The big pot bust in Barrie brings back heady memories. Lazy August afternoons. Bees abuzzin.' Crows cawing on a soft breeze. My old man checking the cannabis crop. "Lookit how tall it is," he would say, head back in wonder.
It was 10, 12 feet high. The corn no longer hid it. The OPP cruised by regularly, peering in from Talbot Rd. "The cops were really suspicious," my dad chuckles down the line from Maple Manor, in Tillsonburg.
In 1994, he had North America's first experimental licence to grow cannabis, on 10 acres of the family tobacco farm.
It drew many curious people to skulk in the treelines.
Sometimes, my dad found plants missing.
One thief left a bottle of wine in the mailbox, apparently in gratitude for the juiciest cannabis plant he'd ever stolen.
"The wine was really good," my dad says. "But I don't think he got much out of that plant."
Dad's strain of cannabis, you see, took you no higher than lawn grass.
It had the same leaf, the same weedy smell, but only a trace of narcotic. Your lungs collapsed long before you got a buzz.
It was industrial hemp, outlawed with the rest of the cannabis family in North America since Reefer Madness days.
Dad got nearly as much publicity as the Barrie bust. The L.A. Times came to call. There was a TV feature, complete with The Ballad of Joe Strobel.
The CBC report of the harvest showed dad on his tractor pulling a hay mower, then panned to an OPP cruiser poised mid-field.
Reporters had to swear to keep the location secret, though any local would draw you a map.
The harvested bales were stored in secret, my dad said, though frankly, they were piled in the neighbour's garage.
"People flat-out didn't understand the difference," says Geof Kime, 37, an engineer who was dad's hemp partner. "I tried to explain marijuana and our hemp as Great Dane and Chihuahua. They're both dogs, but not the same at all."
Still, in those days, every time he or my pop tried to pitch hemp for paper, or clothing, or garden mulch, or horse bedding, or concrete filler, or fence posts, or whatever, the comeback was usually: "Yeah, but can ya smoke it?"
It was, says Kime, "the giggle factor."
So, as cops stare agog at the former brewery in Barrie, where has hemp come since that summer on the old farm?
Well, a series of strokes took my old man out of the movement. Any hemp crusader knows his name. Any marijuana crusader, too, though he politely steered clear of the dope side.
The Canadian hemp business peaked at nearly 700 licences in 1998, after the feds saw the sky didn't fall when my dad grew his impotent pot.
But growers' ranks dwindled to 82 by 2002, 16 in Ontario.
Firms like Hempola prosper. They make oil products and food, which are easily processed with seed machinery.
But clothing makers can't compete with the cheap labour of China and other hemp powers.
And infrastructure hasn't kept up with demand for such things as fibre for car door panels. That's the kind of hemp product made by Kime's Hempline Inc., out of Delaware, up the road from Tillsonburg.
Big production takes big dough. "The (hemp fibre) industry is ready to go," says Kime. "Capital is the missing ingredient."
Hemp, however, is happenin' on Queen St. W., at the Friendly Stranger Cannabis Culture Shop.
"You're Joe Strobel's son?" says owner Robin Ellins, 37, with some reverence.
The front of his place looks like The Gap. Walls covered in groovy dress shirts, jackets and jeans. Wallets and belts of hemp. Soaps, candles, power bars, hairwax, lip balm, soda pop, potato chips. He doesn't carry hemp "ice cream" but you can buy it at supermarkets.
In back, hemp's flip side: Pipes, paper, other paraphernalia.
$8.8 BILLION UNDERGROUND
How 'bout that big bust, Robin?
"Funny it was in a brewery that closed down. Didn't 400 people get laid off? You could have given them new jobs" in the grow operation.
"Marijuana is an $8.8-billion underground economy. It's an industry dying to be legitimate. The general public now knows pot is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco.
"And it's easy to regulate: Permits for growers and retailers, inspections, age limits, taxation. What's the problem?"
I dunno, Robin, ask my dad. Being a hemp warrior is never easy.
Note: Dad's cannabis crop stood taller than corn. Credits: Source: Toronto Sun (CN ON)
Author: Mike Strobel
Published: January 13, 2004
Copyright: 2004 Canoe Limited Partnership
Contact: editor@sunpub.com
Website: http://www.torontosun.com/ |