Hilary Black went to work at Bedrocan. It was a shot fired across the bow of the activist circuit. Black had built her compassion club in Vancouver to service more than ten thousand patients. Whenever the CBC discussed marijuana, it was Black who’d explain why, as a medicine, it worked. She wasn’t a drug dealer. She had studied the compassion clubs of California and banged out Grateful Dead tunes on her tambourine. She ran a wellness centre selling vegan, gluten-free edibles and offering psychiatric help and services for people with mental health and substance abuse problems. By 2013, she’d dedicated more than half of her life to marijuana.
Black respected Bedrocan for what the company had done in the Netherlands; she also had strong positive feelings for both Marc Wayne and Mark Ware. Hilary Black was proud to smoke marijuana and she liked the health regulators she had grown to know at Health Canada — even the cops.
In her underground career, Black had fostered good relationships with cancer clinics and illegal BC growers and created an ethical model for legalization that prioritized patients and loosely connected compassion clubs across the country. She saw her work as a charity.
However, having lived in Amsterdam, she knew Bedrocan by reputation and had a relationship with the company’s founder. She knew the company had produced its first cannabis seeds back in 1992. She wanted a seat at the table in the new power world of weed and also wanted to exit the grey market. Bedrocan, though corporate, looked good.
“Growers couldn’t afford to operate in the new legal system, so pretty much everybody was selling weed in the black market to subsidize their work for patients,” says Black, adding that designated growers in her scene were often not paid for their work. Certainly, you didn’t get into her corner of the weed world to become rich.
When Black crossed over to the legal system, she was lampooned mercilessly by the pot underground. She says she received misogynistic treatment from a community she helped build and certain activists she once counted as friends grew abusive, even threatening. Sexism, like racism, existed in marijuana, both corporate and underground, like it does everywhere in the world. Tom Flow, for instance, a black market legend, didn’t receive the treatment Hilary Black did. Maybe it’s because he was known to pack a gun. Still, it’s tempting for certain activists to proclaim themselves noble and to paint all of the legal medical marijuana companies as heartless, capitalist jerks. But the distinctions are much more nuanced. A banker was no more honest than a dope grower. And an activist could be just as sexist as anyone on Bay Street, Black says.
It wasn’t only the market — in cannabis, everything was grey.
“I was getting disgusting levels of abuse, sexual humiliation,” Black tells me, describing the underground cannabis community, and though she received support from Mark Ware and Marc Wayne and leaders from her BC network, it was a difficult transition. Not only was she leaving a mission she pioneered, but she felt alone to defend herself on all sides. What kept her going were her values. “Equal access in cannabis as medicine across the country and removing the stigma around cannabis has always been my north star,” says Black, who never stopped working with the BC Compassion Club and had written in her Bedrocan contract that she be allowed to advocate on its behalf. “I had earned the right to shape policy. Nothing could hold me back.”
Thirteen medical marijuana licences were announced in February 2014. By December 2014, Health Canada had received 1,191 medical marijuana licensed producer applications and was receiving 15 new applications each week. The first companies to be granted licences were Aphria, Bedrocan, Broken Coast, Canna Farms, CanniMed, Delta 9, In the Zone, Maricann, MedReleaf, Mettrum, Organigram, the Peace Naturals Project, Tilray, Tweed (later renamed by Bruce Linton to Canopy Growth), and the Whistler Medical Marijuana Corporation. In June 2014, a medical licence was issued to a company called Redecan, started by the Redekop family of Niagara-based farmers, who would partner with the controversial Montour family — an Indigenous powerhouse who could mass-produce cheap cigarettes and avoid excise taxes by doing so on Indigenous land. Quietly, the Montours had created the fourth largest tobacco company in the world.
Around each of these licensees was a moat. Each company did things slightly differently.
Tilray, started by the smooth Seattle-based financier Brendan Kennedy, was the first American company to set up shop on Canadian soil, in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Kennedy skirted the American laws barring cannabis production by growing his weed in the north. Aphria, started by Cole Cacciavillani, a second-generation farmer based in Leamington, Ontario, revolutionized cannabis production by growing marijuana, a product he’d never seen before, in the greenhouses his family owned. “We put in our application in August of 2013, and I thought we’d be first, but Canopy beat us out — our licence was number fourteen,” Cacciavillani tells me, a cigar in his hand and a huge hunk of meat roasting on his grill. “Still, I laughed at the competitors. They didn’t have a freaking clue what to do. All these guys growing in garages, barns, warehouses, or whatever. I knew how to grow in greenhouses. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I’ll grow radish, I’ll grow lettuce. I can grow anything if there’s a buck to be made.”
In June 2014, Cacciavillani brought his old friend Vic Neufeld in to run the company, and Aphria’s low-cost greenhouse production model transformed the industry.
It was a transformation that Lorne Gertner wouldn’t watch from the sidelines. After his PPS investment, Gertner began the Cronos Group in the summer of 2012 to help finance these nascent companies. The pioneer had already lost his shirt in marijuana, but if his dream of a legal industry was going to happen, the activist financier who Bruce Linton says is sober only when he first wakes up had to be in. “I had been so beaten up by that point that I really didn’t want to do it, but we did a deal with Peace Naturals and invested in Whistler and by the time there were twelve legal companies, I probably had equity in seven,” says Gertner, who at Cronos Group would go on to attract outside capital from an obvious, but unexpected, source: tobacco. The Montour family at Redecan weren’t the only cigarette manufacturers to anticipate their advantage for the disruption at the door.
These moves by these people would turn a million-dollar industry into a billion-dollar phenomenon.
Other people wanted in. For would-be medical marijuana producers headed by Canadian entrepreneurs like Sébastien St-Louis at Hydropothecary and Terry Booth at Aurora, who had submitted their applications and secured their facilities but were waiting for Health Canada to approve their licences, the process was agonizing, slow, and costly. St-Louis says that during this interval, while his rivals made sales, he almost went bankrupt three times. Meanwhile, Alan Young says the pot from all of these companies was still bad, and the cannabis community wasn’t interested in purchasing “government weed.”
Terrance Parker, for instance, never stopped growing — and distributing — his own pot. People who smoked weed continued to smoke weed, medicinally or not, and it had to come from somewhere, and you didn’t need a licence for that. (Rosie Rowbotham was coy when I asked him if he got back into the weed game after being released from prison, when the MMPR laws were passed. “What are you,” he asked, “a cop?”)
The cannabis companies had to wait for the regulators while the competition built their client list and perfected — well, iterated — their infrastructure and growth models. Mettrum’s Michael Haines was particularly creative.
His company pioneered the “clinic model,” which would be copied by every licensed producer, the idea being that patients could visit a pharmacy for a script and physicians there would prescribe that licensed producer’s product. It’s like buying the No Frills–branded peanut butter at the grocery store, except this product was cannabis, and no one, doctors included, knew how it should be dosed. To solve this problem, Haines created the Mettrum Spectrum, which helped doctors prescribe medical cannabis based on a colour-coded dosage system. Soon his company had 20 percent of the market share.
Haines did what the market needed — he created a language — but the early days of medical marijuana did not see executives sitting in the boardroom alone. Some days they had to pack planes with weed.
The licensed medical marijuana companies that received licences were racing to grow pot at scale. And the brands all had to adhere to a firm government deadline for purchasing their approved licensed seeds and growth material. Brands had until March 31, 2014, to finalize their live cannabis materials to grow their medicinal pot, and Health Canada couldn’t supply growers with a list of whose seeds were legal to buy.
How does an illegal industry suddenly become legal? Inevitably, the companies turned to Kelowna, British Columbia, and the legally dismantled designated growers who, though outlawed, would end up supplying the legal medical market with their first starter seeds. It was chaos at every level. Canada Post, for instance, wouldn’t allow cannabis shipments, which meant weed executives had to personally handle the marijuana.
First, Michael Haines at Mettrum had two of his partners drive the cannabis root bulbs and seeds from Kelowna to Bowmanville, Ontario, where Mettrum eventually built their facilities. Along the way, this first Mettrum cannabis source material nearly froze. Next, Herriott rented a prop plane and flew the roots and seeds to a private airstrip near the Mettrum grow. The licensed producers couldn’t buy actual finished, sellable marijuana from the licensed growers. They could only buy the root material to make their own.
Still, for people receiving cannabis in 2014, the optics would do little to erase the stigma around weed. “I met Greg at the Ajax airport, half expecting the police to show up and half wanting them to because we had all the paperwork and everything was okay. Still, it looks bad,” Haines says. If the police had inspected their legal cargo, they would have found cardboard boxes filled with whole cannabis plants and marijuana seeds inside dozens of plastic bags.
“Plus, the plane just reeked,” Haines says. “It stunk to high hell.”
But the real action was in Kelowna, and on one spring weekend in 2014, Haines had volunteered to make the deal, before the Health Canada deadline expired. He arrived in town to pack up the boxes of root cannabis material, bulbs, and seeds.
“Clearly it couldn’t be a big load of pre-rolls, but there was some discrepancy about what was allowed,” he says. The buds could have been cut from the plant, but not dried. It couldn’t be packaged and it wasn’t to be finished: in other words, you couldn’t smoke the weed the licensed producers were allowed to import.
Haines was helping pack up the plane with marijuana and moving quickly — because the cannabis couldn’t be processed, the clock was ticking before it would spoil, making the whole mission null and void. Dead plants equalled no weed, and Mettrum, thanks to the clinic model and Mettrum Spectrum, already had thousands of patients in the spring of 2014.
So there’s Michael Haines, at sunrise in Kelowna, loading 250 kilos of marijuana plants onto his private plane outside the hangar in British Columbia — and that’s when the RCMP arrived, brandishing guns. The cops were responding to what they thought was a drug deal. The millionaire had a plane full of weed.
“I’m taking a shipment back to Ontario,” Haines told the officers, and he showed them his paperwork. The RCMP, however, were unfamiliar with the MMPR program, and detectives in Kelowna were cracking down on illegal weed. After all, it was largely their bud that required the legal system to begin with. Haines, an expert in the capital markets, loading boxes of marijuana onto a plane in the dead of night looked suspicious. Meanwhile, he was thinking about the precious seconds ticking away.
As the police had done with Mat Beren, the RCMP officers at the airport called the 1-800 number at Health Canada for clarification. But because it was Easter weekend, the office was closed until Tuesday — at which point the cannabis plants would be dead. It was a standstill, and Haines left Kelowna without his marijuana.
Michael Haines met Bruce Linton the next morning. Mettrum wasn’t the only one busted that night. Linton, by way of introduction, told Haines that he’d handle the police and the press. Apparently, Tweed had five hundred kilograms of marijuana at their own hangar in Kelowna. Chuck Rifici had just had $500,000 worth of marijuana confiscated. Worse, Chuck’s pot was stashed in hockey bags. “The quantities that Bruce had,” recalls Haines, “were staggering.”
Linton says he called the RCMP and had them come to check his inventory. The National Post spent five years uncovering the documentation from that night and filed an access to information request. The RCMP is quoted in internal documents saying that Linton had “harvested buds packaged for resale.” The RCMP wanted to make an arrest and send out a press release about their work. In their telling, it was the private airlines who called the cops. “Can we transport 1,500 pounds of weed?” reads one airline’s inquiry to the Kelowna RCMP.
“There were no plant seeds or production material,” says the unsealed transcript about what was confiscated that night. Tweed, according to the transcript, had 2,071 plants, and Mettrum had 730. “An unfathomable quantity,” according to authorities. The RCMP, however, after confiscating the weed at the airport, were told by Health Canada to go home. The RCMP briefing notes read, “The heart of the problem is Health Canada has gone on record saying that they authorized the shipment which has and will continue to cause us grief.” The RCMP had always been a step behind Health Canada with the cannabis laws. It is difficult for a police officer to differentiate among buds, seeds, leaves, and flowers, especially when the material is in hockey bags and discovered in a region notorious for its illegal weed.
Change is always hard, and the source material, even if it came from licensed designated growers, was suspicious. What sort of designated grower could provide $500,000 worth of cannabis seeds? How much weed did they have? Responding to the seizure of what the RCMP called “a quantity rarely seen in Central Okanagan,” Linton took over the situation. Bruce tells me he remembers the phone call with Haines. “I go, ‘Mike, we have twenty-five times more weed than you. Don’t cave in, don’t do anything,’” recalls Linton, who, on our night in Las Vegas — loose-lipped from alcohol and vibes — also recites his conversation with Rifici:
Chuck: They took all the marijuana.
Bruce: Did you sign anything?
Chuck: No.
Bruce: Are you in jail?
Chuck: No. But Bruce, it’s from bikers.
Bruce: Where do you think it’s from? Little Red Riding Hood?