In the Parker case, Harnett, backed solely by his mother, who acted as his secretary, worked tirelessly to defend his client, who was known to go off the rails. It was the lawyer Alan Young who connected Parker to Harnett. The irascible Young, who believed in marijuana as one would believe in Allah, Buddha, and Jesus Christ, represented pornographers and prostitutes and dedicated his life to using the law to grant individual freedoms. He had smoked a lot of weed before going to Yale (and smoked a lot of weed at Yale, too). Young had defended Marc Emery, Canada’s BC-based self-described “Prince of Pot,” who sold seeds to Terry Parker and was arrested in 1994 for selling High Times magazine. Young had gotten Emery off. Emery supplied Parker, and also became the country’s first big, bold-faced, money-making, attention-seeking cannabis star, alongside Jodie, his much younger, troubled, and beautiful pot-smoking wife.
Jodie — who appeared nude on the cover of her husband’s pot magazine — made a more appealing face for the marijuana movement than Terry Parker, who had long scraggly hair covering stitches that formed the shape of a Christmas tree on his skull. Parker, who Alan Young wouldn’t defend because he’d made anti-Semitic remarks, needed handling. He was sick.
Aaron Harnett gave me Terry Parker’s number, and I walked over to his house.
Parker tells me he took his first pull of a joint on December 24, 1972, with a friend who worked as an orderly at a hospital. It soothed him, like a pan of water ceasing to boil, and, unlike for his buddy, didn’t seem to produce typical marijuana effects. He didn’t giggle or find the meaning of life in the lyrics of Pink Floyd. Instead, his fingers unspooled from his fists. He says he’d never again celebrate Christmas in pain.
He tried cannabis again and the same thing happened: unlike the experimental treatments for his epilepsy that had failed to help him in his teens, marijuana created a sensation in his body like peace. Some people get paranoid. Some get hungry. You can get the giggles, get horny, get the sudden urge to paint. In Parker’s case, the pot settled his body down. His muscles, on pot, stopped attacking him. The seizures went away. It’s a feeling, he told me the first time we met, in the cold outside his apartment building, that for his whole tortured life he’d been chasing and had been unable to find. And his life has certainly been tortured. Parker’s pre-marijuana treatments read like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At fourteen, he had a right temporal lobectomy at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, which involved opening his cranium and removing brain matter. Two years later, under only a local anaesthetic — which means Parker was awake while this happened — surgeons opened his skull and sliced brain material apart, attempting to scrape harmful neural matter away from the brain of this terrified sixteen-year-old.
It was January 2021, and Parker was standing in front of me telling me that these experimental operations didn’t help him, but they did make him depressed and suicidal. “If they can cut my head open,” he asks, “why can’t they give me a joint?”
“Everyone should have access to marijuana,” Parker says. He stood gloveless in the grey Toronto pandemic, wearing a camouflage medical mask half off his face, outside the same Toronto apartment where his arrest had set in motion the dominoes, falling, slowly, of marijuana laws all over the world. “Pot stopped my fucking seizures after all the bullshit the hospitals tried — that almost killed me, but definitely didn’t fucking work.”
Parker was angry, difficult to talk to, and given to impossible-to-follow asides. But he was encyclopedic on the details of his case and recognized that he played an important historical role in changing his country’s cannabis laws. The Terry Parker case, which would help end prohibition in this country, was, in Aaron Harnett’s words, “about making Gramma not afraid of marijuana.” For society to accept medicinal marijuana, the movement needed a sympathetic figurehead. Jodie could’ve worked. They got Terry Parker instead.
That summer in 1996, Parker was working in construction, living with his girlfriend, and taking care of his mom, who was going through chemotherapy but wouldn’t try the medicine her son was legally entitled to consume. Terry grew the pot he smoked in a back closet of his Parkdale apartment. When the police searched the place, they found seventy-one plants. They didn’t care when he said he was legally entitled to produce and consume medical marijuana — the police didn’t know their own cannabis laws — and he was arrested for possession, cultivation, and trafficking. In court, Parker admitted to giving joints to other people who suffered from his same epileptic condition; he was a one-man compassion club.
Harnett could’ve gotten the charge thrown out. The courts were loath to press cannabis charges on white men. By the late 1990s, already half a million Canadians had cannabis convictions, and the data states that of that number, Black and Indigenous men and women were disproportionately arrested. While consumption rates are the same among all races, arrest rates certainly are not.
Parker, who is white, decided to fight the case in court, and Aaron Harnett saw his opportunity to bomb the system. He says he had two cases to prove: one to the judge, and the other to Gramma — the court of public opinion.
The timing, Harnett says, for reconsidering marijuana was good. In the 1990s, we were in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. Allan Rock, Canada’s minister of justice, had been in Montreal with Yoko Ono and John Lennon at their 1969 bed-in, when they wrote “Give Peace a Chance.” Even before hearing of Terry Parker, Rock had visited the 519 Clinic on Church Street in Toronto, in the gay village, and listened when activist Jim Wakeford told him, “I have AIDS and I’m wasting away and the one thing that saves me is marijuana. I can eat and stay alive and you won’t let me have access to marijuana. I think that’s wrong.” It was an image Rock couldn’t shake and the spearhead of a movement in Canada that was also happening in liberal parts of the U.S.
In 1996, California passed Proposition 215, known as the Compassionate Use Act, which legalized marijuana as treatment for a limited list of medical conditions. Prop 215 is the precedent that introduced cannabis as a means of increasing appetite; reducing nausea; and helping with sleep problems, glaucoma, muscle spasticity (a common symptom of multiple sclerosis, or MS), and what Terry Parker suffered from, epilepsy. But it wasn’t only that. Public perception also was changing.
Alan Young, the crusading Canadian lawyer, says he knew he could go after marijuana legalization when he saw how it was treated on TV. In the 1980s, if Alex P. Keaton were to smoke a joint on Family Ties, he’d be in rehab in the next episode. By the 1990s, however, on The Simpsons, when Lisa says that Otto’s jacket smells funny, it’s simply played for a knowing laugh. In 1992, Bill Clinton looked like a loser when he said that he’d tried marijuana but didn’t inhale. The culture was changing, at least in the tarot cards as read by Alan Young. Compassion clubs, illegal storefronts that provided cannabis to anyone who flashed a membership card, were popping up in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. These activists set the groundwork for legalization, but they were generals with no army. The owner of a compassion club that was busted in Montreal in 1998 told me, “The police were hating on me, and organized crime didn’t like me either.”
Terrance Parker, who continued cultivating, imbibing, and dispensing to the sick, was arrested again in September 1997. Again, with Harnett mounting his defence, he told the court that he wouldn’t stop doing any of those things.
One day Parker had a seizure in court. His lawyer had established how violent the episodes could be and how, when they occurred on a subway platform or on the street, they could make him susceptible to violent crime. In public, he’d had seizures that had knocked him out and as he lay on the street, he’d been robbed. Harnett told the judge that this had happened to his client more than fifty times. But nothing could prepare the court for what a seizure looked like: Parker falling off the bench, shaking, writhing on the floor.
This wasn’t the Hells Angels or hippies. This wasn’t college kids reading the Beats and protesting the war. This was human rights. This was Jim Wakeford speaking to Allan Rock about not wasting away.
Harnett told the court that to deny Parker his marijuana was to take away his constitutional right to health and security. In the choice between stability through marijuana or prison — a life where he either experienced upward of ten seizures a day, some life threatening, or jail time — Harnett argued that it was Parker’s constitutional right to smoke cannabis. “It was about increasing an individual’s right versus the state,” Harnett tells me.
Canada, at the time, was becoming increasingly liberal with regard to individual rights. In 1988, it had been established that women were entitled to an abortion. In 1995, compassionate suicide became a new category of crime for adults assisting in consensual euthanasia. The state, on behalf of brave plaintiffs and pioneering lawyers — most, like Harnett and Young, pot smokers working for free — was affording more power to individuals and accepting, grudgingly, that individuals had the right to make decisions that an earlier generation might not choose.
Harnett won Parker’s appeal on July 31, 2000. This opened the floodgates to what we have today. During that trial, the Ontario Court of Appeal not only ruled in Parker’s favour, but also ruled that the law as it was written forced Parker to choose between committing a crime or succumbing to inferior medical treatment. Criminalizing marijuana put his security at risk. The court tasked the federal government with creating a regulated system for distributing medical marijuana. And there was a caveat in this decision: if the government couldn’t figure out a way to administer the medicine that Parker and other Canadians legally needed and were now entitled to, then all of the marijuana laws would cease to exist.
In the time between Parker’s arrest and the Court of Appeal verdict, other activists around the country got onboard. Jim Wakeford sued the Canadian government for access to legal medical cannabis in 1998, and Chris Clay, in London, Ontario, was arrested for selling cannabis seeds. Both of these men were represented by Alan Young. Meanwhile, on the West Coast there were Marc and Jodie Emery (today, Jodie goes by Jodie Giesz-Ramsay and has disassociated herself from her ex). Marc, a lightning rod for publicity, moved from aggression to aggression against any authority — including U.S. drug czar John Walters, which eventually got him thrown behind American bars.
Notable potheads on the West Coast also included Ted Smith, who established the Hempology 101 club at the University of Victoria, organized 4:20 sessions, and opened the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club for medical patients. Buyers clubs administered to the homeless and the sick. They were run by cannabis consumers who distributed edibles and homegrown weed and lived just above the line of poverty. Hilary Black, a pioneer from the scene, says she saw people battling mental health and addiction issues, as well as people, like Terry’s mother, battling cancer or AIDS or any of the myriad social and health issues that affect us all. “If no one was going to help these people, we would,” Black says, “and we’d help them with weed.”
Around the time of Parker’s verdict, Hilary Black was riding her bike through Vancouver with a backpack and a pager, administering grams to people in need. “We’d seen what was happening in California and it made sense to do the same thing here,” Black tells me. She had once followed the Grateful Dead, but now she adhered to strict codes for administering her medicine to patients (for instance, people wouldn’t be served if they were intoxicated), and she kept detailed financial records of the pot she sold. The point was to do everything right. The underground was creating a system that worked.
But the face of the movement was still, for better or worse, Terry Parker.
“Terry was a terrible poster child for the movement, but legally the best litigant because of the facts of the case,” Harnett says. Parker had a detailed, documented history of taking every epilepsy medicine on the market. His stints in and out of Toronto’s hospitals since the 1960s followed him around like the stink of a half-smoked joint in his blue jeans pocket, as did his cannabis arrests. Parker had tried everything — even those experimental brain surgeries — and nothing produced the effect of weed. His health struggle was as exhaustive as the treatments’ results were unfruitful. There was only one alternative, Harnett argued: cannabis. “Terry didn’t want it only for himself. He could’ve walked from the charge of possession — he was licensed! But it wasn’t enough for him,” Harnett tells me. “Terry had a crusade against the medical world.”
Terry Parker was obsessed not just with his case but with the broken system, and Harnett couldn’t dissuade him from seeking to make a lasting change. The lawyer was popular around the Scarborough courthouse. Everyone admired his belief, and judges in the building had taken to whispering in his ear: “The Crown will fold, Aaron. Just walk away.” He didn’t have to fight the case, went the assertion. The government would drop its case.
But, in the summer of 2000, that’s not what Parker wanted to do. He could’ve walked out of the courthouse and gotten high. The court even offered to give him back his seventy-one plants. “As someone who’s gone through the medical system, I know what works and what doesn’t, and it makes no sense that anyone should be denied the medical benefits of a simple, natural plant,” Parker tells me. “You can cut somebody open, who’s a minor, without consent, and that’s legal, but you can’t let somebody have the joint that they need? It doesn’t make sense. I’m not special. But I will always fight for what’s fair.”
When I spoke to him in 2021, Parker had been in his building for forty years. He shovelled the snow from its walkways. He and his brother took care of their mom before she finally succumbed to her cancer in 2011. He was still in touch with Aaron Harnett, and he still smoked, daily, marijuana that he grew in his closet. There was no doubt his life had been hard. At times, Parker rattled off dates of court rulings and pot busts like a cannabis investor tallying EBITDA reports; at others, he spewed the kind of nasty comments that made Alan Young walk away from the case. Still, I found Terry generous. Young says Parker could be anti-Semitic, but every time we met, I, a Jewish reporter, promised him lunch, and every time I stood with him in the cold outside of his building, he turned me down.
This is how the Terry Parker case changed Canadian law: When he was arrested in 1996 and again in 1997 for possession of marijuana, he was legally allowed to grow and smoke pot as a result of earlier rulings. The pot had been prescribed by his physician. Aaron Harnett argued that the same rights afforded to Parker should be afforded to other people suffering from other afflictions. The judge agreed, but the Crown brought the case to the Ontario Court of Appeal. Harnett, defending Parker, won the appeal, and as a result, the federal government had one year to enact medical marijuana laws or else the entire system of cannabis regulations would become null and void. If there wasn’t a way for Canadians to legally procure and consume medical marijuana, all marijuana would have to become legal — including for recreational use. As a result, a team led by Minister of Health Allan Rock enacted the Marihuana Medical Access Regulations in 2001. Under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, the federal government now stipulated that patients meeting the approved criteria could lawfully use and possess marijuana.
The case had taken four years from Aaron Harnett’s life. He lost money changing Canada’s marijuana laws. But he maintains the struggle was worth it. It’s the reason why he decided to practise law in the first place. In 2001, after the verdict was read, both Parker and Harnett got high. Harnett, in particular, was a coveted interview for media outlets around the world. He says he remembers best one interview that perfectly articulated the moment: he celebrated his biggest court victory drinking champagne and eating chocolate in bed with his wife while being interviewed on the BBC. He was nude.
Chapter 2 Government Weed
“It was a dark, deep, cold hole in the ground.”
Brent Zettl
If buying pot from the government sounds like throwing a rave in a jail, so was every other element of the rollout of Canada’s legal medical marijuana system — including the clunky, obtuse wording of the groundbreaking cannabis law.
The Medical Marihuana Access Regulations, known as the MMAR laws, were implemented on July 30, 2001, a result of the seemingly endless court cases and appeals won by Aaron Harnett for Terry Parker. These new Health Canada regulations would usher in the first legal, government-run medicinal Canadian cannabis program. Under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Health Minister Allan Rock, and Justice Minister Anne McLellan, the law stated that denying a patient their medicinal cannabis was to deny them their human rights, and thus the government had to provide licensed patients with medical cannabis. A patient could legally grow their own pot, if they had a licence, like Terry Parker, or they could employ a “designated grower,” someone who could harvest marijuana for them. Patients would receive pot prescriptions for up to a thirty-day supply or 150 grams, whichever was less.
Although California already had a similar system, the response from America wasn’t good. The Canadian laws were despised by U.S. politicians. “Canada is the centre of the drug problem in the United States,” said John Walters, the U.S. drug czar under President George W. Bush (and foe of Marc Emery). Walters threatened to increase Canadian-American border security and warned that these medicinal cannabis laws set the stage for an increase in crime and drug addiction in youth.
Ronald Reagan, during the 1980 presidential campaign, had said “Marijuana is probably the most dangerous drug in America today.” The crack epidemic was less than five years away.
Allan Rock, Canada’s then Liberal minister of health, dug into the file and disagreed with Reagan, Bush, and Walters. Rock had a history of drawing conclusions for himself. In 1969, Rock had been twenty-two years old and the head of the student union at the University of Ottawa. That May, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were in Montreal staging their bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. There were 2,964 marijuana convictions in Canada that year, and Rock, an aspiring lawyer, had questions. Who was being detained, and why? Rock contacted Lennon’s road manager and asked if the former Beatle, then deep into his peace and drug phase, would share his message of love and understanding in Ottawa. The manager said, “Ask him yourself,” and so our future minister of health, who would later become justice minister, hopped in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle, drove to Montreal, and asked the most famous doper in the world questions about pot.
Lennon, charmed, agreed to come to Ottawa, and he and Ono were good on their word, making a trip on June 3, 1969. Rock describes his time with Lennon as “thrilling,” and says that, before there was ever such a thing as Carpool Karaoke, Lennon hopped in Rock’s Beetle and belted out “Get Back” when it came on the radio. “Those were the adventures of youth,” Rock tells me. He describes driving Lennon and Ono to 24 Sussex Drive, where the three of them knocked on Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s front door. You could do that in 1969. “A housekeeper answered and said Mr. Trudeau wasn’t there, so John Lennon left our prime minister a note,” says Rock with a laugh. He’s coy about whether or not he got high with Ono and Lennon. All he’ll say is “I had my own interest in marijuana and hash.” Still, when his counterpart in the States would have had Lennon arrested, the fact that Rock won’t deny toking up with him illustrates the different approaches on each side of our cultural divide.