Photo by Alycia Sundar
“I smoke a tremendous amount of marijuana, and I am able to continue on with my day, and think and be normal like everybody else” says Greg Williams, 58.
The Sensible BC campaign has one month left to obtain the 400,000 signatures needed to force a referendum on decriminalizing marijuana, and with B.C.’s referendum system being hard to penetrate, success is looking unlikely.
The movement is looking to eliminate the policing of pot, including searches, seizures, citations and arrests for simple marijuana possession cases for adults. The elimination of police efforts in these areas would essentially decriminalize the possession of the drug for personal use. If the petition were to be successful, it would also ask the government to start seriously considering a business model, involving applying taxes to the sale of marijuana and related paraphernalia. At this point, the referendum has fewer than half of the signatures required to make the ballot for the September 2014 election.
Though it is illegal, Vancouver seems to accept marijuana, with a thriving underground drug trade that the government is spending large amounts of dollars and efforts policing. B.C. bud culture is widely accepted by the majority of residents, but still laws remain in place which keep pot in the dangerous substance category, alongside drugs such as cocaine and crystal ,eth. There are a smoke shops located throughout the Lower Mainland, with the most notable pot headquarter in the heart of downtown: The BCMP smoke shop and Vapor Lounge.
This is where you find The Marijuana Man – Greg Williams. He is the manager of the BCMP Vapor Lounge, as well as a Producer for PotTV, an online webcast that airs daily on the Cannabis Culture website. When I arrived to the Vapor Lounge to speak with him about the current state of pot prohibition, I found him at a table in the corner. He looked exactly as I had imagined The Marijuana Man would look: medium build, grey hair and glasses, wearing a plaid-green bucket hat, tie-dye shirt and baggy jeans. Between his fingers was a large blunt and on the table sat three large jars of Marijuana. I had a chance to have a chat with him and his webcast co-host Al The Chemist about the current state of B.C. pot.
Alycia Sundar: Sensible BC seems to suggest that the money Canada is spending policing marijuana is wasted.
Greg Williams: The United States reportedly spends $40 billion a year on the war on drugs. Canada is about 10 per cent of that. When the attorney general was asked how much we were spending, she said “I don’t know,” and the RCMP aren’t helping give any information whatsoever. So, the prohibition money that gets out there is very, very important to the people who have taken that money over the years and become quite politically powerful with it. So they have a great deal of influence over our politicians to keep it exactly the way it is. They want the money [to continue] flowing.
So that’s what we’ve always been up against. The general public are convinced that it’s okay. Half the adult public population has said that they would like it legalized and regulated. But the politicians [say], ‘No, we’re not gonna do what you want, we have another plan.’
AS: If Marijuana were able to be successfully taxed, it could really be a legitimate form of income for our province.
GW: That’s common sense, but obviously our leaders don’t agree with that, and you have to wonder why that is. [The Conservatives] have had a very long time to make that a huge industry. There’s a lot of money in the prohibition of Canada, untold millions and billions.
Al The Chemist: Take into consideration jail sentencing time, police hours, extra police hiring based on [the idea] that we have to fight this entity, this beast.
AS: But now, a lot of states are not only talking about but taking definitive action towards legalization.
GW: They’re all talking about it. All of the bad things that are being said, and have been said about marijuana are being said by the prohibitionists, not by science, and not by regular people, they’ve never said any of those things. It’s only the police, the people who are getting the money to fight it, that are saying [bad things]. So it’s become extremely complicated how they would even come to legalize it now. They’ve made so many lies about it, they don’t know how to overcome it.
Photo by Alycia Sundar
AS: So where does that leave the big players in Vancouver’s pot culture? Why do you still care?
GW: The only reason we do care, is because of the lies that have been told, that marijuana’s bad. The human body, evidently, has receptors for what is on this plant or in this plant. Humans have receptors for that, it had to come from somewhere, it came from [nature]. Humans have always consumed it.
I’ve been smoking it for a very long time, a lot of it, and I know it’s healthy. No one I know, in the history of people I know smoking weed, have ever said “I have had a problem because of [weed]”. They have problems in their lives, but not from the weed. The reason a politician doesn’t want to legalize it, is because even though you can get a lot of tax money regulating it, they’re saying, it’s not going back to the same people anymore, is it? They wouldn’t be able to give huge amounts of money to the police anymore. The police are saying “No! Don’t do that!” Everyday, in Ottawa, they lobby just for that.
ATC: Either way they’re gonna be looking for more money. Legal, illegal, [pot is] being used as a means to capitalize. It doesn’t matter if it’s prohibition or legal distribution. Either through fighting it, or supporting it, it’s being used. There’s a certain level of usery that happens.
Photo by Alycia Sundar
GW: [Alcohol] is a horrendous substance when you get down to it. Alcohol in Canada, they say, costs $14 billion dollars in damage. Fourteen billion! The tax we get from the sales of alcohol doesn’t cover the $14 billion. It’s about $6 billion. There’s a big $8 billion deficit every year, that you and me pay, taxpayers pay, to have alcohol in our society. So in 2005, we were raided many times by the Canadian courts, they didn’t find it very serious that we were selling seeds, and nothing ever happened to us. One day, the DEA came from the United States and arrested us. So, we were charged with crimes that carried 30 years minimum in prison, and millions of dollars in fines.
AS: It seems like it’s gotten a little out of hand now, the underground market has gotten really huge.
GW: All of the marijuana that is being smoked right now is provided by the black market. They have no control over it whatsoever. The black market is providing all of the marijuana that is being smoked today. So tomorrow when they say it’s legal, [everyone] will go, “Well, so what? I don’t care if you opened your government store over there, with lousy weed, I’m gonna buy off of my guy, why wouldn’t I?” They’re not taking that so seriously into consideration.
They’ve lost the war. They’re overgrown, and you cannot stop marijuana.
