the Little Grow Shop, in the basement of Hemp B.C. The desk drawers held the seeds of 300 strains of marijuana, likely the most intense concentration of cannabis genetics in North America. On the walls around him hung photo posters of buds from strains like B.C. Kush, White Rhino and Pearly Girl, supermagnified till the THC-laden trichromes looked as plump as Hershey’s Kisses. "At Hemp B.C.," said Emery, ever ready with a sound bite, "we pretend pot is legal, to show people what would be likely to happen if it were."

Emery grossed nearly $3 million last year, mostly from seed sales. Many of his customers were Americans who made the trip north to buy their supplies. One American, who did not wish to talk to me, shelled out $880 in cash for ten seeds each of five pricey varieties. Then a couple from Connecticut, whom I’ll call Len and Shelly, spent eighty dollars on two more-modestly priced strains of seeds. "We grow for ourselves and friends," Len said. "Not to make bucks – just so we don’t have to deal with finding it through people we don’t know." Len was amazed to see people lighting up right in Emery’s store. "In a grow store in the States you can’t even have books on how to grow it," he said. "If you even talk about pot in a grow store your assets will be seized and you’ll go to jail for twenty years."

At his desk, Emery wore a headset to take a constant stream of phone calls, filling some of the $20,000 worth of mail orders he receives each week and inlaying seeds in cardboard flats that slid into envelopes bound most often for California and Australia. Throughout the afternoon he passed around huge joints of locally grown Northern Lights-Blueberry, exhaling opinions into the general conversation and working his way through a continuous lineup of job seekers, advice seekers 'and pot seekers. Well-groomed, focused and intense to the point of abrasiveness, Emery seemed the antithesis of the stereotypical stoner.

Possession of marijuana is still an offense in Canada. When I asked Emery why the cops weren't busting him on a daily basis, he mentioned a recent poll indicating that fifty-one percent of Canadians and sixty-three percent of British Columbians favor legalization of marijuana. "Almost two-thirds of the general public are in favor of what we do, to the degree that we do it respectfully, so we exist with the consent of the people," he said. "The police are actually reflecting the community standard, not the law as written." Vancouver police say barring extenuating circumstances, they will not charge someone for simple possession of marijuana.

"It’s my feeling that the majority of people in Vancouver don’t think marijuana is a serious problem," says Koos Dykstra, the sergeant in charge of the Vancouver Drug Squad. Emery and others in the local marijuana movement "have a lot of statistical and research information to bolster their viewpoint," he says. "I’ve read quite a bit of it myself. The Fact is, it’s illegal right now, and the only way to try and change the law is to do what they’re doing."

Emery currently faces trafficking charges from a January 1996 bust of his store, carried out months after undercover Vancouver police bought seeds from him, germinated them and grew the plants. But prosecutors appear to be in no hurry to bring that case to trial, because a similar case in Ontario is making its way to Canada’s Supreme Court as a constitutional challenge. In the Ontario case, the accused hemp-store owner, Chris Clay, was charged with selling "clones" – female-plant cuttings that eliminate the hassle of germinating seeds and growing the plants until the sex can be determined. A judge in a lower court concluded that marijuana is "relatively harmless compared to so-called hard drugs, including tobacco and alcohol," but ruled that any legal prohibition of its consumption was too "trivial" to be considered a violation of individual freedom under Canada’s fifteen-year-old Charter of Rights, the country’s equivalent of America’s Bill of Rights.

After the 1996 bust, Emery quickly reopened and watched his mail-order seed sales go through the roof until he was paying thirty-five employees and taxes of up to Canadian $250,000 a year. The seed profits allowed him to open the Cannabis Cafe, which he billed as "a sanctuary for cannabis culture from around the world." When I visited the cafe, it boasted a high-ceilinged, civilized ambience and a clientele aged eighteen to sixty who brought their own dope – either to smoke or to inhale through "vaporizers" attached to each table. The vaporizers, which comply with local anti-smoking bylaws, cook marijuana in little glass bowls until it is transformed into a THC-suffused steam. The cafe was always busy, especially on weekends, when it was packed with tourists. Emery worked as maitre d’, handing out free samples of the best local pot and giddily riding a marijuana Prague Spring. "Sooner or later this place will be imitated around North America," he said. "That’s ultimately my great revolutionary idea – to create a role model and have everybody rip it off. It’ll be in Toronto soon, maybe Montreal and then Portland [Oregon]. It just takes one nervy bastard to try and get away with it."

THE SUCCESS OF THE CANNABIS CAFE has already created imitators, like the Amsterdam Hemporium Coffee Shop, just around the corner on Cordova Street. There, Daryl Shelstad, then the proprietor, stood under a Michelangelo-meets-Joe-Weider mural he called "the omnipotent one handing weed to mankind." Shelstad said the cafe gets "an office crowd" for lunch, "but American tourists are our target market."

A very ill-at-ease tourist in a new jean jacket and military haircut interrupted us: "Is it all right to smoke? I’m from Kansas City, Missouri. I don’t know the rules around here." Shelstad assured him it was fine to smoke. Next question: "How much is it?" Shelstad explained that weed isn’t actually sold in the cafe but suggested the alley in back or a nearby bar. The guy left, looking quite intimidated.

Shelstad was worried. "You can score heroin and coke at that bar, too," he said. "It’s not a safe environment to send tourists." The Amsterdam, like the Cannabis Cafe, straddles tourist-friendly Gastown and a neighborhood called the Downtown East Side, home to some 8,000 junkies, where HI V-infection rates reach forty percent. On the edge of such blight, the two pot cafes come across less as sinister drug dens than as welcome attempts at urban renewal.

Emery claims that marijuana is a $4 billion industry in British Columbia. Pot that sells for $2,000 a pound in Canada doubles in value as soon as it crosses the porous U.S.-Canada border, making fortunes for new Canadian entrepreneurs just as rye whiskey did during America’s War on Booze in the 1920s. Now, as then, American authorities seem overwhelmed by the amount of contraband moving south. U.S. Border Patrol agent Alan Christensen, based in Blaine, Washington, the nearest crossing to Vancouver, said, "There’s a lot of marijuana growing up in Canada, and it’s got to be going somewhere, but we don’t have the manpower to catch it." He said the patrol has nearly 7,000 agents watching the 2,000-mile Mexican border, while the 5,500-mile Canadian border, the longest undefended border in the world, is covered by about 300. But seven counties in Washington were declared a "high-intensity drug trafficking area" by federal authorities in October, so more Drug War funds should kick in soon.

FOR ALL THE PROGRESS EMERY HAS made in raising pot’s profile in Vancouver, Canadian authorities may be close to shutting him down. Just before Christmas, more than thirty officers converged on Emery’s two businesses and seized what they claimed were $1.5 million worth of seeds. (Emery said the seeds weren’t worth more than $150,000, but that cops also loaded up a rental truck with more than $100,000 worth of bongs and growing equipment.) By the time the bust was over, 250 of Emery’s supporters were huddled outside in the rain chanting slogans like, "Don’t waste our time, go fight real crime!" and "Get the fuck out of our store, we don’t want your drug war anymore!" One activist tried to organize a nonviolent blockade of the store, and when police began to remove him, two other protesters clung to him. "The police whacked them to the ground and really beat on them," Emery says. "I went up, one officer looked at me and said, ‘Move away,’ and I spat in his face."

For that, Emery spent the next twenty-four hours in jail and was charged with assaulting an officer. No drug charges, however, were filed against him. The store was restocked and running by business hours the next morning. American displeasure may have pressured local police to launch the raid. Vancouver police sergeant Dykstra theorized that pressure was brought to bear on "chiefs and superintendents – the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have international contacts with other police departments who see Marc Emery’s Internet stuff. They say, ‘I can’t believe you guys are allowing this. I thought drugs were illegal in your country.’ Now it becomes personal, being put on the spot by somebody from another country in terms of our policing abilities." Emery himself suspects more direct, local pressure. Last fall, Emery made some enemies in Vancouver’s city hall when the city hosted eighteen world leaders – including President Clinton – for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. While the world’s attention was focused on Vancouver, Emery took out more than $15,000 worth of ads in local papers, welcoming APEC delegates to British Columbia, the "Marijuana breadbasket of North America," and inviting them to the Cannabis Cafe for a smoke.

At first, it seemed that the busts hadn’t slowed Emery down. In January he said that within a year he hoped to launch a smoking room in the Starbucks style – "easy to franchise, clean, professional, befitting a product worth bazoo an ounce, with twenty-five strains available, pre-rolled and waiting in humidors." Emery was heartened when a fifteen-year veteran of the Van- couver police force published a plea for the legalization of street drugs in a local daily. In follow-up interviews, the same cop complained that during the Hemp B.C. raid, most of the policemen "just shrugged their shoulders and wondered why they were there."

But the Vancouver Police brass appear more progressive than local politicians. In January, Vancouver’s City Council, still smarting from the embarrassing APEC-ad debacle, refused to renew Emery’s business licenses. "They’re going after me with a passion that makes me feel like Al Capone," he complained. With bills for $250,000 worth of seized inventory coming due, Emery announced plans to sell Hemp B.C. and the Cannabis Cafe to his employees.

As a condition of retaining a business license, the cafe removed the smoke-free vaporizers. The Little Grow Shop in the basement of Hemp B.C. shut down, and Emery made his mail-order seed business Internet-only. After many steps forward, it was Emery and the Vancouver pot scene’s first step back in a long time.

But Emery remains upbeat. "We may lose a few bullshit legal skirmishes," he said. "But in the court of public opinion, we’ve already won."