Pubdate: Thu, 28 Jan 2010
Source: Victoria Times-Colonist (CN BC)
Copyright: 2010 Times Colonist
Contact: http://www2.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/letters.html
Website: http://www.timescolonist.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/481
Author: John Mackie, Canwest News Service
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis - Canada)

SHOW REVEALS BUSINESS SIDE OF MARIJUANA

Documentary Tracks Growers And The Police Who Pursue Them

(CNS) - Marijuana is believed to be a $20-billion industry in Canada. 
But most discussion about the drug is centered around the moral issue 
of whether to legalize it.

Lionel Goddard thought it was high time somebody looked at marijuana 
as a business, not a social issue. The result is CannaBIZ, an 
hour-long documentary airing on CBC-TV's DocZone tonight at 9 p.m.

Goddard is a former CBC reporter turned documentary filmmaker. He was 
approached by the network to do a film on "the state of the marijuana 
industry in Canada," which is a broad subject.

He decided he needed to focus on a single community, and chose Grand 
Forks, an idyllic West Kootenay town.

"It's in the Kootenays, in the heartland of marijuana, where the 
hippies came in the '60s and planted the first B.C. bud," Goddard explained.

"I thought if I could focus on one town, rather than try to find a 
dealer in Nova Scotia and a cop in Toronto, maybe I could see the 
business as it's actually working, and maybe see its connection to 
the local economy."

Grand Forks leaped to mind because it achieved national notoriety in 
the late 1990s for having the "marijuana mayor," Brian Taylor.

Taylor not only admitted smoking marijuana, he wanted Grand Forks to 
become the centre of a new marijuana/hemp industry. He wound up being 
defeated in 1999, but was undeterred, becoming the head of the B.C. 
Marijuana party for the 2001 provincial election and campaigning 
around B.C. in a "cannibus."

Taylor lost, but kept running for Grand Forks mayor. As luck would 
have it, he was running again while Goddard was filming in 2008, 
which provided a natural storyline.

Grand Forks turned out to be the perfect place to shoot. Goddard 
found a young guy who let him film him planting his crop outdoors, 
and an older grower who let him film his much more sophisticated 
indoor grow-op.

The RCMP let Goddard film them searching for marijuana fields from 
helicopters, and chopping plants down when they discovered them.

One of his key subjects was the victim of a "grow-rip," and teared up 
when discussing it, perhaps the most poignant moment of the film.

The growers don't come across as hardened criminals -- they're more 
like an old hippie neighbour who likes to garden.

"It's weird," said Goddard.

"There's almost an innocence in the heartland of marijuana, and 
there's a sense that something is being lost. There almost is a sense 
of pride there, of tradition, that people are mourning.

"I'm not sure if people understood that it existed in the first 
place, because [growing pot] was illegal. But it's a counter-culture, 
it's a way of life, in that area of the province. And it supports the 
towns there.

"We like to drive there as yuppies, to have these little towns to 
drive through and pick up our ice cream and fresh vegetables and have 
a bed and breakfast to stay in. But people should realize that town 
probably wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the marijuana industry, 
or at least be in the shape that it's in."

CannaBIZ is half of a marijuana double-bill tonight on CBC. It will 
be preceded at 8 p.m. by The Downside of High, an hour-long 
documentary on The Nature of Things about new research that finds 
teenagers under 16 who start smoking pot are "four times more likely 
to become schizophrenic" than those who don't.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom