Pubdate: Sat, 28 Jul 2001
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2001, The Globe and Mail Company
Contact: http://www.globeandmail.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: CAROLYN ABRAHAM
WOOD, WATER - AND WEED
We're famous for our natural resources and now, CAROLYN ABRAHAM reports,
here comes an unnatural one. A small town in northern Manitoba is betting
its future on a good buzz.
Brent Zettl and his team rise at dawn at the Victoria Inn. Wearing jeans
and sweatshirts, they hoover down eggs, hash browns and coffee. A waitress
packs lunch in brown bags to carry them till dinner. No one delivers 360
metres underground.
They speed off in pickup trucks and vans as daylight spills over Flin Flon,
over the corrugated steel buildings and the soaring smelter stack of the
Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Company that built this northern Manitoba
town, where the blue and orange coveralls, damp and dirty from the pits,
sway on clotheslines behind the clapboard company houses.
Seven miles northeast, Zettl's convoy turns up a private two-lane highway
and toward Trout Lake, to a copper and zinc mine blown out of the hard rock
from a nearby hillside. Headlights nose into the mouth of the mine and
disappear down its black gullet.
For the next 25 minutes they bounce in darkness down steep Byzantine
shafts. Breakfast lurches in their bellies as they head down, way down, to
where no one has gone before -- the first legal marijuana farm in the
country, the continent and, as far as anyone knows, the world.
Zettl, the president and CEO of Prairie Plant Systems Inc., and his five
colleagues have driven the six hours to Flin Flon from Saskatoon three out
of the last four weeks. They've bumped up and down the mine shaft along
with 10 locals who tend the cannabis crop in its cavern, hauling in
supplies as the clock ticks. Soon, much sooner than expected, it will be
showtime.
On Tuesday, Health Minister Allan Rock leads his own entourage to Flin Flon
to survey the historic project his federal department contracted to Zettl's
small biotech company last December. The government earmarked $5.7-million
over the next five years for Prairie Plant to grow close to a tonne of
medicinal-grade marijuana. Come harvest time, it will be shipped out to
patients suffering chronic pain from AIDS, cancer, epilepsy and Multiple
Sclerosis. Later, people will smoke it in clinical research trials.
Starting Monday, the sick earn the protection of a new federal regulation
that permits them to possess, and in some cases cultivate, what is
otherwise an illegal narcotic. Zettl is Canada's first legitimate pot
dealer, doing with scientific sophistication down in this Manitoba mine
shaft what daring dope enthusiasts have done for decades in garden patches,
suburban basements and idle meadows.
Health Canada's communications department is hoarding photographs of the
underground operation until the minister makes his own descent. They're
expecting so many requests for interviews they've asked the mining company,
which leases space to the marijuana project, to secure three telephone
lines to handle reporters' calls.
Word is spreading through town that CNN, ABC and the New York Times will be
trekking to this prairie outpost "at the end of the road," as they like to
call it in Flin Flon, where fame is an odd fit. Mayor Dennis Ballard, a
burly sixty-year-old in a golf shirt and black jeans, heard they want him
to make a speech. "Oh geez," he says. "Am I going to have to wear a suit?"
Zettl has been banking on a big splash. For more than a decade, the
39-year-old has clung like the stubborn pines on rocky slopes to his
entrepreneurial dream. To him, the underworld of empty mines could be the
biotech farmer's fields of the 21st century.
Scientists are modifying plants to produce the proteins for new drugs, yet
environmentalists gasp at the prospect of contaminating other species. Deep
in the bowels of the earth, says Zettl, where there's no wind to carry
pollens on to neighbouring fields, opportunity waits. Stone-insulated
grottos offer ideal protection and a limitless growing season, with a
temperature that even in the dead of winter holds steady at between 10 and
12 degrees Celsius.
The miners spotted it first. At lunch, they'd spit their orange and apple
seeds into the pits and watch them shoot up six inches before they finally
withered from lack of light. In a remote town where fresh produce can be
pricey or scarce, the idea took seed. Town and mine together sought out a
willing green thumb and the headlines led them to Saskatoon.
The young Zettl, agriculturalist and fledgling businessman, had earned
media attention for his work cloning hardy Saskatoon berries. Officials
from Hudson Bay Mining and the Greenstone Community Futures group came
calling in 1990. The first time they took him down, at ear-popping speeds,
below the earth, he thought to himself, "What the hell I am doing here?"
But instinct made him a quick convert.
It was greenhouse growing turned upside down: If the mine supplied steady
heat, he could supply the light. In February 1991 in went the Saskatoon
berries, growing five times the speed underground as they did on the
surface. Next came the roses -- 80 dormant long-stems that exploded to
1,100 in three months. "That was our signature," Zettl said. "The miners
would take those home and I'm pretty sure we were responsible for a
population surge in Flin Flon."
Hudson Bay Mining had backed the project, out of interest and for a little
publicity, said Wayne Fraser, director of the company's environmental
policies -- publicity they got in spades: Equinox, National Geographic,
even the National Enquirer ran the story, right alongside one about former
Kojak star Telly Savalas being buried alive.
Hothouse tomatoes and culinary herbs also grew into smashing successes. But
not on the bottom line. It was cheaper to import from Mexico, and too hard
to crack the food-distribution ring. Still, Zettl's gut kept telling him
that the unique conditions of mine agriculture made it ideal to grow plants
for medicinal use. And what better way to show it than to turn out a bumper
crop everyone from Flin Flon to the Phillipines would be talking about?
"This had enough profile that it would elevate us," he says. "That's our
target and now we have to prove it."
Against 195 competitors for the Health Canada contract, including one that
pitched the famous "Diefenbunker" government bomb shelter as a marijuana
plot, Zettl and Flin Flon came out the winners. He had the staff, the
research ability and a site so secure that officials had to see it to
believe it. "In some ways it's like achieving the last laugh. I don't know
how many times people heard about our work in the mines and said, 'Hey,
sounds like great security for a hydroponic pot operation.' "
In fact, the marijuana under Trout Lake is faring almost too well. With
levels of carbon dioxide in the mine twice the concentration of the
atmosphere (fresh air must be pumped in for workers at 250,000 cubic feet a
minute), with no wild fluctuations in temperature and no insects to spread
disease, the cannabis is literally growing like a weed.
"They're real happy plants," says Zettl. "We've got one five feet tall." A
regular cannabis growth cycle spans 12 to 15 weeks. Theirs are busting up
an inch-and-a-half a day. At that rate, they could be ready to harvest in
four weeks -- half the usual rate of maturity.
Just a few months ago, they wondered if they'd have anything to plant at
all. They had thought they could plug in through diplomatic channels and
collect the widest variety of species, one from a seed bank in St.
Petersburg, Russia, another in the Phillipines and Hawaii. But despite
their contract with Health Canada, they had no authority to import an
illegal substance.
In the end, Health Canada played intermediary and sent them marijuana
seized by RCMP detachments across the country. So the first harvest will be
a chemical surprise. "Nobody knows what it is you get on the street," says
Mark Hetherington, Prairie Plant's senior researcher.
Hetherington is also the quality control officer, and laughs easily at the
notion that people might picture him slumped in a corner with a bag of
Doritos. In fact, when the dope is cured and dried, Hetherington will run
it through a gaschromatograph to test levels of THC, marijuana's main
psychoactive ingredient. The contract with Health Canada calls for
marijuana with THC levels of between five and seven per cent.
With the health minister's visit less than a week away and an early,
unexpected harvest, it's a scramble -- transplanting 3,000 marijuana plants
into bigger containers, and installing the dryers, five stainless-steel,
refrigerator-sized forced-air contraptions that will dehydrate the weed.
They're still painting the lab and hooking up the computer system.
So, every sun-up, they're heading down, outfitted in miner's caps and blue
coveralls, slithering through the burrows beneath Trout Lake. Eyes blink
and adjust to its glare, and then to the majesty of "the chamber" where
white paint covers walls, floor and ceiling and the loamy scent of cannabis
tinges the air.
Here, it is awe by numbers: 150 thousand-watt, high-pressure sodium and
metal-halide bulbs snuggled in reflective chrome tubes and dangling three
feet above the crops; the 3,000 plants, nestled in their own containers,
sit on tennis-court flooring, porous for drainage, installed above 230
cubic yards of concrete in a 12,000-square-foot cavern -- roughly three
times the size of a high school gymnasium -- blasted out of the Canadian
shield.
"The first time people see it they don't say a word," says Zettl. "They
just stand there and look around, trying to believe what they're seeing.
They don't expect the brightness, the space down here."
They've only used a fraction of it so far. At full capacity, there's three
football fields worth of potential pot plots. So far, Brazil, Ireland and
South Africa have made inquiries. Flin Flon's contribution might very well
make Canada a hewer of wood, drawer of water, and grower of weed.
Flin Flon is so small it defies the three-M principle that characterizes
most other North American communities: It has neither mall, movie theatre
nor McDonalds. Its people are content to fish trout and pickerel, launch
aspiring Bobby Clarkes on their frozen ponds and, Mayor Ballard says with a
laugh, party.
"People think we're rough-hewn, a little stupid in the head, we fight and
drink beer. Sure we fight, I remember getting my nose broken outside that
dance hall there," he says. "But we've got self-reliance and we've turned
out brain surgeons and inventors and nuclear physicists."
And now Flin Flon growing dope for the nation's medically needy.
When Health Canada first announced Flin Flon would be the site of the
marijuana project, some locals cheered, Ballard especially, as though
they'd won an Olympic bid. In a one-industry town, any shot at diversifying
is worth taking. "You're always on the bubble. Your fortunes rise and fall
with one industry," says Ballard, himself a consultant to the Hudson Bay
mining company. One day the news is grand, as with the recent $400-million
expansion of the Triple Seven Mine; the next day it can tumble along with
metal prices.
Faith in the mine runs as deep as shafts in this community, and Flin Flon
is far from poor. The average individual income hovers around $45,000 a
year. "You might not see it in the ramshackle houses," Ballard says, but
wander around and you can count the sprawling cottages along the lakeshore,
the skidoos, the speed boats and the mine parking lots filled with shiny SUVs.
But the company is downsizing, and the young people ship out just like the
minerals from the ground. The population of has shrunk to 7,000 from 12,000
over the last dozen years. Something new was needed, and what could be
better than to exploit the tapped-out mines?
"Our CEO loved the idea," says Wayne Fraser of Hudson Bay Mining. "There
was some snickering, but nobody ever lost money growing pot."
"If Health Canada is ready to get into it," agrees Ballard, "Why not? No
one's going to sneak down and get a joint." His eyes twinkling with
mischief, he adds, "I applied for a job as sampler."
Some people here might believe it. Ballard hides his irreverence no better
than he hides the ashtray on his desk. ("There's actually a bylaw against
smoking in here.") Back in the seventies, when he was principal of the Ruth
Betts elementary school, he sat on a local panel and said he thought pot
should be legalized. "People erupted," he laughs.
But now, the town is right down in the mine with Zettl and his coworkers.
They lured him here. They've eaten his tomatoes and smelled his roses, and
when this town bands together, it's from the bottom up. When an explosion
at the smelting plant killed a man last summer and injured several others,
for example, the local women collected $15,000 in empty buckets of Kentucky
Fried Chicken.
And when word got around about Zettl's struggle to get "product," it
reached the ears of the mayor's office. Dennis Strom, a local councillor in
Creighton, Sask., just a whisper across the border from Flin Flon, called
Ballard. "Did you hear," he said, "they can't get any seed?"
"No seed?" the mayor said. He picked up the phone and called Health Canada
himself.
Like Zettl, Ballard sees the potential of the marijuana project. No one
knows if it will lead to any permanent production. So far it's only 10 new
jobs, and Health Canada and Prairie Plant are still discussing whether
joints or water pipes are the better delivery system, which may mean no
marijuana-cigarette production plant. The research itself might fail. The
plot could close. But the principle will have been proven loud and clear:
Mines make a fabulous greenhouse.
"Do you know how much empty space we have down there?" Ballard says. "Why
not do something with it?"
The first evidence of economic spinoff is the travel magazines stacked on
the counter at the Zig Zag Zone, Flin Flon's Main Street purveyor of all
things youthful and rock 'n' roll: KISS T-shirts and Britney Spears posters
and Pokemon cards. Zig Zag's long-haired proprietor, Chris Pilz, outfitted
in an Indian Motorcycle tank top and clearly no stranger to the bench
press, opened the shop with his wife Ronna two years ago.
They heard the blurb on the radio last December when Flin Flon won the
marijuana project and whooped. That very day they decided to produce a
T-shirt to commemorate Flin Flon's place in history. Ronna Pilz phoned her
artist brother Larry Mulvaney in Vancouver to design a prototype: A
dazed-looking miner pushes a cartload of dope from the mouth of a mine,
with the smelter stack transformed into a giant joint billowing skyward.
The miner sings, "High Ho, High Ho, it's off to work we grow." The caption:
"Flin Flon -- Marijuana Growing Capital of Canada."
The Pilzes ordered 200 and sold out the first day. "The locals bought it,"
says Chris. "They thought it was really funny." They ordered 400 and ran
dry in a week. He's sent freebies to Jay Leno, David Letterman (who, he
heard, plugged Flin Flon on late-night TV) and displays Rosie O'Donnell's
thank-you card. With a second shirt design, a new commemorative mug and a
Web site pulling in orders from as far away as the Grand Cayman Islands,
Zig Zag is selling 1,000 shirts at $20 a pop every three weeks. The Pilzes
are planning their first Caribbean vacation this winter.
"They say most businesses don't start to see a profit until the fifth year,
but we've just done so well with this," Pilz says. "It's been like winning
the lottery."
Ron Dobson does not share the joke. He wrote protest letters to the the
Daily Reminder, Flin Flon's newspaper -- of which he now happens to be the
editor. He's all for helping people in medical need, but the T-shirts say
nothing about marijuana as medicine. "It sends the wrong message. . . . It
concerns me that a 10-year-old can walk down the street in Flin Flon and
see someone they respect wearing that T-shirt and think they're a role
model, that smoking pot is cool.
"If Health Canada was going to put this in our backyard they should have
some education programs for the youth in the community about the
differences between medicinal use and recreational use. People don't wear
morphine T-shirts. I came out of the Seventies, and I admit to inhaling for
several years, and I know how destructive pot can be. Young people smoking
pot . . . slide into a culture that does not promote achievement."
Kevin Dallas, a 29-year-old born and raised in Flin Flon who now drives the
town taxi and airport shuttle, says there were "elderly people right mad
about that t-shirt, that it was glamorizing dope smoking and all." His
grandmother called from Montreal, worried the plot would bring drug wars to
town on the scale of the Columbian cartels.
Dallas's own wife suffers from chronic joint and muscle pain. If marijuana
helped her condition, he says, he'd find it on the streets if he had to.
"Some of the elderly people say, you know, 'Oooh, it's a holy sin,' and the
younger people, well, they want samples. But there's no worries about that,
it's like Fort Knox up there."
The way Sgt. Bob Bazylewski sees it, anyone after marijuana in the mine
would have better luck trying to rob dope from a gang of bikers. The head
of Flin Flon's RCMP detachment, a native son come home to police the
streets he grew up on, said he has not a whit of concern. The miners might
have helped themselves to a few of the hothouse tomatoes, but they're four
miles of solid rock and steel doors away from the dope crop. And anyone
planning to head down the shaft, Bazylewski says, doesn't stand a chance.
"There's all kinds of video cameras. There's only one way in and there's no
back door to sneak out," he says. "It would take a thief at least 15
minutes to get out and it would only take us two minutes to get there."
At six o'clock every evening, Hudson Bay blasts further into its mines. The
workers tag in and tag out so that no one gets caught below in an explosion
that rattles houses across town. It drives Zettl and his team to the
surface for dinner. But in an hour, maybe two, they're back down again.
In between tending the plants and the construction puzzles of installing
drywall in a wet place, Zettl finds time to read nasty e-mails and field
patronizing calls from critics convinced those prairie hicks in Flin Flon
will grow nothing but weak weed.
They bellyache that Zettl should be going "hydroponic." They razz him that
growing Saskatoon berries is no grounding for growing dope. But he and
Hetherington believe it's a myth that today's black-market marijuana has
THC content in the 20 per cent range. Before long, they'll be testing their
hunch in the seed that came from the street.
But like the pulp-fiction subterranean explorer Josiah Flintabbety Flonatin
(from 1914's The Sunless City, by J.E. Preston Muddock), who this town was
named for, Zettl is diving into the unknown. He listens to his critics
because it only makes him more determined.
"My goal," he says, "is to have those people who are in need get it and
say: 'This is the best damn stuff I've ever had in my life.' "
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens