Legalized Pot Seems Likely Up North

[boulder]

Vancouver, B.C. -- The door-kicking has stopped, as have the asset forfeitures and harassment. Chris Bennett hasn't been arrested in weeks, nor have any of his friends. Yet, the 40-year-old Bennett isn't inclined to say the battle is won.

 

He's seen the police relax before. He's seen pot achieve a tenuous level of respectability when a more liberal-minded mayor or police chief takes over. And he's seen the subsequent backlash.

 

"Every time we talk to the press, something happens," he said, sitting in the store he manages, The Marijuana Party Headquarters.

 

The store is three blocks from one of Vancouver's toniest shopping districts. While Bennett talks, he selects a handful of sticky green cannabis buds from a dense cluster the size of a hoagie. Pungent bluish haze hangs in the air, and customers casually put flame to pipe as they flip through books about hydroponics.

 

"I've had friends arrested the next day after talking to reporters about pot. So you can see why I'm nervous."

 

Nervous but willing to talk. In spite of Bennett's concern, the likelihood of marijuana legalization in Canada never has been stronger -- despite strong U.S. government objections and opposition from within the country.

 

A working medical marijuana law is in place nationally. Late last year, both the House of Commons and Canadian Senate in official reports endorsed some form of pot legalization, as have the justice minister and prime minister.

 

Indeed, Justice Minister Martin Cauchon recently promised to ease marijuana laws in 2003, making possession of a small amount punishable with the equivalent of a parking ticket.

 

In Vancouver, this already has happened, if not in law, then in practice. Although cannabis remains illegal and its possession is a criminal offense, the city effectively has decriminalized it. Police rarely bust the dozens of dealers selling grams of pot and hashish on East Hastings Street. On a Sunday afternoon, pot is nearly as easy to buy as a six-pack of beer.

 

All of which has made east downtown Vancouver -- where The Marijuana Party storefront sits sandwiched between cafes named The New Amsterdam and Blunt Bros. (motto: A Respectable Joint) -- a bit smokier and, judging from the number of signs offering "munchies," a bit hungrier, too.

 

"Dude, the cookies rock," said Justin B., a 24-year-old Seattle resident sitting at a cribbage board in Blunt Bros. while his buddies lit up in the cafe's rear-corner smoking booth.

 

Standing against a backdrop of Grateful Dead iconography, dozens of centerfold-style posters of pot plants and cases of translucent glass pipes, Justin, who asked that his last name not be printed, said he loves Vancouver because the police "let (pot) smokers be."

 

Which is what U.S. and Washington state authorities fear. Justin is the embodiment of U.S. drug czar John Walters' nightmare.

 

Walters, fresh from a recent trip to Vancouver to explain to the Canadians how wrongheaded their drug permissiveness is, believes that not only will Americans flock to Canada for drug vacations, but that more pot will find its way into the United States.

 

"Nothing gets better with more drug use," Walters said in a recent interview. "I think you are seeing in Vancouver a level of denial (among public officials) about marijuana's place among addictive drugs."

 

Walters' point: According to statistics from his office, pot, not alcohol, is the No. 1 drug treatment issue among U.S. residents under age 18. Nearly 95 percent of the potent pot grown in British Columbia, known broadly as "B.C. bud," heads to the United States for sale, a $4 billion annual industry.

 

Even the medical claims of pot's usefulness largely are spurious, he added -- a statement hotly disputed by the medical marijuana community.

 

"I was told by a Canadian official they are sure pot doesn't create dependency. That's archaic in the absurd," Walters said.

 

"You can walk down the streets in (downtown) Vancouver and the streets are swarming with the openly addicted."

 

U.S. drug investigators agree. They point to a tent-city on East Hastings that started as a protest to encourage low-income housing but in the past month has become an open-air drug bazaar. Dave Rodriguez, who runs the Seattle-based drug intelligence unit Northwest HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area) team, said drug busts on the U.S.-Canadian border are rising faster than on the Mexican border or the coast.

 

A decade ago, investigators seized 5,000 kilograms of Canadian pot annually. Last year, agents confiscated 20,000 kilos.

 

"I can't see how that would improve if the Canadians legalize," Rodriguez said from his downtown Seattle office. "People in Washington (state) should be concerned."

 

But Canadian officials, including Kash Heed, the officer in charge of the Vancouver Police vice division, wonder what Walters sees in Vancouver that is so different from New York, Chicago or Seattle.

 

"Exactly what benefit has harsher penalties and 'Just Say No' brought?" asks Heed, whose unusually aggressive push for legalization has alienated him from some of his own officers. "They have addiction at the same rates we do. For some things, we are lower."

 

Experts on all sides of the issue say the pot market in Canada is driven by U.S. demand, and that many of the addicts in Canada are U.S. citizens.

 

Marc Emery, who has become his nation's Johnny Weed Seed with his multimillion-dollar cannabis seed business, said three-quarters of his sales are to U.S. customers, many from Washington state.

 

The 44-year-old Ottawa native said he's been jailed 10 times for the sale of seeds, which he markets online.

 

 

Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer (WA)