420
Founder
Bud Inc.: Inside Canada's Marijuana Industry By Ian Mulgrew Random House Canada, 287 pages, $35
Among the many soft spots in the road to marijuana-law reform is the lack of hard numbers. People in the cannabis trade don't report to StatsCan, and the police are prone to exaggerate the pot "problem" to justify the $300-million Canada sinks every year into the war on drugs.
But however anecdotal or even apocryphal, the numbers do matter, because they are, like dispatches from the front, our only way of gauging the progress of the battle.
So it is here, with the calculus, that Vancouver journalist Ian Mulgrew opens this timely and engaging book.
He turns for help to Simon Fraser University economist Stephen Easton, who has developed a mathematical formula to track the growth of Canada's marijuana industry ( a formula that I, as a one-time pot grower, find largely credible ). The figures churned out by Easton's computers are stunning: a Canadian wholesale value in 2003 of $5.7-billion, or $19.5-billion at high-end street prices, with the bulk of this coming from British Columbia. And the trend of production has nowhere to go but up, more than trebling in B.C. over the past seven years.
As they like to put it, pot producers are "overgrowing the government." And the justice system into the bargain. Police busts as a percentage of grow ops are tumbling, while judges, rather than plug the jails, are handing out more conditional sentences. "The law," Mulgrew tells us, "is no longer a risk to growers, it is an operating cost."
This, then, is Bud, Inc., a huge and burgeoning industry operating outside the law and out of control. Mulgrew's purpose, as a toker, civil libertarian and champion of medical marijuana, is to make the case for outright legalization. His method is to take us inside this closed and secretive business, meeting some of the biggest players on their own ground.
Mulgrew's cast of characters is fascinating. There's Charles Scott, "Reeferman" in the trade, who shook off a murky background in racist politics and organized crime to become one of the world's premier breeders of new marijuana strains, both for recreation and medical use. There is "Big Mike" Straumietis, all six-foot-eight of him, who hooked up with two partners and grew a small hydroponics store into a $30-million-a-year industrial giant, only to be deported to his native United States, a multimillionaire, but separated from his wife and child.
We meet Don Briere, who did jail time for running multiple grow ops ( 34 simultaneously, he claims ) and went on to open Vancouver's Da Kine cafe, which sold $2-million worth of pot in four months before police swooped down with a 30-cruiser raid straight out of a B movie. And not least, a delightful woman named Watermelon, the Betty Crocker of marijuana in Vancouver, who earns a modest living making pot-laced confections ( "I'm a baker, not a criminal" ) and tells a hilarious story about being busted by the RCMP, complete with hovercraft, helicopter and bullhorns, for selling cookies on the city's nudie beach.
Interestingly, almost without exception, all these players -- and many others whom we meet -- would like to see marijuana legalized, even at the cost of a crash in the price of their product, which would almost certainly follow. They are fed up with the sleaze and violence of the black market.
But they shouldn't look to Ottawa to legitimize their industry, Mulgrew believes. It will be the untapped medical potential of marijuana, not our timorous politicians, that will most likely bring about a change in the laws. Patient groups say at least a million Canadians want access to medical marijuana, and the courts have ruled that they are entitled to it under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Moving with glacial haste, the bureaucracy at Health Canada has managed to certify only about 800 of those patients to receive pot legally.
Tired of waiting, thousands of others have said to hell with the law and gone to compassion clubs, buying their buds on a health practitioner's certificate of need. They have the numbers and the public support -- 90 per cent of Canadians favour legalized medical marijuana, Mulgrew says -- to become an irresistible force.
Having supplied at least four cancer patients with cannabis to help them through the agonies of chemotherapy, Mulgrew writes with passion about his beliefs. But he is also a realist who doesn't expect legalization any time soon. ( Decriminalization would only make things worse, he argues, strengthening the black market and the criminality that feeds off it. )
So where is all this headed? Mulgrew is unequivocal about two things: The war against drugs, at least as it applies to marijuana, is lost, and the consequences of pretending otherwise will only get uglier. Once again, he draws on the work of Stephen Easton. Looking back 86 years to Prohibition in the United States, Easton has found a series of striking parallels with the ban on marijuana today. The longer it continued, the more Prohibition fed deepening gang violence, public contempt for the law, widespread corruption in government and the justice system, the trampling of civil rights, due process and personal freedoms.
In short, as Mulgrew puts it: "The social fabric becomes threadbare."
Bud Inc. is a fine book and an excellent primer for the time when marijuana returns to the front burner in Ottawa, as it always does.
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2005, The Globe and Mail Company
Contact: letters@globeandmail.ca
Website: https://www.globeandmail.ca/
Among the many soft spots in the road to marijuana-law reform is the lack of hard numbers. People in the cannabis trade don't report to StatsCan, and the police are prone to exaggerate the pot "problem" to justify the $300-million Canada sinks every year into the war on drugs.
But however anecdotal or even apocryphal, the numbers do matter, because they are, like dispatches from the front, our only way of gauging the progress of the battle.
So it is here, with the calculus, that Vancouver journalist Ian Mulgrew opens this timely and engaging book.
He turns for help to Simon Fraser University economist Stephen Easton, who has developed a mathematical formula to track the growth of Canada's marijuana industry ( a formula that I, as a one-time pot grower, find largely credible ). The figures churned out by Easton's computers are stunning: a Canadian wholesale value in 2003 of $5.7-billion, or $19.5-billion at high-end street prices, with the bulk of this coming from British Columbia. And the trend of production has nowhere to go but up, more than trebling in B.C. over the past seven years.
As they like to put it, pot producers are "overgrowing the government." And the justice system into the bargain. Police busts as a percentage of grow ops are tumbling, while judges, rather than plug the jails, are handing out more conditional sentences. "The law," Mulgrew tells us, "is no longer a risk to growers, it is an operating cost."
This, then, is Bud, Inc., a huge and burgeoning industry operating outside the law and out of control. Mulgrew's purpose, as a toker, civil libertarian and champion of medical marijuana, is to make the case for outright legalization. His method is to take us inside this closed and secretive business, meeting some of the biggest players on their own ground.
Mulgrew's cast of characters is fascinating. There's Charles Scott, "Reeferman" in the trade, who shook off a murky background in racist politics and organized crime to become one of the world's premier breeders of new marijuana strains, both for recreation and medical use. There is "Big Mike" Straumietis, all six-foot-eight of him, who hooked up with two partners and grew a small hydroponics store into a $30-million-a-year industrial giant, only to be deported to his native United States, a multimillionaire, but separated from his wife and child.
We meet Don Briere, who did jail time for running multiple grow ops ( 34 simultaneously, he claims ) and went on to open Vancouver's Da Kine cafe, which sold $2-million worth of pot in four months before police swooped down with a 30-cruiser raid straight out of a B movie. And not least, a delightful woman named Watermelon, the Betty Crocker of marijuana in Vancouver, who earns a modest living making pot-laced confections ( "I'm a baker, not a criminal" ) and tells a hilarious story about being busted by the RCMP, complete with hovercraft, helicopter and bullhorns, for selling cookies on the city's nudie beach.
Interestingly, almost without exception, all these players -- and many others whom we meet -- would like to see marijuana legalized, even at the cost of a crash in the price of their product, which would almost certainly follow. They are fed up with the sleaze and violence of the black market.
But they shouldn't look to Ottawa to legitimize their industry, Mulgrew believes. It will be the untapped medical potential of marijuana, not our timorous politicians, that will most likely bring about a change in the laws. Patient groups say at least a million Canadians want access to medical marijuana, and the courts have ruled that they are entitled to it under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Moving with glacial haste, the bureaucracy at Health Canada has managed to certify only about 800 of those patients to receive pot legally.
Tired of waiting, thousands of others have said to hell with the law and gone to compassion clubs, buying their buds on a health practitioner's certificate of need. They have the numbers and the public support -- 90 per cent of Canadians favour legalized medical marijuana, Mulgrew says -- to become an irresistible force.
Having supplied at least four cancer patients with cannabis to help them through the agonies of chemotherapy, Mulgrew writes with passion about his beliefs. But he is also a realist who doesn't expect legalization any time soon. ( Decriminalization would only make things worse, he argues, strengthening the black market and the criminality that feeds off it. )
So where is all this headed? Mulgrew is unequivocal about two things: The war against drugs, at least as it applies to marijuana, is lost, and the consequences of pretending otherwise will only get uglier. Once again, he draws on the work of Stephen Easton. Looking back 86 years to Prohibition in the United States, Easton has found a series of striking parallels with the ban on marijuana today. The longer it continued, the more Prohibition fed deepening gang violence, public contempt for the law, widespread corruption in government and the justice system, the trampling of civil rights, due process and personal freedoms.
In short, as Mulgrew puts it: "The social fabric becomes threadbare."
Bud Inc. is a fine book and an excellent primer for the time when marijuana returns to the front burner in Ottawa, as it always does.
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2005, The Globe and Mail Company
Contact: letters@globeandmail.ca
Website: https://www.globeandmail.ca/
