Pubdate: Sat, 12 Nov 2005
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2005, The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.globeandmail.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Michael Poole
Note: Michael Poole is the author of Romancing Mary Jane: A Year in 
the Life of a Failed Marijuana Grower. His first novel will be 
published next spring.

JOINT VENTURE

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.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman