“The system was rickety and unsatisfying, but it wasn’t in a crisis point and the prime minister never mentioned cannabis to me,” says Clement. “We were tackling reduced hospital wait times and HIV/AIDS policies, heroin, cocaine, and MDMA. We had bigger fish to fry.”
Still, even if the Harper government didn’t go fishing for marijuana, its crime policies resulted in mandatory minimum sentences, so a non-violent cannabis charge could result in time behind bars. In a five-year period, from 2006 to 2011, Harper introduced sixty-one crime bills and saw twenty of them turned into laws. By following American-style war-on-drugs policing — where stiffer sentences are supposed to scare criminals away from breaking the law — Canada saw its incarceration rate rise 14 percent between 2005 and 2015. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, systemic racism and misogyny was the hallmark of this legal legacy: the number of Indigenous prisoners increased 52 percent; the number of female prisoners increased 77 percent; the number of Black prisoners increased 78 percent.
Do the Right Thing: Akwasi Owusu-Bempah at a Cannabis Amnesty event, pre-legalization.
The number of white prisoners, meanwhile, decreased by 6 percent.
“Mandatory minimums dehumanize the accused, and when these laws are passed alongside law practices such as carding — in which people can be pulled over and asked to show ID at a police officer’s discretion — we know certain neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods where Black and Indigenous males tend to live, it’s the Black and Indigenous populations who are being over-policed and over-arrested,” says Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, who has worked with police departments across the country to mine data on racialized populations and sentencing. Owusu-Bempah says that mandatory minimum sentences take away a judge’s ability to contextualize a defendant’s life circumstances in applying sentencing. What’s more, he adds, while Mr. Harper was prime minister, a drug offence could carry a stiffer sentence than possession of child porn. While Black and Indigenous men were being disproportionately arrested, Mr. Harper also fought against supervised injection sites during the rise of the opioid epidemic, which began surfacing in force in 1999.
His punitive approach to law enforcement, at the very least, says Owusu-Bempah, created an uneasy environment in which to launch a legal medical marijuana program enriching already rich white men. Against a backdrop of this already occurring for the past one hundred years, it made Owusu-Bempah cringe. “So while we have Black and Indigenous men being arrested for pot and forced to serve real time, we also have the government sourcing marijuana contracts,” he says. “Who’s profiting from Prairie Plant Systems? White businessmen. Who’s being arrested for cannabis possession? Black kids.”
Ken Boessenkool doesn’t see it that way. Mandatory minimums were designed to be colour-blind, and the last thing the Conservatives wanted was to get involved with marijuana. Legalize cannabis, even medicinally? That’s something for Zöe. Better to lock her up because she’s too busy banging on her tambourines on Queen Street to vote Conservative. “Conservatives would never put cannabis in the front window because of our support within ethnic communities,” says Boessenkool, adding that the Conservatives, never the party of the youth, saw themselves as the party of “families.” To Boessenkool — “It doesn’t matter what the fuck I thought. What matters was what it took to win” — weed equalled drug messaging equalled immigrant parents afraid for their kids. “Tough on crime” didn’t discriminate, says Boessenkool. The mandatory minimums were based on votes. The hammer always found a nail. “In the immigrant communities, we were aggressive to say that pot legalization was bad for the future of their children. I can’t tell you how strongly that resonated,” he says.
His message for Mr. Harper was simple: “The Liberals want your kids on drugs.” Boessenkool insinuates that the posturing could have been an act. “Mr. Harper probably had sympathy for medical cannabis patients — if indeed it was used medically — but cannabis wouldn’t be the issue for us.”
Cannabis became an issue for Stephen Harper because the MMAR program had spawned massive “grey market” legal grows. They were grey market because a grower might have a Health Canada licence to grow medical marijuana. But the licences were being abused, and a licensed designated grower might produce something like thirty thousand plants. Owusu-Bempah says these types of semi-legal operations were all over his Peterborough, Ontario, neighbourhood when he was growing up. So while a kid who looked like him could face jail time for smoking a joint, real criminals began sensing a softening legal marijuana environment.
Under the designated grower system, criminals began growing weed at scale. In 2004, an officer who had spent his entire adult life fighting crime was involved in an illegal-pot bust at a Molson plant in Barrie, Ontario. When his team arrived on the scene, he tells me, they seized property, automatic weapons, and vehicles worth more than $7.5 million. “This is black market cannabis destined for the U.S.,” says the officer, who also makes an important point. The twelve suspects arrested at the Barrie grow op, which housed fifty workers and could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal income per year, were not part of an organized gang. They weren’t Hells Angels or the mafia, although both groups were involved in legal and illegal weed. Instead, they were a loose collective of entrepreneurs with enough money to buy high-tech irrigation systems and thousands of hydroponic lights and produce hundreds of pounds of semi-legal weed.
“Organized crime isn’t always what you see on TV. It can be any group that’s banded together to do illegal things,” the officer tells me, adding that much of the illegal Canadian pot is smuggled into the U.S., where it gets swallowed by criminal enterprises and helps fund a reverse shipment back into Canada — most likely as cocaine, cash, opioids, or guns. The officer says that illegal Canadian pot was smuggled through the Buffalo, New York, border at a rate of one thousand pounds per run. “We busted hundreds of sites in the Niagara region, Norfolk county, and Leamington,” he says. These are the verdant agricultural regions where licensed producers of legal cannabis would soon begin: Redecan in Niagara and Aphria in Leamington.
By the time Harper was elected, the pot situation was becoming a problem. In 2003, the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police published the Green Tide Report, which claimed as many as ten thousand children were being raised in grow houses and that many of them were close to schools. “They’re smart, well financed, and ruthless in their pursuit of profits,” the report says of the illegal growers. Meanwhile, alongside the number of illegal grow ops, the number of medical cannabis patients buying legal weed continued to rise. There were 500 medical cannabis patients in 2002. In June 2009, there were 4,029 medical marijuana patients. By 2013, there would be 26,000. And by the end of 2016, there were more than 129,000 medical marijuana patients. Working in Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty’s office, John Aird saw the regulations changing and realized there was going to be a problem of supply and demand. A third-generation Liberal insider, Aird, California sober — he smoked pot but didn’t touch alcohol — became a licensing fixer for nascent medical marijuana companies. “I knew the need for legal weed was growing alongside the rampant illegal growing,” says Aird. “Pot would have to be licensed and I could connect the dots, help build cannabis companies, and see pot was going to be a huge industry.”
Alan Young explains why the laws changed. “The government couldn’t control the illegal grows,” he says. “Canadians were legally entitled to medical marijuana and, insult to injury, the legal weed wasn’t good.”
Young at Heart: Alan Young reads KIND magazine in Toronto after smoking a joint and decrying the legal cannabis system.
Because the legal weed wasn’t good and the legal growers were despised, the politicians and the activists could finally agree about something.
By law, PPS and Brent Zettl never worked with the designated growers. Part of the MMARs stipulated that a cannabis company couldn’t employ anyone with a record. But these would be the people best suited to growing weed and best connected to the culture. What cannabis users might want or, more specifically, might need, didn’t enter the equation. It was us against them at the dawn of the legal cannabis market — for medical and, as we’ll see later, for recreational, too. Hostilities often boiled over between the nascent legal cannabis industry and the people working in the grey market.
“PPS thought we were illegal gangsters and would never talk to us, but we also led a countrywide campaign against them for years,” says Mat Beren, an early designated grower at the Vancouver Island Compassion Society. Beren was a pioneer of the vertical integration concept of dealing pot, whereby a licensed cannabis producer also distributes their product and sells it in a location they own. This way, explains Beren, a single individual or company can be held accountable for — and earn revenue on — every step of the growing and distribution process. Beren was and still is a leading light in the cannabis culture. In 2004, Beren, then thirty, distributed a cartoon of someone rolling PPS weed in toilet paper. There was only one kind of paper, the cartoon insinuated, suitable for PPS weed.
Brent Zettl says that the abuse he took was relentless and that the cannabis underground spread disinformation and lies. “They thought it was their God-given right to grow cannabis and took every opportunity to defame the government’s program and ourselves,” says Zettl, who explains why his product had its distinctive feel: his cannabis was milled, which means it was ground into powder, because it was designed to be consumed by vapes, battery-operated cigarette-like contraptions that combusted without a flame. A patient with MS, he says, couldn’t properly grind a cannabis bud to roll into a joint. It was Health Canada, he says, that stipulated that the PPS product be distributed already milled. It wasn’t his fault that a connoisseur like Mat Beren, used to growing fat nuggets, would claim that smoking PPS weed was like drinking a hamburger through a straw. “The pot was never intended for heavy users. It was medicine,” Zettl says. “The whole program was never intended to be rec.”
PPS also had to ensure that each gram was consistently dosed. If marijuana was medicine, you couldn’t have some variations with 5 percent THC and others with 25 percent. But plants aren’t tubes of toothpaste, and even with Brent’s technology, it was impossible to identically harvest living things. So Zettl’s team took the top of the cannabis plants, which had a high THC percentage, and the bottom of the plants, with low THC, and blended them together. Since the entirety of a cannabis plant didn’t mature in concert, it was an odd concoction at best. Meanwhile, the rumour mill said that PPS ground the stalk, seeds, and flower into its grams. Continuing with the hamburger metaphor, Mat Beren says this would be akin to grinding up the plate and napkin and mixing it in with your lunch.
“Poor Brent. We made so much fun of him, and the more that the government was inept, the more righteous we became,” says Hilary Black, who had started the British Columbia Compassion Club Society in 1997. Black was never arrested at her club at 2995 Commercial Drive, at the corner of East 14th Avenue, not far from where the Chinatown riots led to Canada’s first drug laws. She had a wellness centre attached to her store and lived above the unit while earning six dollars an hour. Black says both the local cancer and HIV centres sent her patients and, while her operation was illegal, she required physician-authorized paperwork to administer her medicinal marijuana, edibles, or hash. She knew she was a target for the police, but she was an activist, willing to take the risk. “I had a big dry bag where we’d shove the pound bags and blocks of hash to bolt out the back door when we thought the cops were coming,” says Black. She and her cronies were a different kind of marijuana criminal than the folks shipping pounds out in Barrie. They broke the laws as a form of resistance, she says, and by offering her care to all comers, a Florence Nightingale of bud, she was susceptible to burglary, or worse.
One time, she tells me, she had to call the police herself for assistance when one of her patients threatened violence. “This patient, he just kept telling me I’d be lying in a pool of blood, and I couldn’t get him out of the building. Very reluctantly I called the police,” recalls Black, “but the cops helped us! One officer even said, ‘We know what you’re doing here. You have to call us if you get in trouble. We know that you girls are doing good Christian work.’”
Black, like Mat Beren and most of the compassion club operators, used the licensed designated growers to provide pot for her customers, some of whom had medical marijuana licences, some of whom did not. Since Health Canada was still coming to terms with cannabis consumption — and scientific evidence had yet to be produced to a standard high enough to convince the Canadian Medical Association that pot really worked — grey market operators policed themselves and made their own rules. Especially in Vancouver, they were, by and large, ignored by the police.
Black calls it an act of compassionate rebellion. “Nobody had the balls to do what we were doing in Vancouver,” she says. She always knew legalization would come with regulation, and her vision since the late 1990s was only to get good cannabis affordably to the maximum number of needy patients. Though her business was illegal, she worked with Health Canada. She sent reports on her operating system to regulators and worked in adjunct with other compassion clubs in Guelph and Montreal. She, Adam Greenblatt, and Mat Beren were friends.
“Shit would go sideways and we’d all get on the phone, and together we published our first set of operating procedures,” says Black, adding that when Health Canada announced the first legal system in 2001, it included many of her recommendations. Black, like Marc Emery, even provided Terry Parker with seeds and weed. This would blur the line between legal and illegal. This underground system — flawed, decent (mostly), and run (often) by brave, compassionate stoners — was not designed to last.
Mat Beren had a legal licence to grow medicinal marijuana, and in 2003 he bought a house on Vancouver Island for the job. Authorized to grow eleven marijuana plants, he grew eleven hundred. When he got busted, he says, the RCMP knew nothing about the MMAR laws, then two years old. “The cops didn’t even know cannabis could be medical,” Beren recalls. “When they showed up, they just said, ‘You’re growing weed. You’re busted.’ The RCMP didn’t believe medical marijuana was a thing.”
Mat gave the police the 1-800 Health Canada number to confirm the country’s drug laws, but since it was late in the day, the office was closed. “The RCMP destroyed the whole facility and we were devastated, but three weeks later, we said, ‘Fuck it, let’s rebuild.’”
Beren is white, and Hilary Black is white; Rosie Rowbotham, Terrance Parker, Alan Young, Marc Emery, and Jodie Giesz-Ramsay are white, too. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah says the way we distinguish between activists and dealers often comes down to who the medicine is for. He says law enforcement judged rule breakers differently in Black and Indigenous lower-economic urban communities, especially from 2006 to 2013, during Stephen Harper’s tough-on-crime platform. Certainly the Black community was using pot as medicine, too. “Whenever subjectivity is entered into law enforcement, it’s the Black and Indigenous people who suffer,” Owusu-Bempah says.
And there was lots of subjectivity — and abuse — in the system. Harper, when he was elected, had to deal with the MMAR system that Jorg Scott, a medical marijuana OG in British Columbia, describes like this: “There were doctors who opened up their clinics and said ‘Pay me five hundred dollars and I’ll give you a licence.’ There were lineups out the door.” Scott mentions that in 2005, another popular way to get a grower’s licence was to hire someone with MS or cancer and recruit them to get a medical marijuana licence and make you their designated grower. Scott says the scene, once the domain of folks like Don Briere of Da Kine, Aaron Harnett, and hippies — lawbreakers who, even if they broke the law, were still connected to the plant — began to change. Opportunism brought in a rougher crowd, and this, too, would be a legacy of legal recreational weed.
“Imagine a guy who has spent his whole life not playing by the rules, sitting in a doctor’s office or standing in a line, and he might be a heavy — a guy who you don’t want to piss off,” says Scott of the criminal element that saw an opportunity in pot. Unlike activists such as Alan Young and Terry Parker, dangerous outlaws found a way to cash in. “These early adopters saw an opportunity. They didn’t give a fuck about weed.”
Like Hilary Black, Alan Young had been consulting with Health Canada. To its credit, Health Canada was talking to the right people. Young says that, in court throughout the early 2000s, he extended patients’ rights to grow their own weed and he set the table for new products such as edibles, beverages, and vapes. (Cannabis in all these formats, dubbed Cannabis 2.0, would become legal in 2019.) Young argued that sick patients needing medicine shouldn’t have to smoke their cannabis and that edibles and vape pens should be legally allowed. Lorne Gertner, working with media tycoon Moses Znaimer and Joe Mimran, of the Joe Fresh clothing line, was developing medical devices for patients to get their cannabis without smoking: products like vape pens, inhalers, and Listerine-like strips. His company Cannasat Therapeutics, with David Hill as its CEO, had gone public on the TSX Venture Exchange in March 2006, listing at thirty-five cents per share. Hill says he suffered endlessly trying to make the company work. He had Hilary Black and Mark Ware on his board and raised $6.5 million for his venture. He wanted to use that money to fund cannabis research. “You could see how the company should work — it was right before our eyes,” says Hill. “The problem was we were just too soon.”
The team at Hill & Gertner had taken the first North American marijuana company public. Maclean’s called Lorne the godfather of cannabis in 2017. And yet, private companies, not the medical community, had to fund their own studies. Gertner estimated that his company could take 10 percent of the $700 million Canadian pain relief market, eventually, but he couldn’t get his brand off the ground. Cannabis had no momentum, no spokesperson, no cachet. The Cannasat stock peaked at eighty cents and made history. It just didn’t work as a business. “We couldn’t raise any money,” Gertner tells me, and echoes his partner. “We were too soon.”
Alan Young thought Gertner was early, but he also believed that he was onto something and that the medical program needed to improve and expand. “There were rumours out of the West Coast that the Prairie Plant Systems pot was contaminated. It turned out not to be true, but it helped our case with Health Canada,” says Young, who spent much of 2010 in meetings with government regulators, proposing a new system. It was clear the MMAR model didn’t work. “There were crooked doctors who exploited the program. You gave them two hundred dollars and they’d prescribe you four hundred grams per day,” says Young, who also opened a compassion club in Toronto.
In 2010, he brought underground cannabis growers to Ottawa for a consultation. The group explained to Health Canada why the medical system wasn’t working: the government needed to hire growers who understood weed. Young also proposed that the government give out multiple licences to multiple companies, so patients could choose the weed they wanted and make the market competitive. There are multiple types of pain relievers. Why wouldn’t there be multiple types of weed? Alan Young envisioned a cannabis world in which licensed patients could buy licensed weed at legal brick-and-mortar stores, assisted by knowledgeable attendants. Budtenders, said Young, could manage the cannabis front lines.
On December 16, 2012, the government of Stephen Harper announced new Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPRs). These were the legal result of Alan Young and Hilary Black consulting with Health Canada. By the end of 2012, pot growing was no longer going to fall solely to Brent Zettl.
“They took away all of our patients without any warning,” says Zettl. “We had to start from scratch.”
These new companies would need to be well financed. They had to build the facilities before they could receive a licence to grow, and the vaults alone could cost $250,000. And regulations would be strict. Despite its intentions, the Harper government now had marijuana in the front window. The changes would usher in Canada’s first wave of licensed producers, the Blessed 13.
The medical marijuana program — and the Canadian economy — would explode.
