Gone To Seed

420

Founder
Let's Grow Up About Grow-Ops and Reroute Revenues From the Marijuana Industry into Legitimate Ventures, Says Author/Activist

Bud Inc.: Inside Canada's Marijuana Industry By Ian Mulgrew, Random House Canada, 304 pp, $35 ( hardcover )

If you're ambivalent, indifferent, or worse still, opposed to the notion of marijuana's decriminalization, Ian Mulgrew has a thing or several to tell you that you really ought to know. In his newest book, Bud Inc., the respected journalist and legal affairs columnist for the Vancouver Sun sets out to demonstrate how much Canada's drug laws matter to you, and everybody's stake in reforming them. "Turn on the lights," Mulgrew the pot activist says. "Let's be grownups."

Everyone who reads Bud Inc. should prepare to be surprised by the things they learn. For starters, you can forget the notion of decriminalization as a means of curing what ails our society when it comes to marijuana. Asked: what does handing a ticket to a kid smoking reefer in the park do to shut down illegal grow operations that destroy property, steal vast amounts of electricity, frequently have firearms ( and the will to use them ) on the premises, and enable organized criminals to engage in all the other fabric-of-society-rending activities they enjoy?

Nope, for Ian Mulgrew, legalization is where it's at. His epiphany came when he went to Amsterdam and heard the coffee shop owners there describe their plights, where they must behave as gregarious hosts toward the customers who buy marijuana from them, put on their bureaucrat hats when they pay taxes on their sales of marijuana, "But at the back door, when they go off to buy their stuff," says Mulgrew, "they're dealing with organized criminals; they're dealing with the Hell's Angels!"

Let It Grow

Yeah-legalize it; don't criticize it. Bud Inc. is something of a novelty among pro-pot polemics in that, even though Mulgrew may be a fan of, and even an activist for marijuana, he's no evangelist. If you know about those receptors in your brain that only pot molecules fit, or how to give weak weed a little extra zip, you didn't read it here. Really, it's beside the point to him whether you've ever inhaled or not. Bud Inc.'s focus is to explore marijuana's potential for going "legit," something which extends far beyond recreational use.

Many of the names in Bud Inc. are recognizable to anyone familiar with current events in this country: Marc Emery, the seed kingpin whom the Canadian authorities hung out to dry when the Americans came calling; Pot-TV; David Malmo-Levine, Edmonton ex-pat and activist extraordinaire who got a case all the way to the Supreme Court before he was shot down; Advanced Nutrients, who made $30million last year with their fertilizer products tailor made for and marketed directly at marijuana growers, and who pay their taxes and invest heavily into research that will allow for greater exploration of pot's medicinal promise.

It's true! This humble plant, long derided as "the devil's weed" by concerned parents and doubly concerned pastors, police chiefs, politicians, and editorialists, is used in the treatment of glaucoma, AIDS, muscular dystrophy, and many other debilitating conditions. "Then, when you tell people that chronic use of marijuana is linked, at worst, to bronchitis, not cancer or any other horrible diseases, people are really surprised," Mulgrew adds. "And then, when you tell them about the research that's going on, that it's being touted as the new aspirin, or it's being looked at as an anti-cancer drug, they're flabbergasted!"

Something Mulgrew leaves little room for in Bud Inc., however, is the business of myth-busting and answering-back to the anti-pot side's charges, but his reason for leaving them out is sound: "Why keep repeating the lies?" he asks. He calls the anti-pot crowd prohibitionists, after those puritanical sorts who sought to protect people from themselves by banning liquor during a decade frequently described as "roaring." Liquor was still widely available in the 1920s, of course; what prohibitionists were most responsible for, Mulgrew notes, was the simultaneous rise of organized crime, thanks to the huge black market they created for the product.

The Green Machine

But what if we made the market for pot a legal one? It would take vast amounts of resources away from organized crime and move them into the public purse, and it would provide relief to our police departments and court systems, freeing up money, staff and other resources to be spent on more worthwhile pursuits. "We can redirect that money to terrorism," Mulgrew offers, "people smuggling, crimes of violence like rape and assault, where it can take years for your case to wind its way through the courts because the court system is blocked up with people being prosecuted for possession of marijuana or for trafficking."

He states, "That is a crazy situation," one we should not have to settle for. A growing list of American cities, with Vancouver poised to join, too, have directed their police forces to not enforce federal drug laws when it comes to pot and have seen whole sections of their cities reborn as a result. And, oh, vast numbers of studies, commissions, and investigations have reached the conclusion that at its worst, pot is benign, which is not something that can be said for smokes and booze. Says Ian Mulgrew, "We've gotta change our thinking on drug policy in general, but definitely on marijuana. The senators' report said it, the Ledain Commission, the Lancet, representing the British medical community, says it, everybody reaches the same conclusion. Portugal's legalized everything, and quite frankly, that's the way to go. We should not be criminalizing substances, we should be criminalizing behaviours."

In Bud Inc., Mulgrew exudes a strange optimism about Canada's approach to pot, kind of like legalization is a foregone conclusion we haven't reached yet, but he doesn't see anything happening for another five or ten years. That's the time he says it will take Canadians to inform themselves and get over their reservations about pot, for guys like Malmo-Levine to get a few favourable decisions and then for that to filter through to our federal lawmakers, "because politicians follow, they don't lead." When that time comes, Mulgrew thinks we'll want to kick ourselves for not doing it sooner.

"What people have to start to look at is the harm this policy is causing," he says. "We can reduce that harm easily, we can better regulate the substance, we can better educate our kids and redirect our resources to something that's worthwhile. We can help all of our communities if we change this policy, but, the police and the growing community don't want it to be legalized because it'll take away so much revenue from them."

Source: See Magazine (CN AB)
Copyright: 2005 SEE Magazine
Contact: SEE - Edmonton. News. Entertainment. Life. Weekly.
Website: SEE - Edmonton. News. Entertainment. Life. Weekly.
 
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