It was under Allan Rock that Terry Parker was allowed to acquire his medical cannabis legally, and it was Rock who then needed to make a system for the cannabis program. It wasn’t originally Jean Chrétien’s intention to strike down the country’s pot laws. However, after the MMARs were passed and Chrétien, after a decade in power, began looking at his legacy — he’d already announced he wouldn’t be seeking another term in 2003 — the PM openly mulled cannabis decriminalization, even knowing it would mean a fight with the U.S. Canada was becoming more liberal, and more bold.
In 2002, the Canadian justice minister who succeeded Anne McLellan, Martin Cauchon, was asked if he had tried cannabis. “Obviously,” he responded. The Canadian justice minister had obviously smoked marijuana. The United States, in the dark ages, was on its own.
Rock says the Parker case forced the Canadian health system to decide who was entitled to medicinal marijuana. Scientists still couldn’t conduct vigorous research because the substance was banned, and most of the best work, on its use since the 1970s for treating soldiers suffering from PTSD, was coming from Israel. Still, the Canadian Medical Association wouldn’t endorse marijuana as medicine. There just wasn’t ample data. What did pot do to the mind? What were the side effects and how dangerous was it? Was it addictive? Could it alleviate pain? CBD hadn’t yet been discovered. What would happen if a sixteen-year-old tried marijuana? No one could produce empirical data on the plant; acquiring it was against the law.
Rock had a difficult job and says that Canada’s beginnings as a medical marijuana supplier were scrappy. In the fall of 2001, if you wanted a medical licence to smoke weed, you just had to ask. “Back then, it was an informal, almost back-of-the-envelope system, with my staff getting letters and messages from all over the country from people asking for prescriptions, and we didn’t have a rigorous or scientific or professional way of assessing them. For the most part, we just said yes,” says Rock. The government approach to awarding licences was, in a word, humane. Rock says, “Who were we to deny someone reaching out to us who said, ‘I’m in pain and I need this relief’?”
Alan Young worked with the government of Canada to draft regulations to clarify the system. The pothead lawyer says he’d beat the court on so many cannabis cases by 2001 that the Crown figured it was better to enlist him to help than to have him keep kicking their ass.
A few more words about Alan Young. He is a rebellious malcontent; hilarious, angry. He’s divorced, brilliant, pissed off about money: the perfect Aaron Sorkin character. His 2003 takedown of Canadian law is called Justice Defiled: Perverts, Potheads, Serial Killers and Lawyers. We meet for a joint near his home in north Toronto, and through tufts of smoke, bewilderment, a thick moustache, ego, and pride, he describes his journey from outsider to insider. He tells me that he first got involved with cannabis as the founder of Osgoode Hall Law School’s Innocence Project, where he defended Rosie Rowbotham. Rowbotham, a non-violent veteran of Toronto’s late-1970s Rochdale College scene, was, for a time, among North America’s biggest pot dealers. Rosie still has the dubious distinction of spending the most time behind bars for dealing cannabis in Canadian history. Rosie wasn’t connected, Young says, to the mafia or the Hells Angels, but as a pot dealer, he obviously consorted with unsavoury characters — connections the legal industry to this day hasn’t been able to completely shed.
Alan introduces me to Rosie, and we spend time together just north of Toronto. Rosie is bedridden, dying from stage 4 cancer, but lucid; irascible, but strangely warm. He has his shirt off and a kitten in his bed beside his ashtray, and he tells me stories about the 1960s that, if I close my eyes, bring up images of Led Zeppelin, Ginsberg, and big doobies of hash. Rosie talks in whispers, grinning through pain, while he smokes weed, passes me the joint, and conjures the past. “I’m on Yonge Street. It’s the summer of 1969 in front of Sam the Record Man and I get a tap on the shoulder. ‘Are you Rosie Rowbotham? Are you involved in hash?’” Rosie says that the man who tapped him on the shoulder was a Lebanese pilot, and Rosie — who also dabbled in LSD distribution at nineteen years old — began importing bricks of hashish from Lebanon and distributing it throughout Canada and, with a partner, the United States. He moved fifty pounds of Thai stick in 1970 and something like sixteen thousand pounds of weed, or eight tonnes, using the freight elevator in his dorm, where he kept six stash rooms filled with hash. It’s very possible that if Allan Rock got high with John Lennon in Ottawa in 1969, he was burning Rosie Rowbotham hash. Rowbotham tells me that he kept upping the quantities of cannabis he sold, and eventually he got into even more serious weight — over one hundred pounds of Lebanese hash. The founding member of the Hippie Mafia — what Rosie and his university friends were called — has never apologized for his dealing. He says he doesn’t know the details behind the people in Lebanon who got him his supply. He didn’t want to. He just knows they gave him enough to supply pot throughout eastern Canada, and also own New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
Rosie Grew from Concrete: Head of the Hippie Mafia, Rosie Rowbotham, vamping in 1971. Rosie would become a friend in the last year of his life and went to his dying day without ever trying legal weed.
He says, “I didn’t have all of the United States, but I did have a nice chunk.”
Rosie saw himself as Peter O’Toole. He smoked pot in front of the police, rioted on Bloor Street with kilos inside his dorm room, and told Norman Mailer that he didn’t read books; he was the kind of person books were written about. He had a vast array of pit bulls and guns. When he was arrested in 1982 after a decade of dealing weed, in a sting called Operation Rose, he addressed the court: “There’s nothing wrong with a hippie selling flowers, and as soon as I get out of here, I will do it again.” Rosie did just that, and the Toronto Drug Squad, who had been tapping his phone, arrested him again.
Defending Rosie, always, was Alan Young, who became enraptured with his client. In Rosie, Young tells me, he found a symbol for the societal ills he was railing against. “My client, my friend, got fourteen years, while our firm defended attempted murderers who got six? The disparity in the court was wrong and fucking ludicrous — it pissed me off,” says Young. Young’s ideology was being cemented. The system was bullshit and needed to change.
To do this, in the 1980s and 1990s, Young specialized for his firm, defending what he calls “consensual crimes” like gambling and prostitution, where adults are making informed decisions and both participants (except in extreme cases) are willing. In 1990, he defended Marc Emery after he’d been arrested for selling the album As Nasty as They Wanna Be by 2 Live Crew.
“I wasn’t convinced that medical use was real, but realized it would be the thin edge of the blade for how you get to full-on marijuana legalization,” says Young. In 2003, Young defended Chris Clay, a twenty-seven-year-old in London, Ontario, who was arrested for selling marijuana seeds to an undercover officer. Clay maintained that he sold seeds to people who had medical licences to grow cannabis. The Crown maintained that he also sold seeds to people who did not have their medical licence. As the MMAR laws were being tried across Canada, Young would, pro bono, take every case. Like Harnett, he says the Clay case was about winning public opinion — soccer moms — which would lead to political ramifications. “I used the media in the late nineties and said ‘Look, this drug had benefits, it’s not as harmful as we previously believed, and it’s costing us an arm and leg to enforce,’” Young recalls, “and the media was a willing conspirator. I never met more pot-smoking people than journalists.”
Anne McLellan was the minister of justice from 1997 to 2002. She had her apprehensions about cannabis, as she had spent most of her career on the enforcement side of the law, including a stint as the head of the RCMP. She didn’t find Rosie Rowbotham colourful and had mixed feelings about Alan Young. Still, she says, with the passing of the MMAR laws, her department had to listen to the courts. “The Canadian government did not step out here and say, ‘Hey, we want to develop a medical market.’ It was the court who took us there, so that’s where we went,” she tells me.
As the daughter of Nova Scotian farmers who cut her teeth in Alberta politics — she tells me she’d never even seen pot before she worked on the file and never tried it herself — she represented rural Canadian values. But, she says, marijuana was never personal; in 2001, when the court ruled that Canada needed to change its drug laws with regard to marijuana, it was her job to enact the rules.
“Allan and his people found a start-up outside Flin Flon, Manitoba, in an old mine shaft where the first legal cannabis was produced,” she tells me. This was Prairie Plant Systems (PPS), the Saskatchewan-based biopharmaceutical agriculture company that won the first licence from Health Canada in 2001 to grow, sell, and distribute medicinal cannabis. There was only one problem, and McClellan had to learn quickly: not all pot is the same.
PPS was started by Brent Zettl while he was still a student at the University of Saskatchewan. Zettl pioneered the biosecure underground growth chamber. He specialized in genetically modifying existing plants to have them do new things. In his underground lair, he created yew trees with antibodies that were used in treatments to fight cancer, and he synthesized tobacco plants that created pharmaceutical protein. He created genetically engineered canola and manufactured rice that could work as a polio vaccine. Zettl owned a cutting-edge biopharmaceutical agricultural company, but he didn’t know anything about weed.
“We were known as the guys who did the odd and unusual,” Zettl tells me. In the summer of 2020, Zettl, in his new company, would isolate the antigen for Covid-19.
In December 2000, Zettl became Canada’s first licensed producer of cannabis. Once Health Canada determined that it wanted nothing to do with growing marijuana — Zettl tells me the government tried to grow plants, but each time, the bud was stolen by those it employed — Zettl was given the government’s first legal medical marijuana production contract. It was for five years and valued at $5.75 million. It was a single-sourced request for proposal, and Zettl was tasked with growing two tonnes of weed. “I didn’t even know what cannabis looked like until I grew it the first time,” he tells me. “I grew up on a farm. We drank and that was good enough. We had cows to milk the next day.”
People like Rosie Rowbotham — felons — were federally barred from the system. Rosie was by then living in a halfway house and contributing TV segments for CBC. People like Zettl, who knew nothing of weed or the culture, ran the show. “I gave up everything for the cause, for the movement — my freedom, my family — and what did it get me?” Rosie says, blowing smoke toward his television, which soundlessly plays CNN. “I don’t even have enough money to pay for my grave.”
After its experience growing bud, security was of the utmost importance to Health Canada. Zettl, with a property in Flin Flon leased from the Hudson Bay Mining Company, offered the government something unique: his grow op would be in an abandoned mine twelve hundred feet below the surface of a lake. If someone wanted to steal his weed, they’d need a submarine. And it got better. Electricity — given a subsidy in Manitoba allotted to abandoned mines — would be free, and the cannabis would be grown in a fortified, impenetrable, secret location.
“It was a dark, deep, cold hole in the ground,” Zettl says.
In 2002, PPS had 455 medical marijuana patients with prescriptions. There were zero reported cases of pot theft. However, PPS had a different problem. Zettl could do a lot of different things with plants, but, says Anne McLellan, there was an important thing he could not do. In 2002, McLellan, after leaving her post as the minister of justice, became the minister of health. The medical marijuana program became her jurisprudence, and so the initial feedback from marijuana patients would arrive at her desk. They weren’t pleased. “All the people who had medicinal licences said ‘Minister, this is the worst pot in the world — this is terrible stuff,’ and I’m sure it was,” Anne McLellan tells me. “It was grown a thousand feet under the ground in a dark, wet mineshaft. It had low THC. I’m sure it was mouldy, too.”
Planting the Seed: A look at Brent Zettl’s Prairie Plant Systems, Canada’s first licensed producer, under Trout Lake in Flin Flon, Manitoba. Activists claimed the only paper for rolling a PPS joint was toilet paper.
Zettl doesn’t entirely disagree. “When the Supreme Court ruled in favour of medicinal marijuana, they just said, ‘Make product for the whole country — without any plan!’ We did the best we could,” he says, “but there were lumps along the way.”
Lorne Gertner is a weed guy — advocate, connector, ruffian, and financier. Alongside David Hill at the investment bank Hill & Gertner, he was an early investor in PPS. Lorne has a background in money, branding, architecture, and design. When he was young, his father, Samuel Gertner, owned Mister Leonard, a women’s clothing line, and Lorne helped him elevate its value proposition. He turned Mister Leonard into a trend. It could now sell the same slacks for more cash. Lorne is avuncular, with an edge; sweet, but scary. He might look like Yoda. But no one is fucking with Lorne. He’s comfortable around money and marijuana, which makes him a great judge of weed at the annual underground Emerald Cup. He rolls between Bay Street, Los Angeles, and the unlicensed cannabis world and brings a specific aesthetic to his life’s work.
Gertner was once gifted a blue polo shirt by the king of Lesotho. He was there on a cannabis sales call, and the men were about to play golf. Gertner told His Excellency that he had to decline the gift. “I haven’t worn blue,” he said, “since the eighties.”
Of all the cannabis characters in this book, no one has gifted me better weed than Lorne.
In Jamaica, as a teenager, Lorne smoked his first spliff. “Most people didn’t see cannabis the way I did. They weren’t as deeply invested,” he says. “I was doing it for the belief that this plant was going to help people and our Canadian system we were building would be a model for people all over the world.”
It was Alan Young who connected Gertner and Zettl. By 2001, Gertner had begun a merchant bank and had investments in everything from condominiums to retail displays inside drugstores. “I cold-called Brent Zettl and said, ‘Let me see your company.’ Brent said, ‘Why would I let you?’ I said, ‘I assume you need money. Well, I’m in the money business … and I know a few things about weed.’”
Gertner took a plane to Saskatchewan, where he’d never been before, to meet Brent Zettl. The two men — the wealthy Jewish pothead investor from Toronto and the farm-raised prairie-boy plant scientist — then drove eight hours from Saskatoon to Flin Flon, with Gertner repeatedly asking Zettl to pull over so he could smoke cigarettes. Zettl reluctantly agreed, but kept telling Gertner they were in a rush. “We had to leave Flin Flon before it gets dark because when it gets dark, they start dynamiting shit around the mine,” Gertner says. He describes the descent into the PPS mineshaft as transcendental, like scaling into heaven in reverse. “It’s a de-elevating mine and we’re wearing the miner shit and we drive into the earth for half an hour, and then you have to get out of the cage and get in this truck, and I’m in the back bouncing up and down, but it’s exciting — we can’t believe this trip — and I get to this white door, take off all the mining shit, and put on the gowns, and they use blowers to inflate our suits, Hazmat suits or some fucking thing, and Brent opens the door and I step into this room and it’s the most incredible, beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.”
Gertner walked into a ten-thousand-square-foot, $3 million, state-of-the-art indoor grow room, with cameras in the ceilings, lights enough to power a Super Bowl halftime show, and the kind of surgical approach to growing marijuana — what Gertner once saw cut with a machete from a Jamaican bush — to make NASA marijuana green with envy. It was robot pot buried at the bottom of a Manitoba lake. The cannabis stalks were verdant, lush, and uniform in their dimensions, like a terracotta army of Cannabis sativa. They looked and smelled so terrific to our marijuana zealot that he thinks of the experience comparably to first laying eyes on the Mona Lisa. “I have a picture that I took at that moment and I still look at it,” Gertner tells me, “every day.”
Gertner bought 25 percent of Zettl’s company on the spot and that night enjoyed the deep sleep of a cannabis king. Unusually for Gertner, on this historic evening he was not stoned; he wasn’t able to try his own product. A kink in the MMAR program meant producers couldn’t get high on their own supply without a medical licence. (Even after October 17, 2018 — the date on which pot became legal in Canada — you couldn’t get pot without it first appearing on a government shelf.)
Gertner, upon leaving Flin Flon, got his medical licence.
When the federal government spends nearly $6 million to buy two tonnes of weed, people pay attention, especially people like potheads and criminals and weird amalgamations of the two. In 1994, 325 pounds of cannabis were seized at the Washington State border. In 1998, it was 4,000 pounds. By 2004, according to Dana Larsen’s incredible illustrated book Cannabis in Canada, a total of 20,500 pounds of homegrown Canadian weed were confiscated at the Washington border. Even before recreational legalization, the Americans’ nightmare had come true.
Don Briere, the Vancouver-based long-time cannabis activist, tells me he helped move a lot of that illegal pot. Briere is the founder of Weeds, a line of illegal and legal dispensaries and head shops, and the home of a wide selection of rolling papers, pipes, marijuana, and glass bongs. In 1997, he was arrested for trafficking and possessing cannabis, and in 2004, while out on parole, Briere opened Da Kine on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. At Da Kine, not only could you buy illegal edibles, hash, and ounces, but you could also smoke marijuana in the store. Female employees would walk through its tight aisles with “dabs,” systems for burning marijuana resin, and at 4:20 p.m., everyone in the store got stoned. Briere says the MMAR laws were good for illegal weed because they introduced an element of doubt into the law. If the government’s selling weed, Briere says, drug dealers thought, Why can’t I? Even the police didn’t know what was up.
“At a certain point in BC, there were huge competitions to get operations to grow. People were bidding on houses with acres or with big, big basements, and there were people in the culture teaching other people how to grow — franchises, so to speak. Basically, tons and tons of weed being produced,” Briere tells me.
Da Kine was perhaps North America’s first out-in-the-open, public-facing, illegal bricks-and-mortar marijuana dispensary. They paid no mind to pot being medicine. They believed, like Rosie Rowbotham, that pot should be legal for everyone, full stop. And they didn’t mind being arrested for the cause. Da Kine was hardly an Apple store; it was a hippie enclave. But it was also in stark contrast to what was being produced in the huge industrial operation in Manitoba.