S2 E2 Cannabis: from prohibition to legalization

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On this episode, we're talking about cannabis prohibition and legalization in Canada. I think I actually remember when I first became aware of marijuana. I would have been about eight years old at the time. I was riding my bike down our gravel street in a working-class neighborhood of Surrey, BC. The neighbors two doors over had a pair of twin hellions for sons. They would have been about fourteen, and they were blasting music with the front door wide open.

I heard a song that began with the sound of someone coughing, followed by a monstrous grinding guitar riff. I was already kind of stunned that those two things together could count as music, and then my sister, who's four years older than me, said, That song is about smoking pot. As though that phrase should have meant something to me.

I think she tried to explain it, but it was all pretty mysterious. Well, of course I learned later that that song was Sweetleaf by Black Sabbath, and that little scene shaped my earliest impressions of cannabis culture. It was something connected to heavy music and wildness. Even once I reached junior high school, I was pretty naive about pot. But my friend Ken's older brother had all the Cheech and Chong records, which we had memorized by the end of grade eight.

So we thought we knew everything about weed, even though none of us had even tried the stuff. I don't want to blame those guys for anything that followed, but the Cheechin Chong records and movies helped make pot seem, if not normal, certainly not scary and definitely funny. I was in the ninth grade when I finally smoked it and learned what the fuss was really about. And by that time it felt like I was doing something that had at least

Cultural sanction. I went to school with some serious potheads and people like me who smoked occasionally. Mostly, kids I knew had at least tried it. It wasn't a big deal. Pot was slightly at the margins, but hardly even counterculture. It was just something that people did. People who had jobs, people who were parents, people who had responsibilities. And yet we also knew that pot could land you in a lot of trouble.

We were reminded of that in guidance class and through helpful PSAs streaming in from south of the border. I get angry just thinking about it makes me mad. Little kids doing drugs. you from living up to your potential. It holds you back. And all that created a kind of dissonance. It was hard to square our own experiences of pot and the people who used it with the scary warnings and the legal penalties.

I wasn't alone in feeling the tension in that. And it wasn't just loud activists for legalization. There's been talk of ending prohibition from all over the political spectrum for at least 40 years. But all that is about to change. It looks as though sometime this summer a bill will pass into law that legalizes and regulates cannabis. So how did we get here?

So on this episode of On Drugs, we're going to trace the history of cannabis prohibition from its obscure legal roots to its undoing, thanks in part to a teenage girl from West Vancouver. Canada put cannabis on its confidential restricted list in 1923 under the Narcotics Drug Act Amendment Bill.

Why they did it and why they did it when they did it is a little unclear. Usually when governments go to the trouble of making something illegal, like, say, lawn darts, it's because it's creating problems like poking out children's eyes. But according to historian Catherine Carstairs, your average Canadian in 1923 had likely never heard of cannabis, let alone any harms it might do.

I think there was very little awareness in the nineteen twenties. I mean there was a drug problem in Canada but it was um a problem of opium use, um cocaine use, morphine um by the later nineteen twenties, heroin. cannabis really didn't register. Um, you know, it it was under discussion in the United States. There were some drug panics by this time in the southern United States.

um around cannabis use. And in the nineteen twenties a number of US states outlawed um the the possession of cannabis. But I think the average Canadian would have had no idea. They just I mean they would have been aware of hemp and using it for rope and things like that and um people on the on the prairie seem to have used hemp as um a wind guard but No, people wouldn't have really been aware of cannabis as a psychotropic substance, or at least very few.

If they knew anything at all, they might have been getting their information from Emily Murphy. Murphy is fondly remembered as one of the famous five, a group of Canadian suffragists who won major battles for women's rights. Murphy was also the first female judge in the British Empire.

Unfortunately, Murphy is equally remembered for having written a very troubling book about illicit drug use. The book was called The Black Candle, and it was a compilation of diatribes that were originally published in McLean's magazine. It's racist hysteria meant to drum up support for stricter drug law. And the book is mostly obsessed with the pernicious influence of Chinese opium peddlers. But it does have a chapter on pot titled Marijuana, The New Menace.

And in that chapter, she quotes the LA chief of police at the time who says, persons using this narcotics smoke the dried leaves of this plant, which has the effect of driving them completely insane. The addict loses all sense of moral responsibility. Addicts to this drug while under its influence are immune to pain and could severely injure without having any realization of their condition.

While in this condition they become raving maniacs who are liable to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other persons, using the most savage methods of cruelty without, as said before, Any sense of moral responsibility. The Black Candle came out in 1922, and so some people, especially legalization activists, have suggested that the book helped lead to the ban on cannabis. Historian Catherine Carstairs disputes this.

Well, I don't think Emily Murphy is at fault for the ban of cannabis in Canada. I mean, certainly she had a very deleterious impact on the lives of drug users in Canada. She spearheaded a moral panic about drug use in Canada in the early nineteen twenties, which led to the passage of a lot of very harsh legislation. But she was mostly interested in opiate users.

The book that she published in nineteen twenty two does deal slightly with marijuana use in a very alarmist fashion. You know, it's a four hundred page book and there's one seven page chapter about marijuana in it. I don't think that was

um the deciding factor. I think what happened was that by this point Canadia Canada had a drug bureaucracy in place. The actual the Prime Minister of Canada um William Lyon Mackenzie King had actually been involved in the very early discussions um around international drug policy and cannabis came under discussion at the international meetings that were being held, most notably um in nineteen twelve. And there was some thrust there to ban cannabis. And I think

Um, Canada came away from those meetings. We were doing a lot of revisions to our drug laws in the early nineteen twenties, thanks in part to this drug panic. and thought, well, okay, this might not be much of an issue in Canada, but clearly it's a problem elsewhere and so we'd be better off just adding it to the schedule now. So there was virtually no discussion or debate around adding cannabis to the schedule of restricted drugs.

So the more likely story is that Canada banned cannabis in nineteen twenty three because everyone else was doing it. It wound up being a solution in search of a problem. I suppose it's possible that police hadn't yet learned to identify Pot and Pot's But there were no marijuana seizures until nineteen thirty two, nearly a decade later. The first conviction for possession of cannabis was in nineteen thirty-seven, fourteen years after Prohibition.

By that time, the U.S. was churning out anti-cannabis propaganda, spurred on by Harry J. Anslinger, the founding commissioner of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Films like Reefer Madness and Assassin of Youth played in Canadian cinemas, we know that. But these movies are so bad, it's hard to imagine that they had any real influence on thinking. But marijuana did start to find its way into Canada.

A 1938 issue of McLean's magazine reported on smugglers caught with marijuana near the Detroit-Windsor border. But the numbers were still puny, just a couple of dozen arrests a year in the whole country. Well into the fifties, if Canadians had any knowledge of cannabis at all, it probably came second hand or from a film shown by the A V Club at school. my girlfriend Anne and I went around with Jim and Bob.

They both smoked pot. That's jive talk for marijuana. And after a while, Anne and I got so that we did. I'd been smoking pot for quite a while before I met Chuck. I guess he was what the newspapers call a a pet. He had the heroin. Chuck finally talked me into using heroin. He said it would make him feel better. So I tried it. That's a 1951 film called Drugs, The Terrible Truth.

And it's pretty typical of that era and how it puts marijuana on a continuum that leads inevitably to hard drug addiction. So before most Canadians had any real experience of cannabis, they were being taught to fear it. And just for good measure, in nineteen fifty four, the government of Louis Saint Laurent doubled the penalty for trafficking marijuana from seven years to fourteen. Judges could also call for whipping as additional punishment.

Then in nineteen fifty five, the Canadian Senate formed a special committee on the traffic in narcotic drugs. It was a landmark in that it heard not just from the enforcement side, but from actual drug users. It also heard from, you guessed it, Harry J. Anslinger, the US drug czar who had done so much to demonize marijuana. Even still, the committee made note that at the time marijuana was rarely found in Canada.

Which probably didn't matter much because as near as we can tell, even if you were willing to throw caution to the wind and smoke something that you've already been told will turn you into a homicidal maniac, it just wasn't readily available. Canada's west coast has always had a bit of a reputation when it comes to drugs. trade dates back nearly to the founding of the city in the late nineteenth century.

The nickname for the region is Lotus Land, and that refers to Homer's Odyssey. You'll recall that in the story, the hero Odysseus visits a land where the inhabitants are all hopped up on this narcotic lotus flower. Nowadays, BC is the cannabis capital of Canada, but 60 years ago, marijuana was barely on the radar. A psychiatrist named George Stevenson studied inmates at the Ocala prison farm just outside Vancouver.

In his interviews with prisoners between nineteen fifty three and nineteen fifty five, he found that very few of them, even admitted drug users, had ever tried marijuana. So as late as nineteen fifty nine, marijuana was an oddity associated with the very fringes of society. Well now, the Beatniks of San Francisco and New York have frequently been damned as the worthless riffraff of the farther out Bohemians, rather lazy wastrels who

Smoke marijuana and indulge in orgies. This is the popular concept. Is this at all true? Oh yes, it certainly is. But then the sixties happen.

Well in the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies we have what we call the counterculture movement. And it really was a social-political movement that shook the foundations of many nations, not just Canada, the United States, her western nations. Um there was um anti-colonial movements, uh civil rights movement, the women's movement, all of these came together and along with that movement was sort of a rejection rejection of traditional legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco.

Susan Boyd is the author of Busted, an illustrated history of drug prohibition in Canada. And more favorable ideas about drugs like cannabis, um, I think you could say that it was in some ways a rejection of consciousness or what would be called conventional consciousness and an exploration of altered states of consciousness.

And that embrace started to translate into numbers. Even in nineteen sixty four, there were only thirty-nine arrests for cannabis possession. But by nineteen sixty-seven, the year of this CBC report, the number was up to four hundred and thirty one. In spite of new medical reports of the dangers of marijuana and particularly elevated.

Both drugs are found in the Yorkville area of Toronto. Larry Bondi finds there are commercial possibilities beyond just peddling the drugs. Yorkville's newest boutique. It could be Adolphin's idea of a dream come true. Gandalf's is Canada's first psychedelic attestant.

Or as the hippies and trippies around here call it, a headshot. What would you smoke, uh, in this pipe? Uh it looks like it's a marijuana pipe. Well, quite frankly, uh, it probably would be used by some people as a marijuana pipe. I know I wouldn't use that. One of the part owners of Gandals, Larry Scherniak, says there are already plans to open new head shops in Montreal and Vancouver in the next few weeks. In 1971, there were 8,389 police reported incidents involving cannabis.

Now arrest reports are not a perfect measure of rates of consumption, and we don't have reliable numbers for that, for fairly obvious reasons. But suffice to say that in the span of less than a decade, cannabis was becoming a part of the culture, especially youth culture, to such an extent that in nineteen sixty nine, the CBC decided to investigate.

It's Debatable. The CBC explores controversial areas of education, visiting Canadian high schools. Today from York Mills Collegiate, Willowdale, Ontario, our topic is Drugs in the Teenager. With its Debatables regular moderator, El Weo. I can only talk from my own experience, but the number of kids that I've met who take grass is just phenomenal, you know, like athletes too.

Like supposed straits are like doing grass now. I think the vast majority of people I I'm talking about are those who've tried it at least once, but there's still a large number of people that do it regularly. Diane Howard. The young man in that debate probably didn't match the stereotypical drugie, and Susan Boyd says that fact helped cultivate concerns about the harshness of cannabis prohibition.

No, I think eventually that parents across Canada felt that their children were being treated unfairly. I mean, these are families that had never had encounters with criminal justice before. And it frightened them at that time that their child for one joint or two joints of cannabis could be sent to prison. and have a criminal record that would impact them for the rest of their life.

And so there was quite a bit of concern and I wouldn't say that it was because um parents necessarily approved of cannabis use. They just felt that the use of the criminal law for that you know, to curtail the use of that substance wasn't working and was actually doing more harm than good. And at the same time marijuana users were starting to organize and stand up for themselves.

They were pushing back against enforcement. Yeah. I mean in the sixties what we saw in the nineteen seventies, um, even here in Vancouver we had the um people coming together to demand that cannabis be legalized and that the Vancouver police stop arresting people for cannabis possession. No, we know we talk about that jamboree as the guest town riot now in the early nineteen seventies.

But it was actually envisioned as a very peaceful um demonstration where people came down with their children and smoked cannabis in a public space. The reason people were gathering was a series of articles in the then counterculture weekly, the Georgia Strait. The stories documented a Vancouver Police Department crackdown on pot users. The charmingly named Operation Dustpan involved raids and infiltration by undercover officers.

So organizers called for an August 7th rally in the Gastown neighborhood. They build it as the Grasstown smoke-in and jamboree. The Jamboree seems to have started with a festive mood and eventually nearly 2,000 people were gathered, but it turned ugly pretty fast. Four policemen on horseback charged suddenly into the crowd, and they were soon followed by dozens of others on horse and on foot. By all accounts the police were pretty indiscriminate in their use of night sticks and riot batons.

And as you might surmise from this actual recording of the riot, it was pandemonium. The demonstrators pushed back, hurling rocks, cement, and bottles, A Vancouver Sun story two days later related this scene. Held by the hair and one arm, a screaming young woman is dragged for about a hundred yards over broken glass by two police officers who take her to a waiting paddy wagon. The paper also describes several pools of blood in the streets of Gastown.

When all was said and done, 79 people had been arrested and 38 were charged with various offenses. 12 people were in hospital. While the mayor, Tom Campbell, was quick to blame the riot on agitating troublemakers. There was a lot of public sympathy for the demonstrators. And the incident was national news, so it helped put marijuana legalization into the popular consciousness. And speaking of popular consciousness, this is a good opportunity to get back to Chee Chin Chong, or Tommy Chong anyway.

International listeners might not be aware of this, but Tommy Chong is Canadian. He was born in Edmonton and grew up in Calgary. He started a band and moved to Vancouver, where he spent a good part of the nineteen sixties. And it was during this time that Chong became familiar with police drug enforcement tactics, the stuff that got those gas town protesters so riled up. One cop in particular was very well known in Vancouver at the time.

Constable Abe Snedenko was a narcotics officer with the RCMP, and he had a reputation for his relentless pursuit of even the pettiest breeches. Abe Snedenko died last August and the C B C spoke to Tommy Chong about the man. He was the the cop that uh would bust you for for a seed or a joint or or anything. You know he Abe Abe was one of those guys back in the day that thought marijuana was the evilest Drug on the planet and he was bowed to uh stamp it out any way he could.

In several of the Cheechin Chong films, Stacy Keach plays Sergeant Stedenko, the Stoner Duo's witless narc nemesis. Hello, Radio Dispatch. This is codenamed Hardhat. Codenamed Hardhat. Do you read me the over? What's that, Lardass? Hard Hat. Codenamed Hard Hat. Do you read Radio Dispatch? Hey, got something for you, Lardass. Hard hat!

Hard hat! Do you understand? Lardas, Lardas! So now that you know about that, we should get back to real life. Because in real life, there were apes Nodenkos all over Canada making life miserable for pot smokers.

That meant that a lot of people who had never had so much as a jaywalking ticket were suddenly caught up in the criminal justice system. That meant plenty of work for people like John Conroy. My name is John Conroy and I'm a lawyer. Uh have been practicing here in British Columbia since nineteen seventy-two. And not just any lawyer, at least one of his colleagues believes that John Conroy has argued more marijuana cases than any other Canadian lawyer.

As a young lawyer, Conroy dreamed of battling for justice in the courtroom, so he got into criminal law. Uh we'd had a number of changes happen in the legislation just prior to that. And so my initiation into the criminal justice system was defending a lot of people who were charged with simple possession or trafficking, possession for the purpose of trafficking. It was a new offense that had come in at that point. I was also

In Abbotsford, uh and Abbotsford is the Kingston of the West, I like to call it. It's surrounded by federal prisons, so I developed a practice involving prison administrative law, but the bulk of my practice was defense work. And a substantial amount of it being uh cannabis uh defense work in during that period.

John Conroy hasn't been able to find any evidence that anyone was ever sentenced to a whipping for marijuana in Canada. But by the late 1970s, a lot of people were having run-ins with the law because of pot. In 1977, police reported 50,168 cannabis offenses.

Well it was that time when uh because they had changed the law fairly recently from a a much more harsh situation, and so there was a a move to a uh provide an option to the courts which would be less uh serious and consequential, where at the same time Jacking up the penalty in terms of indictment is this belief that if you do that you send a message to, you know, stamp things out.

So you got lots more younger people suddenly interested in this and therefore lots more charges and as I say the crown could choose whether to it was more serious or less serious and so many of them would be proceeded with summarily, but you still had judges who were used to sending people to prison.

And so there was this whole move to try and and move them away from that. I mean they used to bust I remember one case where they actually busted this fellow because he had a pipe that had some uh residue Yeah. And so there was nothing there that was usable or anything, and yet they still busted him for simple possession. So in cases like that we would argue something called de minimis, meaning that the law doesn't take cognizance of trivialities.

So these were the types of arguments we'd be trying to make to the judges to say, look, you know, it's one thing when somebody causes harm to another. Uh it's another when they're doing something that why do you care? You know, w the the the criminal law is supposed to denounce and deter and and uh reform and rehabilitate. And you say

How you know, what's that gotta do with this fellow smoking a marijuana cigarette or even possessing some and sharing it with his friends? Now, as John acknowledges, those cases don't all end with someone going to jail. As many as half of all drug related court cases are stayed, withdrawn, dismissed, or discharged, but that still represents a huge amount of police, court, and administrative resources.

In Canada we have something called Stays of Proceedings, and one of my pet peeves has been the problem of the Crown entering a stay of proceedings. And so the charge is dropped. But that's still on your criminal record. That's still gonna show up when you're at the border and things like that. And it's not a conviction. Um and sometimes it wouldn't tell you why they're staying the proceedings.

And so I I my r uh developed a concern about the the prejudicial consequences of these non-convictions uh to people. in terms of employment and in terms of all sorts of things. People would say, Oh, what was this about? If you're in prison, they'd convict y if you gotta stay, that was tatamount to an a a conviction as far as the parole board or anybody like that was concerned. And John Conroy wasn't the only one concerned.

You heard him mention the Ledaine Commission. That's the shorthand name for the Commission of Inquiry into the non-medical use of drugs. The commission traveled thousands of miles and held public hearings all over the country. They spoke to people in formal and informal settings. They talked to casual users and non-users and people with addictions.

And they talked to experts in everything from medicine to law. Commissioner Ian Campbell even interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono in a private rail car. They were in Montreal as part of their peace campaign. The commission ran from 1969 to 1973 and by all accounts did a bang-up job. It issued several reports along the way, and one in particular stood out. The 1972 interim report focused on cannabis, and among several recommendations was number seven. It read like this.

The costs to a significant number of individuals, the majority of whom are young people, and to society generally of a policy of prohibition of simple possession are not justified by the cannabis and the additional influence which such policy is likely to have upon perception of harm, demand, and availability. We therefore recommend the repeal of the prohibition against the simple possession of cannabis. Now to be clear, this was not full-blown legalization that they had imagined.

Just a recognition that the criminal penalties for possession were out of whack with the associated harms. easier or more accessible or more available. We acknowledge this. But we but but that is a different thing from saying that it should be available. Now we do not say it should be available. We just say that the cost of attempting to prohibit possession is too great.

And the police power is part of the general policy that to which you referred of discouraging use. That was Gerald Ledain speaking. But there were dissenting voices on the commission as well, and they thought that even the modest repeal recommended might be going too far. CBC reporter Ron Collister recognized this divide and turned it into the prophetic closer to his news story.

The split in the commission probably reflects the split in the country and in the cabinet that has to take the decision on whether possession should be legal and users should go unpunished. The speculation here is it'll be a long, long time before any government feels strong enough to do that. Ron Collister, CBC News. Even still. It's pretty stunning when you think about it.

By 1972, cannabis had only been a part of the national landscape in a big way for a few years. And just like that, the government had a report built on a vast body of evidence recommending that it decriminalize cannabis possessions. The government praised the commission for the depth and breadth of its work, and then it put the report on the shelf and acted like it had never had.

And that guaranteed decades more work for people like John Conroy, and it's partly why he helped charter Normal Canada in nineteen seventy eight. That's the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Law. The group still exists with a stated mandate to quote, eliminate all civil and criminal penalties for private marijuana use through government lobbying, public education, research, and legislative and judicial challenges.

Over the following decades, they would take on test cases with the hope of undermining cannabis prohibition. And it's hard to say what role, if any, normal played in it, but police reported cannabis offenses peaked around 1980 and then they started to plummet. All through the nineteen eighties, the just say no years, the number of reported offenses fell, bottoming out around nineteen ninety-two.

It was a similar story in the US. Despite all the rig and rhetoric, cannabis arrests modestly declined through the eighteen. This is partly because police started to concentrate on things like crack. Now, this is not to say that everyone in Canada had just come to terms with Canada. But even then it felt like Canada was taking a comparatively gentle approach with the drug. We begin with a look at young people and soft drugs. It's a combination that's got the federal government worried.

So next week, Ottawa is kicking off a nationwide campaign, hoping to get them to think twice before experimenting with marijuana and hashish. When people you like want to include you in something you're not sure of. Like smoking a little dope. Things get pretty stormy inside you, and you wonder whether you'll ever get through those heavy seas. But staying real is worth it.

Because all storms end, and getting through one on your own is the biggest high of all. For information on the effects and health hazards of marijuana and hashish, write Stay Real Box 8888-Ottawa.

And there were some strident anti marijuana voices too, people like doctor Charles Messer, a Saskatchewan at the center of a nineteen eighty C B C documentary. I think that you have to look at it in terms of the sort of crap attitudes where there's a lack of direction, particularly to young people who are suggestible.

I think if some of the professors who are proposing that these many substances be released on the public see the tragedies that do occur with reference to this use in terms of psychosis, in terms of people going quite crazy on one trip. They will realize that they are perhaps far out. But then if you're half stoned yourself on the substance, it is difficult to give good advice. It's a monkey see, monkey do pattern. But mostly the eighties were quieter years on the cannabis front.

And maybe it was because the heat was off a little bit and marijuana activists had a little room to breathe and plot their course. But by the turn of the decade, the cannabis movement really started to pick up steam. I was in college. of a student paper and it seemed like every other week someone had an editorial extolling the virtues of Pot.

These usually had a bit of a conspiratorial vibe. Somehow the petroleum and pulp industries were in collusion to suppress a plant that could not only free your mind, but usher in a new era of sustainable prosperity. Suddenly it seemed like there were hemp products everywhere. bags, fair trade, Guatemalan sandals, that kind of thing.

In retrospect, that was a pretty savvy long game. You get people comfortable with the idea of hemp seed oil on their breakfast cereal, convince teenagers that hemp handicrafts are weapons against oppression,

And there you go, you've sown the seeds of legalization. Off the top of the show, I mentioned a particular teenager who may have changed the course of cannabis law in Canada, and this is where she My name is Hilary Black and I am the founder of the BC Compassion Club Society, the first medical cannabis dispensary in the country. Hilary is not a teenager anymore, but she was in nineteen ninety two.

And it was in that cultural moment that she found her calling. My dad made me promise that I would wait till I graduated high school before I went away ungrateful dead to her. And as soon as I graduated from high school I took off and went to a bunch of Grateful Dead shows and I learned about hemp and about how hemp could save the planet. Hemp for fuel, hemp for fiber, hemp for fun, hemp for nutrition, hemp for medicine.

And when I came back to Vancouver in early uh nineteen ninety five Um, Mark Emery and Ian Hunter had started Hempy C in Vancouver and there was a amazing woman, Dana Rozak, who worked there, managed the store. And I started just showing up and kind of being a pain until they eventually hired me. And Dana was a incredible inspiration and mentor to me.

So this is a crucial moment, and keep in mind Hillary Black is still just barely out of high school, and she's about to take her first step towards the history book. So we had we were working in this little hemp store and Dana used to hold Hempology one oh one classes in her flat across the street on Thursday nights.

And people would gather and consume cannabis together, which at that time was like a bit of a wild thing to have a place where like public could almost come and consume cannabis even though it was behind closed doors.

And she would give classes or bring special teachers in to give classes and we would learn about the potential of the fiber of the hemp plant and how it could solve some of our um forestry issues and we would learn about the nutrition of the hemp seed and um, you know, what an incredible protein it was and all just all of the many solutions that this plant could provide, including starting to learn about

the different cannabinoids, which back then wasn't a a a a common part of our language talking about all of the different um molecules inside the cannabis plant and all of their therapeutic benefits. How did you put together what you were learning from those people about about the potential of the plant and what it contained to the Compassion Club? There was a older woman who used to call the store all the time with her questions about medical.

And I had read every article and every book that I could get my hands on, trying to consume as much information as I could about the therapeutic use of cannabis because

people with HIV and AIDS and cancer and elderly folks were coming to the store a lot with their questions and I wanted to be able to answer their questions. So This woman used to phone all the time and she was bedridden with pretty serious arthritis and we would chat on the phone and ask Chat about cannabis and eventually she wanted to try. So she was the first person that I ever really gave cannabis to. And I went over to her apartment and she buzzed me in and I climbed up on her bed with her.

And we looked at a bag of weed and we talked about it and smelt it and like chatted about it until she was ready to try it. And I rolled a joint and we smoked it together. And I remember that day so clearly. She was like a block. so stuck in her body and as she the effects of the joint sunk in She was became like cat like and able to move and kind of like light, like a cat stretching, is what I mean. It was almost like these like chunks of cement were falling off.

And she was experiencing the euphoric effects as well. And she went on this rant about how furious she was that this plant had been held away from her. and how much she had been suffering and suffering with the side effects of her other drugs and what an incredible injustice it was. And I was eighteen then, I think, and in that moment I also was experiencing the euphoric effects of cannabis.

And in that moment I saw like a big wall and on one side is this plant and on the other side is this ocean of people that are suffering and that their suffering can be affected by breaking down that wall. So Hillary comes back all gung-ho about what she's been learning about cannabis and sets to work on creating Canada's first cannabis dispensary.

And keep in mind this is still totally illegal in nineteen ninety six. I rented a little office and Uh there was a friend of mine who um had an office in an office building downtown who was a photographer and a filmmaker and he first gave me a desk in his office for free and I started like making a brochure and

trying to figure out where my supply was coming from. And I had a few friends from when I was distributing cannabis before I went away to patients who were big advocates in the HIV community. And back then in the mid nineties Um HIV and hepatitis C were being transmitted at epidemic rates in Vancouver and the anti at antiretroviral drugs were devastating in their side effects.

And it was the those two friends and advocates that really embraced what I was trying to do and probably the first hundred or hundred and fifty people that I was distributing cannabis to were mostly all from the HIV and AIDS community. So they would take me out to their events and pass out my flyers and introduce me to whatever politicians were out at the you know, sort of the the events that they were taking me to. Um and eventually I got a my own office. in that building.

Uh and I remember the first day that I had my brochure had been printed up and distributed around town, mostly through these friends of mine's and at the hemp store. and I had a phone number and a phone line and I remember my like four different big jars of cannabis that I had like scraped my pennies together to purchase of the four different flavors and I officially opened my doors and started distributing cannabis out of that office and that was May first, nineteen ninety seven.

Things moved really quickly from there. First, Hillary had to find a new location when the pot smoke and colorful clientele made her unwelcome in the original digs. And I ended up where the chicken slaughterhouse is and there's a beer brewery. And so we Hilary even lived on those premises for a while. But she eventually found a permanent location and began to integrate other complementary alternative health services, things like herbalism and traditional Chinese medicine.

For the most part, the police were pretty tolerant. The official line was that they simply had bigger fish to frustrate. But Hillary said it still felt like the Compassion Club was on the verge of trouble. Every time a siren went by,

we were sure that that was it, that they were coming to get us. We had our bug out plans of our like kayak bag ready to be stuffed with the pound bags and somebody would bolt out the door backwards and the getaway car was ready'cause we, you know, wanted to try our best to Preserve our stash if did, you know, get busted by the police. But that never happened, and the only times that the police have ever come to the comparison.

supportive, helpful role. Like very early on, Then somewhere downtown trying to score a little bag of weed. She lived on the west side, has no a nice purse and she's trying to score some weed because she's going through chemotherapy for her breast cancer. And the police found her and said, don't you know there's a place where people like you can go? Well, Hillary and her colleagues never did have to execute the escape plan.

But the tiny little seat of the pants operation started to attract a lot of attention. So In the very early years, David Suzuki and the Nature of Things did a special on My Compassion Club and on Valerie Corral's organization in California who's sort of mentors and that was a absolute landmark moment for us in terms of shifting the acceptance and the stigma around the work that we were doing. Now my grandma's friends were saying to her,

I saw your granddaughter on the Nature of Things with David Suzuki. For non-Canadian listeners, The Nature of Things is a long-running CBC science documentary program hosted by David Suzuki. And apparently it's a really big deal with Canadian grandmas. Of course, all that public attention meant more legal scrutiny, but for the most part the police gave the Compassion Club wide birth. And slowly but surely the idea of cannabis as medicine started to gain some mainstream currency.

So in two thousand and two it was actually the kin it was the Canadian Senate and it was the Committee on Uh Illegal Drugs and it was led by um uh Senator Nolan. May he rest in peace. And they invited us to come and testify. And at that point I had not done any sort of government relations or, you know, like big presentations like that.

And that was a really big deal for me. I remember how terrifying that room was, that the Senate committee was all lined up on one end with the huge Canadian flags and then there's a gallery of people observing on one side and the media all lined up at the other and then way back in the room in this little tiny table was me.

And uh I gave them hell about how um unethical and how mu how unjust it was for this plant to be prohibited, particularly in terms of the application for for medical purposes. And Senator Dolen took me up on my invitation to bring the whole committee down to the Compassion Club. And there was some members of that Senate committee that were very uncomfortable to be there. One had been the head of a drug uh vice squad for a very long time.

Um but Senator Nolen we had there was a little bit of media that we had invited that I was fine with them. And I remember him taking a large Ziploc bag full of

cannabis and like sticking his nose in it and like putting his hand in it kind of like in a very accepting way. And that when that report came out that was one of the milestone moments for us where they recommended uh our model be the one that is, you know, sort of encouraged to be replicated across the country and spoke very, very highly of the work we'd been doing at the Compassion Club. I remember at the time that it felt as though Vanguard

was at the leading edge of something. The Compassion Club was in the news a lot. And this might be incidental, but I want to point out that from 1999 to 2001, Justin Trudeau was teaching high school in Vancouver. Period photos show him wearing a sole patch on his chin, a facial hairstyle that, to my mind, is best paired with a hemp cloth bandana. Anyway.

Along with all the publicity, the proponents of medical marijuana started to rack up legal wins. A major decision today about this country's marijuana law. Ontario's highest court ruling it goes too far. And as a result, I've asked my officials to develop a plan that will include clinical trials.

For medical marijuana, appropriate guidelines for its medical use and access to a safe supply of the as of today, Canadians can apply for the right to possess and produce marijuana for medical purposes. To be clear.

These cases were all about the medical use of marijuana. But little by little cannabis was gaining legitimacy and people were noticing. There's a very telling moment from parliamentary question period way back in nineteen ninety nine. Grant Hill was the reform MP for McLeod, Alberta. When he posed this question to then Justice Minister Alan Rock. And sure enough. The Liberal government under new leader Paul Martin started to take a serious look at decriminalization.

Bill C ten would have removed jail terms for the simple possession of less than fifteen grams of marijuana. Folks caught with pot in that range would have faced the equivalent of a traffic ticket. The bill made it through two readings but died when the two thousand four election was called. And despite all that seeming momentum for the legalization movement, cannabis arrests had actually started to pick up in the mid-90s and continued that way into the new millennium.

The conservative government of Stephen Harper took power in 2006 with a much less kindly view to marijuana, medical and otherwise. Cannabis arrests reached a new peak in 2013, 58,965. But 2013 was a pivotal year for another reason. Emboldened by the expansion of medical marijuana, dispensaries started to pop up, first in Vancouver and then in Toronto and elsewhere. By 2015, there were nearly a hundred of the shops in Vancouver.

So many that the city decided it needed to come up with some regulations. Even though the shops were in a legal grey area, at the very least, It looked as though the city would help bring operators in from the cold. This did not make the feds happy. Conservative Health Minister Rana Ambrose sent a letter to the mayor. That letter read in part Legitimizing and normalizing the use and sale of marijuana can have only one effect.

increasing marijuana use and addiction. But the genie was out of the bottle. And the Pro Pot side kept winning in court. Also in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that medical marijuana should be legal in all forms, including edibles like cookies, teas, and oils, much to the chagrin of Minister Ambrose. Frankly, I'm outraged by the Supreme Court and the court ruling ten years ago that normalizes a drug where there is no clear clinical evidence.

that it is quote unquote a medicine. It is not an approved medicine by Health Canada. It has never undergone rigorous safety. uh reviews by Health Canada. It has never been approved to be a medicine. As it turned out though, Ambrose wouldn't be minister for long. In October of that year, Justin Trudeau's liberals were elected to form the federal government.

Cannabis legalization was part of Trudeau's platform, and he's pretty close to making good on that promise. At the beginning of this episode, I was talking about dissonance. The dissonance that comes from that uneasy relationship many Canadians have had with cannabis for a long time. It's a drug that's had considerable public acceptance or at least tolerance for decades. It's also illegal. If legalization works the way the government hopes, that sense of dissonance might dissipate a little.

And regardless of whether you believe that's a good thing or a bad thing, it's hard to imagine us getting to this place without Hillary Black. To be totally fair, there have been lots of people pushing really hard for legalization for a long time. People like John Conroy. But it was this feisty teenager from West Vancouver who really got the idea of medical marijuana into the public consciousness in this country. And that just changed things forever.

That's all for this episode, but there's much more to come on this subject. I'll be reporting from Colorado on the legalization experience in that state, and watch your feed for my full-length interview with Bill Blair. He's the former Toronto chief of police now responsible for implementing legalization. On Drugs is produced by Jessica Lindsay, Rafferty Baker, and me. I'm Jeff Turner. Thanks for listening.

We at On Drugs are proud to be part of CBC original podcasts. And we implore you to dive into someone knows something. It's a true crime investigative podcast. In season four, host David Ridgeon investigates the murder of Wayne Gravette, an Ontario man who was killed by a bomb that was mailed to his home. When you send a bomb to somebody's house where their family is.

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