GONE TO SEED

Let's Grow Up About Grow-Ops and Reroute Revenues From the Marijuana
Industry into Legitimate Ventures, Says Author/Activist

Bud Inc.: Inside Canada's Marijuana Industry By Ian Mulgrew, Random
House Canada, 304 pp, $35 (hardcover)

If you're ambivalent, indifferent, or worse still, opposed to the
notion of marijuana's decriminalization, Ian Mulgrew has a thing or
several to tell you that you really ought to know. In his newest book,
Bud Inc., the respected journalist and legal affairs columnist for the
Vancouver Sun sets out to demonstrate how much Canada's drug laws
matter to you, and everybody's stake in reforming them. "Turn on the
lights," Mulgrew the pot activist says. "Let's be grownups."

Everyone who reads Bud Inc. should prepare to be surprised by the things
they learn. For starters, you can forget the notion of decriminalization as
a means of curing what ails our society when it comes to marijuana. Asked:
what does handing a ticket to a kid smoking reefer in the park do to shut
down illegal grow operations that destroy property, steal vast amounts of
electricity, frequently have firearms (and the will to use them) on the
premises, and enable organized criminals to engage in all the other
fabric-of-society-rending activities they enjoy?

Nope, for Ian Mulgrew, legalization is where it's at. His epiphany
came when he went to Amsterdam and heard the coffee shop owners there
describe their plights, where they must behave as gregarious hosts
toward the customers who buy marijuana from them, put on their
bureaucrat hats when they pay taxes on their sales of marijuana, "But
at the back door, when they go off to buy their stuff," says Mulgrew,
"they're dealing with organized criminals; they're dealing with the
Hell's Angels!"

Let It Grow

Yeah-legalize it; don't criticize it. Bud Inc. is something of a
novelty among pro-pot polemics in that, even though Mulgrew may be a
fan of, and even an activist for marijuana, he's no evangelist. If you
know about those receptors in your brain that only pot molecules fit,
or how to give weak weed a little extra zip, you didn't read it here.
Really, it's beside the point to him whether you've ever inhaled or
not. Bud Inc.'s focus is to explore marijuana's potential for going
"legit," something which extends far beyond recreational use.

Many of the names in Bud Inc. are recognizable to anyone familiar with
current events in this country: Marc Emery, the seed kingpin whom the
Canadian authorities hung out to dry when the Americans came calling;
Pot-TV; David Malmo-Levine, Edmonton ex-pat and activist
extraordinaire who got a case all the way to the Supreme Court before
he was shot down; Advanced Nutrients, who made $30million last year
with their fertilizer products tailor made for and marketed directly
at marijuana growers, and who pay their taxes and invest heavily into
research that will allow for greater exploration of pot's medicinal
promise.

It's true! This humble plant, long derided as "the devil's weed" by
concerned parents and doubly concerned pastors, police chiefs,
politicians, and editorialists, is used in the treatment of glaucoma,
AIDS, muscular dystrophy, and many other debilitating conditions.
"Then, when you tell people that chronic use of marijuana is linked,
at worst, to bronchitis, not cancer or any other horrible diseases,
people are really surprised," Mulgrew adds. "And then, when you tell
them about the research that's going on, that it's being touted as the
new aspirin, or it's being looked at as an anti-cancer drug, they're
flabbergasted!"

Something Mulgrew leaves little room for in Bud Inc., however, is the
business of myth-busting and answering-back to the anti-pot side's
charges, but his reason for leaving them out is sound: "Why keep
repeating the lies?" he asks. He calls the anti-pot crowd
prohibitionists, after those puritanical sorts who sought to protect
people from themselves by banning liquor during a decade frequently
described as "roaring." Liquor was still widely available in the
1920s, of course; what prohibitionists were most responsible for,
Mulgrew notes, was the simultaneous rise of organized crime, thanks to
the huge black market they created for the product.

The Green Machine

But what if we made the market for pot a legal one? It would take vast
amounts of resources away from organized crime and move them into the
public purse, and it would provide relief to our police departments
and court systems, freeing up money, staff and other resources to be
spent on more worthwhile pursuits. "We can redirect that money to
terrorism," Mulgrew offers, "people smuggling, crimes of violence like
rape and assault, where it can take years for your case to wind its
way through the courts because the court system is blocked up with
people being prosecuted for possession of marijuana or for
trafficking."

He states, "That is a crazy situation," one we should not have to
settle for. A growing list of American cities, with Vancouver poised
to join, too, have directed their police forces to not enforce federal
drug laws when it comes to pot and have seen whole sections of their
cities reborn as a result. And, oh, vast numbers of studies,
commissions, and investigations have reached the conclusion that at
its worst, pot is benign, which is not something that can be said for
smokes and booze. Says Ian Mulgrew, "We've gotta change our thinking
on drug policy in general, but definitely on marijuana. The senators'
report said it, the Ledain Commission, the Lancet, representing the
British medical community, says it, everybody reaches the same
conclusion. Portugal's legalized everything, and quite frankly, that's
the way to go. We should not be criminalizing substances, we should be
criminalizing behaviours."

In Bud Inc., Mulgrew exudes a strange optimism about Canada's approach
to pot, kind of like legalization is a foregone conclusion we haven't
reached yet, but he doesn't see anything happening for another five or
ten years. That's the time he says it will take Canadians to inform
themselves and get over their reservations about pot, for guys like
Malmo-Levine to get a few favourable decisions and then for that to
filter through to our federal lawmakers, "because politicians follow,
they don't lead." When that time comes, Mulgrew thinks we'll want to
kick ourselves for not doing it sooner.

"What people have to start to look at is the harm this policy is
causing," he says. "We can reduce that harm easily, we can better
regulate the substance, we can better educate our kids and redirect
our resources to something that's worthwhile. We can help all of our
communities if we change this policy, but, the police and the growing
community don't want it to be legalized because it'll take away so
much revenue from them."