By all accounts, Kehoe, a medical student from Nova Scotia, was an exemplary First World War fighter. He commanded his fellow prisoners to break his arm upon his capture in Belgium, lest he be used in a German munitions factory making bombs to drop on his Canadian homeland. It was the dying days of the war, when alcohol prohibition was the law back in Canada, and Kehoe — after being gassed and tortured, beaten and starved during his wartime imprisonment — was eventually sent back home a broken man. In Canada, where the twenty-eight-year-old washed up penniless and alone in Vancouver, there wasn’t yet treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder; Kehoe may have been subjecting himself to an improvised medical program. In 2001, Allan Rock would have approved him for grams of PPS’s low-THC weed.
It’s not known when Kehoe first started smoking opium, which at that time required two people to administer a hit in a huge bamboo pipe. But what happened after he took his first toke was widely reported. Kehoe’s descent came hard. Where patriotism once fuelled his actions, he was now motivated by obtaining his next hit. He was a violent opium offender, a “tea head,” as the story unspooled in the press, unable to resist the pull of Chinese-made illegal drugs. Slumming in Vancouver’s Chinatown district, Kehoe stole to buy opium — he was an addict, defenceless against his urges and out of control. When he was eventually arrested and sentenced to five years and twenty-four lashes, his sensational story mesmerized readers of the Vancouver Sun.
Once reformed, and after receiving his lashes, he blamed his condition — his fall from grace — on opium, and this dovetailed nicely with the prevailing anti-Chinese sentiments of the day. The debate was never going to be about what the drugs could do or what they could be used for, or why Joseph Kehoe needed his medicine and what could be done to help addicts get off the streets. Only now, a hundred years later, are we beginning to understand drug treatment, counselling, and addiction. However, after the war, it was prohibition. Lashes. Repentance. And the moral high ground was abstinence.
“Canada’s drug laws weren’t created in a vacuum, and our country, in establishing its international identity at the end of the war, wanted to be seen as moralistic, especially when it came to leaders like Mackenzie King, an abstaining Christian, who probably saw himself as a leading light,” says Catherine Carstairs. According to Carstairs, Mackenzie King travelled the world attending drug symposiums in the 1910s and 1920s, in places like Singapore and France, and learned anecdotally from world leaders about the different narcotics on the street. It would be in keeping with his character to see drug use as black and white and an issue from which he personally felt compelled to protect his people.
Canada banned pot before most Canadians had ever tried it. Won Way didn’t sell it. Joseph Kehoe didn’t smoke it. And here’s the kicker: marijuana was only outlawed in Canada as an addendum to the 1923 Opium and Narcotics Drug Act. Working on the legislation for this drug law, there was no mention of cannabis until its third and final draft — and even then, it was only added as a handwritten amendment. Making cannabis illegal was an afterthought that would, over time, disproportionately impact Black, Mexican, Chinese, and Indigenous lives.
“There’s been many studies that have shown that, after its popularity waned from the nineteenth century, cannabis was not only not available in this country prior to 1923, but it barely appeared here even throughout the 1950s, by which time reefer madness had spread through the U.S. — but didn’t really wind up here,” says Carstairs, adding that Mackenzie King probably first learned about cannabis at the 1909 International Opium Commission in Shanghai. “Through hindsight, we can look back into history and see the errors of our ways — that there wasn’t enough global research into the medicinal values of a plant like cannabis, and that instead it became wrapped up with a local temperance movement that said ‘Ban everything.’”
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, there was more fear about weed than actual weed. Drug use in Canada did pivot from opium. But it wasn’t to marijuana; it was to heroin. Except for small pockets of North America, heroin wasn’t widespread in the Second World War era. A study of 1940s Canadian drug abuse showed that perhaps four thousand people in the country used the drug. They were called “hypes,” for their hypodermic needles, and resided in greatest numbers in Vancouver and Toronto. (Montreal drug use centred around cocaine.) In a widespread study of Canadian hypes — especially those behind bars at British Columbia’s Oakalla Prison Farm — it was revealed that almost none of them, even those imprisoned with drug convictions, were using or had used cannabis. Except in American port cities like San Francisco and New Orleans and in Mexican border states like Texas and Arizona, pot wasn’t available in North America. This wasn’t the case around the world.
Having grown up in the Mazar-i-Sharif area of northern Afghanistan, Brishna Kamal — a former executive at Whistler Therapeutics, an early Canadian medical marijuana producer that Lorne Gertner helped fund — says that hash was part of the local medical program in her community in her parent’s generation, during the 1940s and 1950s, in addition to other forms of medicine and health care. Like aspirin, its medicinal properties were never questioned. Hash helped reduce pain, invoke sleep, and reduce nausea. Kamal says she wasn’t raised amid a cannabis stigma.
“I never smoked cannabis until I came to Canada to attend university at McGill in the 1980s, but I wasn’t afraid of it and knew it had medicinal abilities,” says Kamal. “By the 1960s, most people in our community knew that cannabis wasn’t all bad — that it probably was better for you than alcohol and might even be able to help people suffering reduce pain.”
There were plenty of places like Turkey and Spain where cannabis was available and seen as a good alternative to morphine or amphetamines, which also became a North American problem in the 1950s. In 1961, Canada’s Narcotic Control Act and the Food and Drugs Act came down hard on marijuana. Possession, trafficking, cultivation, and transportation of cannabis all carried serious legal consequences: as much as seven years for a charge of possession. Pot was now a schedule 1 offence. In the meantime, cannabis couldn’t be researched because procuring it was against the law. But there was a culture clash happening, between liquor and pot, old and young.
Marcel Martel wrote the book Not This Time: Canadians, Public Policy, and the Marijuana Question 1961–1975, and has been a great help in my research. According to Martel, the Province in Vancouver was just one paper that began questioning our new drug laws. Writing on May 17, 1968, about two cases in the courts involving nineteen-year-old boys who both had committed crimes while under the influence of a vice, the paper made clear what many people already believed. The editorial compared the sentencing. In the first instance, a boy guilty of marijuana possession received a sentence of “nine months definite and six months indefinite.” Real jail time for possession of marijuana. The other boy in the story, arrested for driving without a licence and under the influence of alcohol, killed his two passengers while driving drunk. For his crime, he was charged $200. No prison time. The outrage once heaped on the Chinese opium peddlers and pushers of the Mexican “locoweed” shifted toward the lawmakers, as clearly the punishments didn’t equal the crimes. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, as jazz musicians shared marijuana with beatniks, and as students at universities around the world began to consume cannabis, pot — like contraceptives, burning of bras, gay rights, divorce laws, and protesting the war in Vietnam — became a generational touchstone.
Nixon could drink bourbon. The kids wanted to free their minds.
“There is no underestimating how seriously the older generation, now in power and who had a little experience with pot, was concerned about their university-aged children facing serious legal consequences for cannabis, something they now knew wasn’t as harmful as once thought,” says Marcel Martel. “The frustrating concept for scientists is that with every new study enlisted to defang the hyperbolic writings of people like Emily Murphy — or even Richard Nixon — a new wave crashes through that quells the research before it could unpack the plant.”
The Shafer Commission was established in the United States in 1970 to help determine whether marijuana should be a category 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act (at the time, category 1 drugs were heroin and cocaine, substances legally defined as lacking medicinal benefits). The chair, Ray Shafer, was a Republican Pennsylvania governor and had been a navy officer and Purple Heart winner in the Second World War. While the bipartisan commission was formed at the direction of Congress and Nixon explicitly wanted the result to demonize marijuana, Shafer’s research proved the opposite of what the president was looking for. Through years of exploration and more than fifty studies, the commission, charged with determining marijuana’s classification in America’s drug laws — which would affect criminal sentencing for those caught with pot — decided that Nixon’s opinions ran counter to scientific research. In a 1972 report titled Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, the commission reported that nobody — as far as medical researchers could tell — had ever overdosed from marijuana and that the biggest concern with pot was that it would make America’s populace less inspired to work. Not criminals. Not addicts. Not cokeheads. It found that marijuana wasn’t a gateway drug, and didn’t provoke insanity, let alone violence. The Shafer Commission advocated for the United States to decriminalize marijuana.
“Amotivational syndrome — that marijuana could lead to lethargy, loss of interest in school and achievement in general — topped the Shafer committee’s list of worries,” Marcel Martel tells me. “Basically, when the Shafer Commission couldn’t find anything damaging about cannabis in terms of a major health scare, they gave rise to the lazy stoner cliché.”
The real person acting like a lazy stoner was President Nixon, who flat-out rejected the findings of the Shafer Commission. Upon the report’s publication, nothing happened. The entire exercise proved futile. The science was ignored in favour of the stigma, and social norms, operating in systemic racism, impeded data-driven, equitable research. There was no follow-up to the recommendations from Nixon’s own committee. A chance to make change was ignored.
In the meantime, Canada was collating its own commission to look at drugs.
Canada’s answer to Shafer was the Le Dain Commission, named after its chair, Montreal-based lawyer and judge Gerald Le Dain, which began in 1969. The Le Dain Commission was tasked by the Liberal prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to investigate marijuana. Trudeau, who had backpacked through India and Pakistan in the late 1940s after graduating from Harvard — and insinuated that he’d smoked hash — could have been Canada’s anti-Nixon. Elected Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, the worldly leader, whose wife would smoke hash in the 1970s with the Rolling Stones, oversaw our Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs. Over twelve thousand people attended and participated in the Le Dain Commission hearings — including Allan Rock’s friend John Lennon, who chose Trudeau as his first Canadian elected official to meet. The Le Dain Commission took a serious look at legalizing pot. Its studies would take three years.
“We would be totally irresponsible if we didn’t legalize it,” John Munro, Canada’s minister of national health and welfare, said of marijuana on Canadian TV in 1970, before the Le Dain studies were even complete. Suddenly, Rosie Rowbotham and the Canadian government were aligned. The Le Dain Commission reported that 1.5 million Canadians had tried cannabis at least once. Given that this number was reached by private citizens telling a government body about their usage of illegal drugs, it’s probably safe to assume that the actual number — even today, with pot legal, it’s difficult to get an accurate tally — was much higher than reported.
Robert Solomon, now a lawyer and professor at Western University with forty-five years of experience studying cannabis and alcohol laws, clerked for Gerald Le Dain on the commission. He says his boss was a decent, studious man. “Le Dain wasn’t someone with any personal connection to marijuana, but he took his work seriously and wanted what was best for the country,” Solomon tells me, explaining that, at the time, Le Dain was a father of two teenaged girls and was sympathetic to both youth culture and parental concerns. “Le Dain knew very little about drugs or drug culture, but he approached his work with an open mind.” Solomon says Gerald Le Dain met students in coffee shops and at their universities. Like Allan Rock, he spoke with John Lennon. However, while he conducted his research in good faith, oppositional forces were also on the move.
Not content with the Shafer Report, Nixon met twice with Trudeau during the years of the Le Dain Commission, in 1969 and 1972, as Martel reports in his book. In both cases, according to the Department of External Affairs, Trudeau had to reassure Nixon that Canada would support the Americans in their war on drugs. Trudeau told this to Nixon before hearing the findings of the Le Dain Commission. Canada was a signatory on the World Health Organization’s 1968 and 1969 Expert Committee on Drug Dependence. The WHO’s official late-1960s stance was that “marijuana had no medical purpose and control measures were required,” according to Martel’s reporting. So, against that backdrop and facing American pressure, when the Le Dain Commission concluded at the end of its study that marijuana should be decriminalized, it’s no surprise that the final results were ignored.
When Gerald Le Dain tabled his report to his prime minister, Marcel Martel says, no one cared. Robert Solomon doesn’t disagree. “I think the culture just moved on without cannabis, and it became less mission-critical in the early seventies,” Robert Solomon tells me.
In 1975, Gerald Le Dain’s eldest daughter was killed in a car crash in British Columbia. In 1984, Le Dain moved on to the Supreme Court of Canada and became one of the most powerful judges in the country. By that time, however, he was burned out and still grieving. A diagnosis for depression was still rare in the mid-1980s, and he ended up being pressured to resign from the Supreme Court. From his hospital bed, the judge appointed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau left his post. The man who ruled that cannabis should be decriminalized died without knowing the medical marijuana ruling was only ten years away.
Chapter 4 Stephen Harper Don’t Smoke Hash
“We know what you’re doing.”
Vancouver Police Department to Hilary Black
The year Stephen Harper became the Canadian prime minister with a tough-on-crime platform was the same year that Lorne Gertner took North America’s first medicinal cannabis company public: 2006. Both events foreshadowed a wild ride. Harper, the strikingly conservative PM, was an unlikely steward of Canada’s groundbreaking marijuana laws, yet he presided over more influential cannabis legislation than any other Canadian politician (and, ironically, over more Canadian-owned marijuana companies, save for his successor, Justin Trudeau). The Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPRs, like the MMARs before them, spelled marijuana with a tacky “h” for reasons never explained) were enacted in July 2013, and presided over by Stephen Harper’s minister of health, Leona Aglukkaq.
To be clear, Harper never wanted to build an industry. The laws regulating cannabis, treating it like tobacco, were written with a prohibition mentality: there was no advertising permitted, and regulations barring differentiation actively hampered the marijuana companies’ growth. But cannabis wasn’t going anywhere, and private companies were going to supply demand. “Current medical marijuana regulations have left the system open to abuse,” said Aglukkaq at a press conference announcing the change from the MMARs to the MMPRs on December 16, 2012. “We have heard real concerns from law enforcement, fire officials, and municipalities about how people are hiding behind these rules to conduct illegal activity, and putting health and safety of Canadians at risk. These changes will make it far more difficult for people to game the system.”
Capitalist systems, however, will always be gamed. It was just the rules of the game that were changing. The MMPRs were different from the MMARs because they cancelled PPS’s monopoly and allowed new cannabis companies to compete for government-issued pot-selling licences. Patients would still need a licence to smoke pot, but there would now be competition for whose pot they’d be buying. Importantly, the MMPRs also ended the designated grower program. By now, the legal medical system had been dubbed “the over-grower program,” because of how much legally grown weed was winding up on the black market. This important stipulation — whether you could have someone grow your weed — would ping-pong back and forth between legal and illegal, and in actuality was only outlawed for two years. The designated grower system is legal today. But the major catalyst of that law change, which gave rise to our cannabis economic moment, was the birth of the marijuana companies, the additional licensed producers.
In the summer of 2013, Stephen Harper, a teetotaling asthmatic conservative accountant, set the stage for today’s industry, a place of one-dollar pre-rolls, cannabis pretzels, pop-up ’shroom stores, and legal one-hundred-dollar ounces.
There had been cannabis legalization inroads prior to Harper’s years in office. Both Paul Martin and, before him, Jean Chrétien came close to decriminalizing marijuana, which would keep pot illegal, but would ban prosecution of anyone for possessing less than a defined small amount. Chrétien, the Catholic leader from small-town Quebec, had come around on the pot file and in 2002, following his reappraisal of the abortion and same-sex marriage laws, wanted to move Canada forward on progressive issues. In essence, Canada was becoming liberal under his watch. Chrétien, the centrist, was not connected to the counterculture or cool like that beacon of late-1960s flair, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Nevertheless, in 2003, his government introduced a decriminalization bill that came close to passing — if not for Parliament being prorogued.
“We just needed another fifteen minutes and we had the vote,” a former Chrétien Cabinet member tells me, adding that Chrétien’s pollsters surveyed the country, and 65 percent of Canadians said they were in favour of decriminalization. Chrétien, swept up in the seas of change, was ready to heed his nation’s call. “We would’ve done it, but we ran out of time,” his former Cabinet member says. “Though none of us in the Chrétien Cabinet wanted full legalization, he paved the way for Mr. [Justin] Trudeau.”
In 2006, after Paul Martin’s government crumbled, Stephen Harper was elected to lead Canada’s smallest minority government since Confederation. From the beginning, he presented as an ideologically right-wing prairie-honed conservative, with little interest or love from the county’s youth, left, or elite. Harper appealed to blue-collar white people, immigrant communities, and working-class suburbs across the country — the Canadian Tire, Hockey Night in Canada demographic and not the downtown climate-change protesters or university hippies or anything remotely resembling the progressive movement.
Harper’s team even had a name for the person who’d never vote for them: “Zöe.” She was a sociology major in Toronto and liked to smoke grass. “The ironic thing was that our campaign office was full of Zöes, and so when we heard something from one of them like ‘This ad you’re making doesn’t speak to me,’ we’d say ‘Great!’” says Ken Boessenkool, author of Harper’s two election platforms, a Calgary-based policy expert who helped shape Conservative messaging in eleven campaigns — in which, he says, he was victorious seven times. “If you had twenty dollars to spend on the votes of either ten old people or two young people and you’re a Conservative, whose vote do you spend twenty dollars to go after?” Boessenkool says. “It’s not personal. It’s called efficiency.”
Equally efficient, at the time of Prime Minister Harper and at the opposite end of the spectrum, was the cannabis ecosystem at work in this country, a loosely cobbled-together conglomerate of activists, growers, and dealers who had supplied Canada with pot since before the laws began to change. Marches for legalization had begun in the 1960s, and most Canadians who wanted marijuana were able to find it — sometimes it could be tricky, but if you wanted to get baked, even without a licence, you could. These people, who either felt personally connected to the plant or were already making their living from it at illegal grow ops or in courtrooms across the country, were trying to change the world, but they sensed their exclusion from the nascent industry when the MMAR laws were passed in 2001. Government weed wasn’t smoked by Terry Parker, and PPS had nothing to do with the wellness centres in Vancouver dispensing cannabis edibles to homeless people with mental health issues or cancer patients or people with AIDS. Outside of a friendship with Lorne Gertner, Brent Zettl shared next to nothing in common with Alan Young.
In 2001, when Canada ushered in the MMAR laws, activists felt like the tide was changing. Now that pot was legal as a medicine, how long could it take for it to also be recognized as a pleasant vice, harmless as wine?
The MMAR laws legalized physician-prescribed cannabis. PPS was the only business in Canada licensed to produce government weed. By 2006, however, when Harper was elected, backlash over the PPS product and abuse of the system — doctors selling prescriptions and licensed designated growers in Kelowna driving hundreds of pounds of Canadian homegrown into the U.S. — forced Health Canada to examine the laws.
According to Tony Clement, Stephen Harper’s minister of health from 2006 to 2008, the government wanted out of weed. Let private industry deal with the mess. “The government had a monopoly on cannabis production and did it poorly, which birthed the line ‘The only way you can lose money selling pot is if the government’s the one that’s selling it,’” says Clement, who, as the MP for Parry Sound–Muskoka, says he was comfortable with cannabis, though he told me he personally has never tried it. Up in cottage country, he says, his base was a bunch of potheads. “Most people in Muskoka who hire someone to build their docks, they’re smoking weed, and I need the people who build the docks to vote for me,” Clement said. “I wasn’t coming out against marijuana. I know what hills to fight for and when to keep my mouth closed.”
Like Anne McLellan, Tony Clement speaks colourfully about the PPS marijuana. “One hundred percent of Health Canada’s supply was grown in some mine in Manitoba that grew crap, was over budget, made a product that wasn’t good, but was expensive to produce and wasn’t available,” Clement recalls, adding that legalization of cannabis — the ensuing step after the MMPRs — was left out of the conversation in his Conservative circle, but that he believes Stephen Harper had no moral hiccup equating pot with any other pharmaceutical drug. Cannabis was an opportunity for tax revenue, and Harper had a both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in economics. Even though weed would never work for Mr. Harper — he had asthma and was a stickler for routine and control — the resistance among his Cabinet members was never personal. The issue just didn’t resonate with his base. This runs counter to popular narrative. It’s been reported that Harper had strong feelings about cannabis, though aside from a few ignorant comments — on the campaign trail beside Justin Trudeau, for instance, he said that cannabis was more harmful than cigarettes, which most experts agree is not true — insiders have told me that the prime minister held no personal feelings about pot.