B.C. is ‘ground zero of pot activism’
Activists claim Vancouver is really the ‘heart of the drug war, and drug peace’
It’s impossible to know how many times David Malmo-Levine has walked down the 300-block of West Hastings, up a familiar stairwell, and sat down to puff on a joint. But when he did it Wednesday morning, it was a bit different from those times that came before.
While Canada drew the world’s attention Wednesday as the largest country to legalize recreational cannabis, for longtime activists like Malmo-Levine, the roots of the story are here in B.C.
“This is ground zero of pot activism in the world,” Malmo-Levine said Wednesday in the Cannabis Culture headquarters on West Hastings. “The first cannabis café was next door, and the first seed sales and med pot grew out of this block.”
Marc Emery, Canada’s selfstyled Prince of Pot, brought Malmo-Levine from Edmonton to Vancouver in 1995 to aid in the cause of cannabis. They operated out of Emery’s Hemp B.C. store, across the street from the current Cannabis Culture headquarter’s location, and the legal atmosphere on the Pot Block of West Hastings was different back then, Malmo-Levine recalled.
“From ’95 to 2000, it was tense here, because we thought we were going to get raided out of existence,” he said. “But the suppliers just kept re-stocking us, and we kept not being afraid of jail, and eventually, we gave the police so many lectures, they did not want to come down to the Pot Block and be the bad guys anymore, and that gave us a little beachhead.”
“Everything really started here in Vancouver,” Malmo-Levine said. “Vancouver is really the heart of the drug war, and drug peace.”
Key pieces of Canada’s drug history can be traced to within a few city blocks of the spot where Malmo-Levine sat, smoked and spoke Wednesday, from Chinatown’s opium dens in the early 20th century and their influence on Canada’s first anti-drug laws, through the 1971 Gastown riot, which erupted after police attacked a pro-marijuana “smoke-in” protest rally and subsequently became the subject of an inquiry by a B.C. Supreme Court justice.
Mid-morning Wednesday, Malmo-Levine rode his bike from Hastings to the Vancouver Art Gallery, to check out a pot protest. But unlike the rallies of Malmo-Levine’s early years in Vancouver, the group of demonstrators protesting federal government drug policy on Wednesday weren’t fighting for the legalization of pot, but against it.
Pamela McColl, organizer of Wednesday’s Opposition to Legalization Rally, stepped to the microphone first, addressing a crowd of mostly journalists: “Today is Oct. 17, as you all know, it’s Canada-went-topot day. … It is a very, very dark day for Canada. The damage that is going to ensue from this policy change will be horrendous.”
Some in the crowd applauded the group of about 10 demonstrators on the art gallery steps, while others, including Malmo-Levine, jeered and booed. Some smoked joints.
Many pot shops around B.C. temporarily shut down Wednesday, while they try to get licences from the provincial government. At least 173 private stores have applied for licences, but the only legal retailer in the province operating Wednesday was a single government-owned retail outlet in Kamloops.
Other pot sellers continued to operate outside the legal system, including the Cannabis Culture on Hastings.
Melissa Zorn, Cannabis Culture Lounge manager, said Legalization Day means “a mixture of excitement and nervousness for us.”
“We got very comfortable doing as we do in the grey area, but we are prepared to change our ways and we’re excited at the opportunity of having a licence,” Zorn said.
In 2015, Vancouver’s city hall blazed a trail by becoming Canada’s first city to regulate retail pot. Since then, the city has sought 53 injunctions to shut down medical pot shops operating outside its regulatory regime. Now, about 40 of those local dispensaries brought a test case to the B.C. Supreme Court, arguing their shops fill a need for patients unable to get reasonable access to medical cannabis through the federal government.
John Conroy, a cannabis lawyer involved in the dispensaries’ challenge said the key issue is whether medical dispensaries and compassion clubs form part of patients’ “reasonable access” to cannabis. The new laws allow retail stores for recreational pot but patients must obtain medicinal cannabis by mail order or by growing their own.